EXCLUSIVE: State Department Puts Final Nail In The Coffin Of Biden-Era Censorship Framework

WASHINGTON—The United States will formally shutter an office formerly used to censor the American people, The Daily Wire can first report, as well as any instruments and processes associated with the office that were implemented under President Joe Biden.

The State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy will officially dismantle the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference framework today, Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Darren Beattie shared with The Daily Wire in a Tuesday interview.

The framework, formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), was created to supposedly counter messaging spread by foreign actors, like violent terrorists abroad.

Instead, the GEC worked to suppress speech from American platforms, including The Daily Wire. The State Department has found that the framework “devolved into tools for political censorship instead of protecting Americans from foreign adversarial propaganda.”

The Daily Wire, The Federalist, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden State Department in February 2024 over GEC’s relationship with “anti-misinformation” outfits like NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), alleging that those groups were focused on suppressing American conservative media.

Beattie’s seat was formerly occupied by the architect of the Global Engagement Center, Richard Stengel, known for his views on moderating the First Amendment. Beattie told The Daily Wire that he finds it satisfying and appropriate that all the tools used in the context of his office are being dismantled within the same office, with a view toward both advancing free speech and centering on free speech once again.

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – OCTOBER 21: Rick Stengel (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for CARE)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio had directed the closure of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office in April, but as of Tuesday, the State Department stopped all frameworks and tools related to the framework used by the Biden administration, a final step in the office’s demise.

Its closure, the State Department says, aligns with President Donald Trump’s January 20 Executive Order on Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship, prohibiting federal censorship and promoting freedom of expression.

Beattie shared on Tuesday that there were some “loose ends” to tie up after Rubio’s April closure of the former GEC. One such loose end was that the GEC undertook a number of agreements with varying degrees of formality with other countries to “facilitate and provide a framework for cooperation on mutual objectives, including principally combating so-called ‘disinformation.’” That was particularly problematic since the GEC was often directly appealing to tech companies to censor such disinformation — “and famously a lot of the names that they submitted to tech companies weren’t even foreign,” he explained.

In fact, Beattie argued, many times when officials would submit names to Twitter, now known as X, they would encourage censorship of an individual and then be told by Twitter, “Hey, this isn’t some, Chinese group, this isn’t some Russian group. This was Bob from Minnesota. What are you talking about?”

“This came out in numerous instances in the Twitter files and, on other occasions,” he explained. “And so the GEC would do that, but they would also have an indirect approach to censorship whereby they would fund third-party organizations that would engage in activity from facilitating the demonetization of conservative sites to generally castigating certain narrative perspectives on COVID, on immigration, on foreign policy, as simply malign as a matter of foreign influence when in fact these were entirely legitimate points of view that often came from Americans.”

Beattie also told The Daily Wire that his office is conducting “an extremely laborious, comprehensive, meticulous transparency review.” The results of that review, or at least, the “very first tranche” of it, will come out within the next few weeks.

That review will “reflect the extensive review of hundreds of thousands of emails that will more specifically and systematically document exactly the kinds of nefarious activities that the GEC was involved in in this unfortunate chapter of America’s history,” he shared.

Asked how these files will be rolled out, and whether the information would be shared with the public in a manner similar to that of the “Twitter Files,” published by a group of journalists, including Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, Lee Fang, and Michael Shellenberger, Beattie said the release of the review will be “extremely deliberate and appropriate.”

“I think we’re very well aware of how the first kind of tranche came out with the Twitter files, and I think you’ll find our approach to the release of these materials to be entirely appropriate and very satisfying as well,” he shared.

Brent Scher contributed to this report.