A botched leak of purportedly explosive government files to a prominent conservative online personality was supposed to offer proof of what the Trump administration and its allies have long alleged: that a little-known office inside the US state department, created to fight foreign propaganda, had secretly become a tool for domestic censorship.

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, Poland and Finland – a framework its backers hoped other countries would use to build their own version of the office.

A 2022 inspector general review found the GEC “generally effective” at supporting counter-disinformation programs overall, while flagging weaknesses in its internal controls, contractor oversight and strategic planning. That record was enough to sustain bipartisan support: senators Rob Portman, a Republican, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat, repeatedly pushed to fund and strengthen the center, and its authorization survived multiple renewal fights before House Republicans, increasingly focused on the domestic-speech question, declined to extend it again in 2024.

That mandate cost roughly $61m per year. The GEC employed about 120 people before Congress declined to reauthorize it, letting the office lapse at the end of 2024. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, later folded what remained of its work into a new counter foreign information manipulation and interference office, framing the closure as an end to wasteful, censorious government overreach.

Trust exercise

Now, less than a year after the GEC shut down, a proposal reviewed by the Guardian shows the state department preparing to pay up to 30 online influencers across 11 countries in south-east Asia $2,500 apiece as part of an $11m, multi-year campaign to counter Chinese propaganda.

The project, which would be operated by the US Mission to USEAN, has three parts: a $5m messaging campaign, a $3m program training influencers and journalists to counter Chinese propaganda, and a $3m trip bringing about 180 participants to studios in Washington and Houston “for intensive collaboration, studio production and first-hand engagement with US institutions and creators”.

The proposal’s planning materials describe the ideal recruit as starting from a “welcoming” position of what one document calls the “rejecting-affirming continuum”: someone not yet sold on the US, but not hostile either. As participants move through the accelerator, the materials say, exposure to evidence of US commitment in the region and training in spotting propaganda from China (which has reportedly invested billions of dollars in disinformation efforts globally) is meant to carry them toward the “affirming” end of that scale, publicly backing closer ties with Washington on trade, tech standards and the South China Sea.

The document cited the rightwing analyst and new Pentagon special government employee, Jennica Pounds, the DataRepublican, as an ideal model to seek out in other recruits abroad.

Contacted for comment, the state department declined to directly address questions about the documents released by Rogers, the influencer proposal, the department’s current foreign influence programs and whether other regions are being targeted as well.

A state department official said: “Undersecretary Rogers has been clear that the department will continue to confront censorship, anti-American propaganda and coercive influence directly while demonstrating the enduring advantages of freedom, accountability and open communication.”

Meanwhile, the office of policy, planning and resources for public diplomacy (R/PPR) was separately shopping for commercial help with a similar mission this spring. A government filing from May 2026 shows the R/PPR requesting information from vendors on software that can mine open-source data, map “adversarial propaganda influence networks” and detect deepfakes.

That apparent contradiction is not lost on the GEC’s former staff.

“Are they trying to re-create it? Probably,” Goux said. “But now they’re spending a lot more tax dollars doing that, trying to get contractors to do some of the stuff that we were doing.”

Goux put the broader cost in plainer terms still. “The US has lost their seat at the table to do that, and that’s unfortunate,” she said. “I hope we can gain it back, but we’re losing trust too, and that’s significant.”