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In the first week of May, 2020, at the peak of Covid-19 panic, Twitter senior legal executive Stacia Cardille received a communication from the Global Engagement Center (GEC), the would-be operational/analytical arm of the U.S. State Department. Founded in the Obama years under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the GEC was like the State Department’s wannabe version of the NSA or the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Appended to an attachment with a long list of names was a note from the GEC — remember, these were the Trump years — that read, in part:

We are providing these 5,500 accounts that display inorganic behavior and follow two or more of the 36 Chinese diplomatic twitter accounts that we have identified in the report. Due to the fact that these accounts follow two or more of these diplomatic accounts, and a good portion of them are newly created, we believe that they are suspicious.

The list of “accounts that display inorganic behavior” was part of what another Twitter legal executive described as an effort by Mike Pompeo’s State Department to pull a “full court press in the media” to “hold China accountable” for “spreading misinformation about the COVID crisis.”