Republicans Request Records on Censorship by Liberal Organizations

House Republicans are pressing the State Department for more records about grants that ended up with organizations targeting conservative voices, according to the Washington Examiner.

Members of the House Small Business Committee have asked the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) for details about the grants it has given.

The request is part of the committee’s broader inquiry into government censorship and interference with American small businesses, the Examiner reported Tuesday.

The Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a British think tank, has been one of the organizations that has received grants from the GEC.

Left-wing groups such as GDI and NewsGuard have been used by major advertising agencies to block military recruitment ads on many conservative media outlets.

“The GEC has funded a myriad of companies that label beliefs running afoul of the radical left’s agenda as ‘disinformation,'” Committee Chair Roger Williams, and Rep. Beth Van Duyne wrote GEC Special Envoy and Coordinator James 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.

The letter is the latest move by GOP lawmakers who want to show that the federal government has ties to companies focused on pushing “disinformation” and “misinformation.”

Republicans in recent months have taken steps to expose GEC’s backing of left-wing groups such as GDI and NewsGuard.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the nonprofit New Civil Liberties Alliance, and publications The Daily Wire and The Federalist last month filed a lawsuit alleging that President Joe Biden’s State Department worked to censor conservative views online.

The lawsuit cites the government’s grant of $100,000 to the GDI in 2021.

The group pointed out that GEC funded GDI, and worked with the Election Integrity Partnership, another third party, to regulate speech before the 2020 election.

The Democrat-led Senate last month agreed with House Speaker Mike Johnson’s demand that the annual defense spending bill not allow Pentagon dollars to be spent with ad agencies that use “misinformation” media monitors.

Williams and Van Duyne’s letter accuses GEC of straying from its congressional mandate, which holds that funds are not intended to be used “for purposes other than countering foreign propaganda and misinformation.”

The lawmakers wrote how GEC awarded funds to Moonshot CVE, an entity claiming to fight “conspiracy theories” and “hate speech,” and Albany Associates International, a British group that claimed that “partnerships between government, academia, and tech at a national and local level” are necessary to thwart “disinformation,” the Examiner reported.