Democrats looked like they were stifling a visceral rage during Tuesday’s Foreign Affairs South and Central Asia House Subcommittee hearing titled, “The Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department.”
None more so than Nina Jankowicz, who led the short-lived, now dead Disinformation Governance Board for former President Joe Biden. Today, she is the CEO of the American Sunlight Project and considers herself an “expert on disinformation and democratization.”
Jankowicz refused to answer when Rep. Michael Baumgartner, R-Wash., asked her to disclose the name of donors for the American Sunlight Project.
“So, sunlight for other people but not for your donors,” he said. Baumgartner also asked if there was a loss of trust with the American people when the Biden White House called videos of Biden acting disorientated “cheap fakes.”
“I think in those cases, there were nefarious editing techniques being used to make the effects seem worse than it actually was,” Jankowicz said. We now know that internally, the White House was worried about Biden’s cheese was falling off his cracker.
“Do you believe the 51 former intelligence officials who said that the [Hunter} Biden laptop was a product of Russian disinformation?” Baumgartner asked. “Do you think they impacted the trust the American people and the intelligence establishment to successfully use social media to go after terrorists?
Jankowicz first responded by asking “Does free speech only apply when you like what’s being said? Those guys were exercising their right to free speech. And actually what they said was the ‘hallmark’ of a disinformation campaign. Based on the evidence at the time, it was true.”
She boldly made this claim on the same day documents proved the FBI knew the laptop was real, and it imposed a gag order on employees to cast doubt on it’s authenticity just before the 2020 election.
Jankowicz’s refusal to honestly characterize failures of the Biden Administration proves the fight against the censorship-industrial complex is not over. Damage was done, trust was broken, and the conversation still is not honest.
“If the FBI officials who buried the Hunter Biden laptop story aren’t held responsible, it will be impossible for Americans to have any faith in the agency — or the electoral process,” Brianna Lyman, an Election Correspondent summed it up for The Federalist this week.
The FBI lied to the public, and it seems to have ignored criminal activity shown on the laptop. As long as Biden was president, accountability seemed impossible.
But not anymore. The new administration must continue the probe and identify who was more loyal to the Biden family than the American people. Those who would keep the truth from citizens must be rooted out. We need a full accounting of what happened to to try to make sense of it, and to prevent it from happening again.
Committee chairman Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., explained that the Global Engagement Center (GEC), was formed in 2016 for “countering foreign propaganda and disinformation.”
“Despite that mandate, for years the GEC instead deployed its shadowy network of grantees and sub-grantees to facilitate the censorship of American voices, especially if those voices were conservative and refused to align with the left leaning establishment politics,” Huizenga said. “Worst of all, this was being done using U.S. taxpayer dollars. Your dollars.”
Margot Cleveland, Senior Legal Correspondent for The Federalist, named some of the offending contractors in a 2023 piece.
Democrats did not love the hearing.
“The majority is relitigating a made-up conspiracy theory about a part of the State Department that no longer exists to distract from the dumpster fire foreign policy this administration is pursuing,” Ranking committee member Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove, D-Calif. said in her opening statement.
Through political pressure, GEC was terminated in December 2024. But that same month, under former President Joe Biden, the State Department restructured the office into the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub (R-FIMI).
“The question we will be exploring today is whether this restructuring is actually in name only,” Huizenga said. “Put simply, whether you call it GEC or R-FIMI, the State Department should never — and if I can help, it will never again — be in the business of silencing American voices.”
Democrats wanted the discussion to stay out of the past, and described Trump as the source of all problems.
“It is the height of hypocrisy for Republicans to hold a hearing on the so called censorship-industrial complex and the need for ‘First Amendment safeguards at the State Department’ when President Trump and [Elon] Musk are launching the largest attack on free speech in America in decades,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., said during the hearing. “The administration is right now stripping people of the constitutional protection to free speech, to dissent, to express their views if they are counter to Trump and Musk, to use cold war era statutes … squashing fundamental American freedoms.”
One of President Donald Trump’s earliest executive orders, called “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” says federal money cannot be used toward censorship of American citizens.
Huizenga intends to introduce legislation to codify that order into law.
“The Global Engagement Center and this entire effort is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the American system and the First Amendment,” testified Matt Taibbi, editor-in-chief of Racket News
“The American government has no role in protecting citizens from speech. The whole idea of the system that was designed by Jefferson and Madison, is that the American people view each other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for themselves. They do not need a nanny state or a guardian or a law enforcement agency to decide for them what’s true. We don’t need a truth squad, and that’s exactly what GEC was designed for,” he added.
Ending taxpayer funding of government censorship permanently is a no-brainier that should get bipartisan support. Based on this hearing, Democrats won’t get behind it, showing we have a long way to go to protect free speech.
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
