Documents leaked by Trump official to bolster a conspiracy show ‘absolutely nothing’

Two former high-ranking officials at the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a target of Republican ire that lost its funding in 2024 and was disbanded after Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, say the documents show nothing of the kind.

Instead, they argue, the files are a symptom of a protracted and bitter political fight over an office that spent nearly a decade tracking and countering foreign influence operations, particularly from Russia, China and Iran.

And the state department is now resuming some of this work in other parts of its operation, including plans – laid out in a proposal reviewed by the Guardian – to pay social media influencers across south-east Asia as part of an $11m campaign to counter Chinese propaganda.

Sarah Rogers, the state epartment’s undersecretary for public diplomacy, 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 she was leaked the documents as part of a bid to “entrap” her.

Rogers, who denied this claim, then published the files herself, claiming officials inside the center “betrayed their stated mission”. The files included a 2022 GEC report on “gendered disinformation”, a flashpoint in the culture wars.

“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. His own congressional testimony was included in the leaked files.

Kimmage and Carrie Goux, a Joe Biden appointee and the center’s former acting deputy coordinator, say nothing in the material shows the GEC, whose mandate was explicitly foreign-facing, ever turned its tools on Americans.

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

Weaponization

The dispute is the latest chapter in a years-long campaign by conservatives to portray the GEC as part of a broader effort by the US government and technology companies to suppress rightwing speech.

Republican congressmen including Michael McCaul, former chair of the House foreign affairs committee, 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 US.

Trump’s return to the presidency drew this view into the heart of the federal government. The center was abolished in 2025, and what remained of its work scattered across the state department.

Much of that Republican-led campaign centered on how the GEC had funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a UK-based non-profit that rates media outlets by how likely they are to spread disinformation, to help monitor propaganda in Asia. But in 2022 the GDI separately published its own study of the US media market that rated several conservative outlets, including Newsmax, One America News and the New York Post, as high-risk – a finding its critics have cited ever since as evidence that a foreign-facing office had funded a group meddling in domestic politics.

The question raised by the files leaked this month is narrower, however: whether they show the GEC itself ran a domestic censorship operation. Kimmage and Goux insist they do not.

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. “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.”

‘False’ allegations

Pounds, the rightwing analyst, is not a neutral bystander. Days after the documents were released, she disclosed that she had been quietly working since July as a special government employee for the defense department.

On Friday, Pounds released a database to track US citizens in the Democratic Socialists of America. The Pentagon did not respond when asked whether the database is included in her scope of government work.

Both former senior officials, Kimmage and Goux, draw a sharp line between the accusations made by critics of the GEC and what the center actually did. “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.”

The GEC “did what its congressional mandate charged it to do, which is to fight foreign [misinformation and] disinformation”, added Kimmage. “This allegation that it’s censoring Americans is false.”

During its almost 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 US-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, Po