Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department
House South and Central Asia Subcommittee
2025-04-01
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Source: Congress.gov
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Transcript
The subcommittee on South and Central Asia will come to order, and the purpose of this hearing is to examine the State Department's previous efforts to facilitate censorship of Americans and the importance of establishing permanent First Amendment safeguards for any future State Department activities. This committee will be passing into law a comprehensive reauthorization of the State Department for the first time in over 20 years. That was in 2002 was the last time that was done. And as part of this critical endeavor, this subcommittee is tasked with examining the public diplomacy functions of the State Department, commonly referred to as the R family of bureaus and offices. In December of 2024, Congress terminated an office within that family, the Global Engagement Center, also known as GECC, after its exposure coming out of an investigation that was done by this committee. The GECC was initially authorized for the statutory purpose of countering foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts. Despite that mandate, for years, the GECC instead deployed its shadowy network of grantees and subgrantees to facilitate the censorship of American voices, especially if those voices were conservative and refused to align with the left-leaning establishment politics. Worst of all, this was being done using U.S. taxpayer dollars, your dollars. The same month the GECC was terminated, the Biden State Department restructured the office into a, quote, counter foreign information manipulation and interference hub, also known as RFIMI. The question we will be exploring today is whether this restructuring is actually in name only. Put simply, whether you call it GAC or our Femi, the State Department should never and if I can help it, will never again be in the business of silencing American voices. Freedom of speech is a God-given right enshrined in the First Amendment of our nation's Constitution.
It is a right that President Trump and his administration are committed to zealously protecting. On his first day in office, President Trump signed the Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship executive order. This executive order makes clear that no federal government employees or taxpayers dollars may be used to engage in or facilitate the unconstitutional censorship of American citizens. And as the chairman of the subcommittee, I plan to introduce legislation that will codify that executive order. I'm hopeful that my colleagues will join me in enshrining these vital First Amendment projections protections into law. I want to thank the panel for being here today. Ms. Jankiewicz, thank you for your time, and you publicly supported and even spearheaded censorship efforts under the previous administration out of what some called the Ministry of Truth, as some had labeled you, the disinformation czar. I guess technically it should be czarina. It is crucial that the American public receive answers and accountability for the actions taken by their own government to silence their voices. Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Weingarten, your valiant reporting helped unearth the GEC's role in the censorship of Americans. Mr. Taibbi, your groundbreaking work on the Twitter files pulled back the curtain on how the federal bureaucracy could colluded, and in some cases, pressured social media companies to target American citizens engaged in protected political speech. Mr. Weingarten, your impactful work has unearthed how the GEC and its implementing partners deployed blacklists to obliterate conservative news publications that the Biden administration disagreed with. Well, we, As Americans and as policymakers must never allow these dark days of mass censorship to happen again. And that is my goal. And with that, I am going to yield five minutes to the gentlelady from California for her opening statement.
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to our witnesses for being here for our first South and Central Asia subcommittee hearing. I look forward to working with the chair in a bipartisan way on the critical issues that we are charged with overseeing. Unfortunately, we are not having a hearing about any of those issues. Instead, this subcommittee is wasting taxpayer time and resources on the fifth With such hearing, Republicans have held across multiple committees on the so-called censorship industrial complex. 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 and elevating a serial sexual harasser as their star witness in the process. Mr. Chair, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record two articles about the Republican witness Matt Taibbi. The first is a Chicago Reader article entitled 20 years ago in Moscow, Matt Taibbi was a misogynist a-hole and possibly worse. And a Washington Post article titled The Two Expat Bros Who Terrorized Women Correspondents in Moscow. Without objection. This hearing could not be more out of touch with the concerns of everyday Americans. People's retirement savings are being decimated as Trump's arbitrary temper tariffs tank the stock market. They are staring down the barrel of cuts to their Social Security and Medicare because the Republican majority wants to give a tax break to billionaires like Elon Musk.
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