The State Department is facing heightened scrutiny from the House GOP for providing congressional investigators with “incomplete” grant records, including on the agency bankrolling organizations that silence conservative voices online.
Republicans on the House Small Business Committee are re-upping a request to the State Department-housed Global Engagement Center for information on awards the office dished out, including to groups such as the Global Disinformation Index, a British think tank that, the Washington Examiner reported, aims to strip revenue from conservative media outlets. The request is part of the panel’s broader inquiry into “government censorship and revenue interference of American small businesses by proxy,” lawmakers informed GEC Special Envoy and Coordinator James Rubin in a letter Monday.
“The GEC has funded a myriad of companies that label beliefs running afoul of the radical left’s agenda as ‘disinformation,'” House Small Business Committee Chairman Roger Williams (R-TX) and Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX) wrote in the letter to Rubin. “Despite your recent claim that ‘[w]e are not in the business of deciding what is true or not true,’ the third parties receiving GEC funds focus overwhelmingly on ‘right-wing misinformation’ rather than misinformation across the political spectrum. It is clear the Biden Administration considers itself the arbiter of truth.”
The letter is the latest escalation of congressional efforts to investigate the federal government for its ties to the “disinformation” and “misinformation” tracking industry, which Republicans assert serves as a tool to censor conservatives on the internet. The state of Texas joined two conservative media outlets, the Daily Wire and the Federalist, in accusing the GEC in a December lawsuit of funding an unconstitutional “censorship scheme,” particularly due to the government’s grant of $100,000 to the GDI in 2021.
Meanwhile, the since-passed $886 billion 2023 Pentagon spending bill banned the Defense Department from placing “advertisements in news sources based on personal or institutional political preferences or biases, or determinations of misinformation.” The provision also prohibited the agency from entering into contracts “related to the placement of recruitment advertising” with the Global Disinformation Index, the New York-based company NewsGuard, or “any similar entity” that purports to track “misinformation.”
In the letter on Monday, Williams and Van Duyne wrote that the GEC has strayed from its congressional mandate, which holds that funds are not intended to be used “for purposes other than countering foreign propaganda and misinformation.” The GEC has often said its grant to the GDI was to thwart foreign influence, though Republicans have noted that money is “fungible” and taken aim at the GEC for having any remote association with the British think tank.
This sentiment, along with a negative 2022 inspector general report finding that the GEC hasn’t lived up to its mission and was not vetting foreign grants, has propelled the GOP-led House Foreign Affairs Committee to lean toward not reauthorizing the GEC in 2024, according to three sources familiar with the discussions. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has also investigated the GEC over its grant to the GDI, with members on the panel in late October grilling GEC acting Coordinator Daniel Kimmage in a tense hearing.
Williams and Van Duyne noted in the letter how the GEC has awarded funds to Moonshot CVE, an entity claiming to fight “conspiracy theories” and “hate speech,” as well as the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which partnered on the program that culminated in the GDI taking home $100,000. The lawmakers also mentioned the GEC’s backing in recent years of Albany Associates International, a British group, which claimed that “partnerships between government, academia, and tech at a national and local level” are necessary to thwart “disinformation,” the letter said.
Albany Associates counts its founder and managing director as Dieter Loraine, a former senior consultant for the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, financial disclosures show. A Washington Examiner review of the London-based group’s social media activity shows it has often shared articles slamming former President Donald Trump and that it called out “right-wing” activists for proliferating “fake news” and “disinformation.”
Albany Associates was incorporated in 2004 and has partnered with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on overseas projects, including in Somalia for support of the east African country’s military, according to tax forms and British government documents reviewed by the Washington Examiner.
“Throughout the course of this investigation, the committee has developed additional
concerns over whether the GEC maintains proper oversight over the selection and actions of subawardees / subgrantees,” Williams and Van Duyne wrote in the Monday letter. “This committee aims to ensure the GEC is not only aware of where taxpayer dollars are going, but that the GEC is screening and overseeing the work delegated by their award recipients.”
The letter excoriated the GEC, however, for what the office has not provided to the Small Business Committee. Republicans previously requested an “unredacted list of all GEC grant recipients and associated award numbers” from fiscal 2019 to the present, but records the GEC gave to the committee appear to have “complete omission of dozens of awards,” according to the lawmakers.
The Washington Examiner obtained redacted copies of what GEC produced to the panel, which included a snippet of the taxpayer-funded office’s agreements with third parties. For instance, Albany Associates is listed in the documents as receiving GEC funds “to counter terrorist group narratives” in 2019, as well as to thwart “disinformation surrounding mass casualty attacks” in 2021.
The documents list awards to Arizona State University, Breakthrough Media Network, a British organization that says on its website that “disinformation” is “undermining democracies,” Moonshot CVE, and the Virginia-based RAND Corporation think tank, among other groups. They also list an award to Park Capital Investment Group, which is heavily cited in the recent conservative media lawsuit against the GEC as facilitating apparent covert censorship operations.
Park is notably the entity that first received the $100,000 that GEC steered to the GDI, the Washington Examiner reported.
The House Small Business Committee is asking the GEC for far more grant records by Jan. 22, though the committee could be nearing subpoena territory if the State Department-housed office does not comply, according to a source close to the panel, who is not authorized to speak publicly. Congressional investigators asked the GEC to turn over an internal document titled “2023.02.14 GEC-GDI-BLACKLIST.docx.”
The GDI-related document corresponds to the name of a file mentioned, though not included, in recent internal GEC records obtained by the Washington Examiner through the Freedom of Information Act.
Matthew Peterson, editor in chief of Blaze Media, one of the conservative media outlets that the GDI placed on its “dynamic exclusion list” aiming to defund disfavored speech, said people deserve “a public answer from the GEC as to how and why they think they can violate the Constitution and work to destroy private businesses they politically disagree with.”
“This is not a partisan issue,” Peterson told the Washington Examiner. “The freedom of speech and a free press is necessary for our very form of government to function. If those who represent the American people in Congress do not use every avenue available to them to protect Blaze Media and others from our government’s unconstitutional attempt to shut them down, we will lose our republican form of government.”
Another conservative news outlet expressed a similar sentiment.
“I’m sure Antony Blinken has heard the phrase, ‘Don’t Mess with Texas,'” Media Research Center Vice President Dan Schneider told the Washington Examiner. “Well, I wouldn’t mess with Roger Williams, either.”
Schneider, who said Secretary of State Antony Blinken and “State Department bureaucrats are violating the constitutional rights of Americans,” added that he “hopes” the Small Business Committee escalates its inquiry.
On Friday, the majority staff on the panel sent a three-page memo to GOP lawmakers with an update on its investigation into the GEC. The memo asserted that the amount of records not provided “is concerning,” stating, “Far too many taxpayer dollars are being used to fund organizations who work to put conservative small businesses at a competitive disadvantage in the online marketplace.”
“The committee’s investigation has grown to focus on three methods of government-funded,
ideologically driven interference of conservative-leaning small businesses’ ability to compete:
(1) government-induced censorship / removal of business social media accounts preventing
companies from earning revenue through their social media presence; (2) GEC awardees
interfering in small businesses’ ability to earn revenue from hosting ads on their
platforms/websites; and (3) GEC awardees interfering with small businesses’ ability to place
their advertisements on platforms / websites other than their own,” the memo said.
The State Department did not return a request for comment.
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