A senior Trump administration official at the State Department provided a tranche of purportedly explosive government documents to a right-wing online personality in what was framed as a revelation of domestic censorship — only for former officials who built and ran the targeted office to say the files prove no such thing. The episode has pulled back the curtain on a years-long political campaign against the Global Engagement Center, a now-dissolved State Department office whose core mandate was tracking and countering foreign propaganda from adversaries including Russia, China, and Iran.
The Leak and Its Collapse
Sarah Rogers, the State Department’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, provided the so-called “GEC files” to Jennica Pounds, a right-wing online data analyst who operates under the name DataRepublican, according to reporting by The Guardian. The intention, apparently, was to surface evidence that the Global Engagement Center had secretly weaponized its tools against American citizens and conservative speech domestically.
The operation did not go as planned. Pounds publicly claimed she had been leaked the documents as part of a bid to “entrap” her. Rogers denied that characterization and then published the files herself, asserting that officials inside the center had “betrayed their stated mission.” Among the documents was a 2022 GEC report on “gendered disinformation” — a topic that has become a flashpoint in broader culture war debates.
But two of the most senior officials who actually ran the Global Engagement Center say the files substantiate none of the allegations that have circulated about the office for years.
“These guys have consistently misrepresented what the GEC did, and this was a great example of that,” said Daniel Kimmage, who served as the center’s principal deputy coordinator and acting coordinator from its founding in 2017 until its complete dissolution in 2025, in remarks reported by The Guardian. His own congressional testimony was among the materials included in the leaked files.
Carrie Goux, a Biden appointee who served as the center’s former acting deputy coordinator, was equally direct. “If the smoking gun was a gendered disinformation report, that feels like they came up short,” she said. “There seems to be absolutely nothing here.”
What the Global Engagement Center Actually Did
To understand why this episode matters, it helps to understand what the GEC actually was — and what it was not. The center’s roots stretch back to 2011 and Executive Order 13584, which established the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications within the State Department. A 2016 executive order under President Obama transformed that entity into the Global Engagement Center, and Congress formally enshrined and expanded its mandate in the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act.
That legislation — and subsequent amendments in the FY2019 National Defense Authorization Act — gave the GEC a specific, foreign-facing mission: to “direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations,” according to its archived official mission statement.
The center operated along five lines of effort: analytics and research, international partnerships, programs and campaigns targeting adversary disinformation ecosystems abroad, public exposure of foreign influence operations, and technology assessment. Its work explicitly targeted foreign actors — Russia’s disinformation ecosystem, Chinese state propaganda, Iranian influence operations, and terrorist messaging — not domestic political speech.
The GEC coordinated its activities with U.S. embassies, interagency partners, international governments, private sector companies, civil society organizations, technology firms, and media networks. It produced multiple public-facing reports, including documents described as “exposing Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.”
A Years-Long Political Campaign
The leak did not occur in a vacuum. It is the latest episode in what former GEC officials describe as a protracted and bitter political fight against the office. Republican members of Congress had been targeting the GEC for years before its legislative authority expired on December 23, 2024 — a termination confirmed by a Congressional Research Service analysis published that same month.
Representative Michael McCaul, former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, along with other Republican members, 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 United States. Congress declined to renew the center’s mandate before that deadline, and when President Trump returned to office in January 2025, the office was formally dissolved.
The State Department subsequently renamed a successor entity the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, known as R/FIMI, before Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced its closure in April 2025, halting what the department described as “all frameworks” to counter foreign misinformation, according to reporting by The Hill. The department’s stated rationale was that “through free speech, the United States will counter genuine malign” foreign influence — a notable philosophical shift from the GEC’s decade of data-driven, interagency coordination.
The Irony: The Work Continues Anyway
Even as administration officials dismantled the GEC and promoted files intended to discredit its legacy, the State Department has quietly moved to resume some of the same counter-propaganda work through other channels. The Guardian reviewed a proposal outlining plans to pay social media influencers across South-East Asia as part of an $11 million campaign to counter Chinese propaganda — work that bears a clear resemblance to the kinds of programs and campaigns the GEC ran for nearly a decade.
The move underscores a tension at the heart of the episode: if the GEC’s foreign-facing counter-propaganda work was genuinely problematic, why is the State Department pursuing functionally similar initiatives? And if that work is deemed necessary, what does that say about the years of allegations that the center was something more sinister than what its mandate described?
What the Documents Do and Do Not Show
The State Department’s own Office of Inspector General conducted multiple investigations and audits of the GEC during its operational life. A 2022 OIG inspection found that the center had largely remained in a support role for other federal counter-disinformation efforts rather than leading and directing such efforts as its statutory mandate required — a finding about bureaucratic positioning, not domestic surveillance or censorship.
Nothing in the OIG record, and nothing in the files Rogers provided to Pounds and then published herself, has been shown to document the GEC turning its analytical or operational tools on American citizens or suppressing domestic political speech. The allegations that animated Republican criticism of the center — and that the leaked files were apparently meant to confirm — remain unsubstantiated by the documentary record that has now been made public.
Kimmage and Goux, who between them oversaw the center’s work across multiple administrations, say the files instead illustrate how a legitimate national security institution became a casualty of domestic political warfare over the definition of disinformation itself.
The Broader Stakes
The GEC episode raises questions that extend well beyond the fate of one government office. As foreign adversaries continue to invest in sophisticated influence operations — Russia, China, and Iran all maintain active programs documented by U.S. intelligence agencies and allied governments — the institutional capacity to track and counter those efforts has been systematically dismantled. The State Department’s own pivot toward influencer-based counter-messaging in South-East Asia suggests that the underlying strategic problem has not disappeared; only the dedicated infrastructure built to address it has.
For now, what the leaked files have definitively revealed is this: a senior State Department official provided sensitive government documents to a conservative online personality to advance a political narrative, that personality publicly accused her benefactor of attempted entrapment, and the official then published the files herself — only for the two most senior surviving officials of the targeted institution to review the materials and conclude they show nothing of what was alleged.
This article draws on reporting from The Guardian, a Congressional Research Service analysis of the GEC’s termination, archived State Department documentation of the GEC’s mission and structure, and reporting by The Hill on the State Department’s subsequent halt to foreign misinformation frameworks.
