The State Department has been hit with a lawsuit demanding records pertaining to its now-defunct Global Engagement Center (GEC) subagency, which leaned on social media companies to suppress Americans’ free speech and funneled US taxpayers’ money to groups even trying to “blacklist” The Post.
The Functional Government Initiative watchdog group filed the suit Monday to obtain potentially damning US government communications — following months of stonewalling by the agency about its grants under President Biden that backed the censorship efforts.
“Just because the GEC is shutting its doors, it doesn’t mean FGI is shutting down our investigation,” said FGI spokesman Peter McGinnis. “The layers of the Biden-Harris State Department’s censorship industrial complex must be exposed so that all which occurred in 2020, along with any attempts to suppress free speech during the 2024 election, comes to light.”
Fueling the lawsuit in part was a September scoop from The Post about the State Department trying to discredit two reporters and a member of Congress over their scrutiny about the GEC funding efforts to deplatform media outlets with libertarian or conservative-leaning editorial boards that were allegedly spewing “misinformation.”
State Department officials drafted a memo last year on how to push back against Washington Examiner investigative journalist Gabe Kaminsky and “Twitter Files” scribe Matt Taibbi over their reporting on GEC.
Taibbi shed light on how the GEC directly pressured social media platforms to suppress content on the COVID-19 pandemic, including the theory — now backed by a majority of Americans and defended by scientific experts — that SARS-CoV-2 leaked out of a Chinese lab.
Kaminsky exposed $100,000 in grant funding the GEC gave directly to the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which rates “media sites based on the risk of the outlet carrying disinformation” and flags its rankings to advertisers that could demonetize the disfavored outlets.
The media monitoring group also received $756,923 from the National Endowment for Democracy, a nonprofit almost entirely funded by the US government.
After The Post’s story, the Functional Government Initiative filed two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, including demands to both the State Department’s Bureau of Cyberspace and Digital Policy and the since-shuttered GEC for communications regarding the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
The law, adopted in October 2022, compelled big tech platforms to quickly scrub hate speech online.
Those FOIA requests came in late September. The GEC, which was established under former President Barack Obama in 2016, closed down on Dec. 23 after Congress declined to reauthorize funding for it.
The Functional Government Initiative listed specific officials — including Secretary of State Antony Blinken — who were likely involved in the communications and also sought correspondence between both the State Department and the White House, as well as the GEC and the White House, over the European Union’s Digital Services Act.
Ostensibly underpinning the request was a desire to better understand the GEC’s and State Department’s approaches to content moderation policies in Europe.
Prior statements from officials claimed that the GDI grant that Kaminsky flagged to support the “blacklist” was “limited to disinformation efforts in East Asia and Europe,” though congressional Republicans critical of the funding have noted how grant money is often fungible for the recipient.
Those Republicans have fiercely lashed out at the GEC for collaborating with organizations that target certain speech on digital platforms in the US.
For example, the grant that Kaminsky unearthed helped fund GDI’s “blacklist” of 10 media outlets, which included The Post, the American Spectator, Newsmax, the Federalist, the American Conservative, One America News, the Blaze, the Daily Wire, RealClearPolitics and Reason.
A little-known advertising cartel that controls 90% of global marketing spending later used that list to encourage its members to defund the outlets, according to a House Judiciary Committee report compiled earlier this year.
Earlier this year, a House Small Business Committee report found that GEC “has several issues in its recordkeeping” and that it lacked “sufficient audit procedures in place to efficiently track its use of taxpayer dollars,” the Washington Examiner reported.
Other GEC grants were also sent over to entities in Washington like the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab for further assistance in flagging social media content to target.
Despite the State Department acknowledging that it received the FOIA requests, it has failed to fork over the requested documents, prompting the Functional Government Initiative to file the lawsuit.
“FGI is being irreparably harmed by reason of Defendant’s unlawful withholding of requested records, and FGI will continue to be irreparably harmed unless Defendant is compelled to conform its conduct to the requirements of the law,” the watchdog’s attorneys wrote in a court filing.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, most agencies are required to divulge full or partial government material within about a month of when it’s requested. There are limited carveouts.
“The responsive records would provide increased transparency and allow the public to see if and how State Department officials were collaborating or discussing EU censorship,” the Functional Government Initiative added in the suit.
In addition to demanding the FOIA-ed records, the Functional Government Initiative is suing to permanently enjoin the State Department from withholding any non-exempt records in its request and to cover the attorney fees.
Reps for the State Department declined to comment.
