Rubio Says Biden State Department Compiled ‘Disinformation' Dossier on Trump Official
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday that the State Department under President Joe Biden compiled dossiers on people it accused of spreading disinformation—with at least one of them being a member of President Donald Trump's cabinet.
'We had an office in the Department of State whose job it was to censor Americans,' said Rubio during an April 30 Cabinet meeting at the White House, referring to the Global Engagement Center, which was rebranded as Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference.
'There's at least one person at this table today who had a dossier in that building of social media posts to identify them as purveyors of disinformation,' he said. 'We have these dossiers. We are going to be turning those over to these individuals.'
Rubio did not name the person or persons to whom he was referring.
Vice President JD Vance jokingly asked if it was himself or Elon Musk, who leads the administration's Department of Government Efficiency and owns social media platform X, formerly Twitter, which critics have accused of spreading disinformation.
Rubio said that 'the best way to combat disinformation is freedom of speech and transparency. We're not going to have an office that does that.'
The Secretary of State
Musk has been critical of the Global Engagement Center.
'The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,' Musk
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The Global Engagement Center was created in 2016 'to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests,' according to archived information from the State Department's website.
It released
The office 'has played an indispensable role in combating Russian and Chinese disinformation. It would unnecessarily undermine U.S. national security if we eliminated this tool,' Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in October in an effort to save the center.
In a 2023
However, critics said that the Global Engagement Center targeted those whose views differed from the Biden administration's.
In the April
Independent journalist Matt Taibbi
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