Donald Trump was listed as a top repeat spreader of election misinformation on a secret government target list in 2020.
Now internal State Department emails prove the office that built that list was never supposed to touch American speech.
And the official who swore to Congress it never did just got caught in a lie that could shake Washington.
How Obama Built the Government Censorship Machine That Ran Against Trump Supporters in 2020
Barack Obama created the Global Engagement Center in 2016 via executive order – an office inside the State Department's Bureau of Global Public Affairs.
The stated mission was countering foreign propaganda.
Russia, ISIS, state adversaries – that was the mandate Congress authorized and the American people were sold.
By the final weeks of the 2020 election, at least one GEC employee had embedded himself inside the Election Integrity Partnership – a domestic censorship operation with direct pipelines to the biggest social media companies in America.
The employee described their election-monitoring work as occupying nearly all of their time through Election Day.
Nobody working a Slack channel full of conservative Twitter accounts is fighting Russian propaganda.
The EIP was a Stanford-run consortium created in the summer of 2020 at the explicit request of DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.
The House Judiciary Committee confirmed in November 2023 that the operation existed to give the federal government a way to launder censorship activities around the First Amendment.
Government officials – including GEC and CISA – filed tickets flagging social media posts and URLs, which traveled to EIP, which forwarded them to Big Tech.
When Twitter and TikTok moved to suppress flagged content, internal emails recorded the operation's response: celebration.
Every account on the EIP's internal list of repeat spreaders was a conservative American – Trump, Don Jr., Charlie Kirk, and Gateway Pundit among them. Not a foreign operative in sight.
The Election Integrity Partnership Was a Big Tech Censorship Pipeline Aimed at Conservatives
In October 2023, Daniel Kimmage – then GEC's Principal Deputy Coordinator – testified before Congress under direct questioning.
His answer was unambiguous: the Global Engagement Center "does not do any work domestically."
The newly released documents prove that was a lie.
Those documents show a GEC employee embedded in EIP's Slack channel, feeding domestic election content into a system that routed it directly to Big Tech.
Less than 1% of the claims EIP processed during the 2020 election involved actual foreign actors.
That means the office Congress authorized to fight Russian propaganda spent the 2020 election running a censorship operation aimed 99% at American citizens.
Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers – a Trump appointee – released the records last weekend.
The timing in 2020 was not accidental. Mail-in voting had exploded, and Americans were fighting over its legitimacy in real time on social media. The GEC knew exactly where to aim.
Call it what it was: a government architecture Obama built, run by career bureaucrats against Trump's own supporters from inside his own State Department – then handed to Biden after the election, who kept it running for four more years.
The Censorship Industrial Complex Is Gone and the People Who Built It Are Not
The GEC officially closed in January 2025.
Its successor was operational within weeks under a new name – the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio shut that successor down in April 2025, stating the agency had spent millions of taxpayer dollars to actively silence and censor the Americans it was supposed to be serving.
The people who built this machine believed they were saving democracy by fighting disinformation.
What they actually built was a government censorship pipeline – disguised behind Stanford researchers, laundered through private nonprofits – aimed at silencing American political speech before a presidential election.
And when Congress asked them directly about it, they lied.
The documents are public now.
The question is whether Barack Obama and Joe Biden's people will face any consequences for what they built – and what they told Congress about it afterward.
Sources:
- Jim Hoft, "Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Releases New Evidence of Illicit Domestic Censorship in US," The Gateway Pundit, August 2026.
- "New Evidence of Obama and Biden's Scheme to Spy on Americans During 2020 Election," Revolver News, August 25, 2026.
- House Judiciary Committee, "The Weaponization of 'Disinformation' Pseudo-experts and Bureaucrats: How the Federal Government Partnered with Universities to Censor Americans' Free Speech," November 6, 2023.
- "In NCLA Victory Against Censorship, State Department Shutters Global Engagement Center," New Civil Liberties Alliance, January 2, 2025.
- Tom Fitton, "Records Show Homeland Security's Cybersecurity Agency Worked with Election Integrity Partnership to Suppress 2020 Election 'Disinformation,'" Judicial Watch, November 11, 2023.
