Leaked GEC files show no proof of domestic censorship, ex-officials say

State Department readies $11m Southeast Asia influencer campaign

Two former senior officials at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center said documents Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers released this month to bolster claims of domestic censorship by the now-defunct office contain no such evidence. Daniel Kimmage, the center’s principal deputy coordinator and acting coordinator from its 2017 founding through its 2025 dissolution, and Carrie Goux, a Biden appointee and former acting deputy coordinator, said the materials instead reflect a years-long political fight over an office whose mandate was explicitly foreign-facing.

Rogers provided the so-called “GEC files” to Jennica Pounds, a rightwing online data analyst known as DataRepublican, only for Pounds to claim earlier this month that she had been leaked the documents as part of a bid to “entrap” her. Rogers, who denied that characterization, then published the files herself, claiming that officials inside the center “betrayed their stated mission.” The files included a 2022 GEC report on “gendered disinformation,” a flashpoint in the U.S. culture wars.

“There seems to be absolutely nothing here,” Goux said. “If the smoking gun was a gendered disinformation report, that feels like they came up short.”

Kimmage said his own congressional testimony, which Rogers included in the leak, had been selectively read. “If you look at the transcript, [the question was], ‘Does GEC take positions on US outlets?’ And I said, ‘No, it didn’t,’” he said. Rogers “tried to twist that into something that it wasn’t,” according to Kimmage, who added: “For people who talk a lot about weaponization of government, this seems a lot closer to the weaponization of government and psy-opping of the American people than anything that the emails from the Global Engagement Center show.”

The Global Engagement Center was founded in 2017 with an explicit foreign-facing mandate to track and counter influence operations from Russia, China, and Iran. During its nearly decade-long existence, the center published eight detailed public reports on Russian and Chinese information operations and ran four major exposures of Russian disinformation campaigns — in Latin America, Africa, and Moldova, and on the Kremlin-linked network RT. Its largest such operation traced a Kremlin-backed effort called the “African Initiative,” which the center said had recruited local journalists, bloggers, and public figures to spread conspiracy theories about U.S.-funded health programs across the continent.

In January 2024, the GEC helped broker an international pact on countering foreign state disinformation that eventually drew more than two dozen government signatories, among them Moldova, Spain, Estonia, Poland, and Finland. A 2022 inspector general review found the GEC “generally effective” at supporting counter-disinformation programs overall, while flagging weaknesses in its internal controls, contractor oversight, and strategic planning. Senators Rob Portman, a Republican, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat, repeatedly pushed to fund and strengthen the center, and its authorization survived multiple renewal fights before House Republicans, increasingly focused on the domestic-speech question, declined to extend it again in 2024.

The office employed about 120 people at a cost of roughly $61 million per year before Congress let its authorization lapse at the end of 2024. Secretary of State Marco Rubio later folded what remained of its work into a new counter foreign information manipulation and interference office, framing the closure as an end to wasteful, censorious government overreach.

The Republican critique of the GEC centered on the office’s funding of the Global Disinformation Index, a UK-based nonprofit that rates media outlets by how likely they are to spread disinformation. In 2022, the GDI separately published its own study of the U.S. media market that rated several conservative outlets, including Newsmax, One America News, and the New York Post, as high-risk — a finding GEC critics have cited ever since as evidence that a foreign-facing office had funded a group meddling in domestic politics. Republican congressmen, including former House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, argued in a July 2024 letter that the GEC was “at best indifferent to, and at worst complicit in” stretching the definition of disinformation to “censor” conservative speech in the U.S.

“We were not ever looking at Americans,” Goux said. “We were looking at the foreign actors and what their [tactics, techniques and procedures] … are doing overseas.” Kimmage said: “The GEC did what its congressional mandate charged it to do, which is to fight foreign [misinformation and] disinformation. This allegation that it’s censoring Americans is false.”

Now, less than a year after the GEC shut down, a proposal reviewed by the Guardian shows the State Department preparing to pay up to 30 online influencers across 11 countries in Southeast Asia $2,500 apiece as part of an $11 million, multi-year campaign to counter Chinese propaganda. The project, which would be operated by the U.S. Mission to USEAN, has three parts: a $5 million messaging campaign, a $3 million program training influencers and journalists to counter Chinese propaganda, and a $3 million trip bringing about 180 participants to studios in Washington and Houston “for intensive collaboration, studio production and first-hand engagement with U.S. institutions and creators.”

The proposal’s planning materials describe the ideal recruit as starting from a “welcoming” position of what one document calls the “rejecting-affirming continuum”: someone not yet sold on the United States but not hostile either. The document cited the rightwing analyst and new Pentagon special government employee, Jennica Pounds, as an ideal model to seek out in other recruits abroad.

Meanwhile, the office of policy, planning and resources for public diplomacy separately shopped for commercial help with a similar mission this spring. A government filing from May 2026 shows the office requesting information from vendors on software that can mine open-source data, map “adversarial propaganda influence networks” and detect deepfakes.

Pounds, who disclosed days after the documents were released that she had been quietly working since July as a special government employee for the Defense Department, released a database to track U.S. citizens in the Democratic Socialists of America last Friday. The Pentagon did not respond when asked whether the database is included in her scope of government work.

The State Department, contacted for comment, declined to directly address questions about the documents released by Rogers, the influencer proposal, the department’s current foreign influence programs, and whether other regions are being targeted as well. A State Department official said: “Undersecretary Rogers has been clear that the department will continue to confront censorship, anti-American propaganda and coercive influence directly while demonstrating the enduring advantages of freedom, accountability and open communication.”

“Are they trying to re-create it? Probably,” Goux said of the State Department’s continued counter-disinformation efforts. “But now they’re spending a lot more tax dollars doing that, trying to get contractors to do some of the stuff that we were doing.”

Goux put the broader cost in plainer terms still. “The US has lost their seat at the table to do that, and that’s unfortunate,” she said. “I hope we can gain it back, but we’re losing trust too, and that’s significant.”