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

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. 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.

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. Rogers “tried to twist that into something that it wasn’t”, according to Kimmage.