Secretary Blinken Official Photo, Department of State
What is the legal justification for the Global Engagement Center targeting the American Citizen?
There is a very important case being considered by the Supreme Court in the spring of 2024 that will determine the trajectory of modern America. This is the Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General filings in regard to the actions of the Federal Government in coercing social media to moderate and shape news, themes, and suppressing the social media postings of private citizens. The 5th Circuit Court had placed an injunction against these activities by the Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, State Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the FBI.
More recently, in September 2023, the Supreme Court had placed a stay against this injunction meaning that the Government could continue to meet with and conduct the activities in question. Having been in the senior levels of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the halls of the National Security Council in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB), I knew that even with the Supreme Court saying it was allowing these activities to continue via the September “stay”, that a significant chilling effect would be in place against the U.S. Government personalities involved in these activities. Sure enough, even with this Supreme Court “stay”, the Biden White House filed a motion to strike down the 5th Circuit injunction. Clearly, even with the Supreme Court September decision, the U.S. Government personalities felt suppressed, knowing that if the Supreme Court agrees with the 5th Circuit when they review the case, the activities of these Government personnel during the “stay” period would receive great inspection and they would potentially be criminally liable for their actions.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton files a suit against the Global Engagement Center
Now a new case has been filed by the Texas Attorney General that approaches the same general topic of unlawful U.S. Government targeting, silencing, and censoring of American media companies (with the implication that American Citizens were also the target). The culprits are a slightly different sub-set of the U.S. Government, something known as the State Department “Global Engagement Center” (GEC). The GEC is led by James Rubin – the same revolving door personality who encumbers Blue leaning media when the Blue team is out of office and is also married to Christiane Amanpour, the same personality placed on a pedestal by Blue media for her years of reporting with a distinct Blue tilt.
The mission of the GEC is stated as:
“To direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”
This sounds like a noble and a good thing. One way I always measure a U.S. Government website is the freshness and focus of their postings. The GEC would seem to have a voluminous conveyor belt of statements asserting American values and addressing the malign activities of all totalitarian governments that run counter to the liberal, democratic republic values of America. There are only 12 paltry postings so far for 2023 and out of the 12, 11 address Russia, and only one posting (8.3%) address China – which according to FBI Director Christopher Wray is the number one threat to America. So there is a distinct disconnect between the priorities of the GEC and the true threat as stated by Wray. There is clearly a Russia, Russia, Russia focus of the GEC which translated means Trump, Trump, Trump.
The GEC traces to the 2011 Obama Executive Order 13584 which sought on its surface to coordinate the U.S. Government message in regards to the Al Qaeda threat. I remember this EO and its seemingly logical purpose at the time. Well if this is the heritage and origin of the GEC, how did NewsGuard, the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) out of London, and this Election Integrity Partnership get involved and their obsession with identifying news organizations and private citizens that should be flagged? That’s a great question. Nina Jankowicz, former self-appointed Mis, Dis, and Mal-Information expert, registered as a foreign agent and moved to London to work for a similarly innocent sounding organization to the GDI, known as the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR). I’m sure there was no connection between the GDI and the CIR and it was totally coincidental that they were both in London.
The 2013 Smith Mundt Modernization Act
Having produced, reviewed, or having to implement hundreds of inter-agency actions directed out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the White House, it’s reflexive muscle memory to ensure that in the first paragraph of any effective Action or Cover Memo for decisioning by the front office, that the legal justification for the action must be clearly stated and identified. I also know that this must be known and understood intimately by the Action Officer, Director, or Senior Official signing and/or preparing the all-important page and ½ that takes the most complex topics in the world and makes them clear and actionable. Although the General Counsel must “chop” (i.e. sign) in the review process, the General Counsel was not really the one on the blame line if things went south, it was the aforesaid signer of the action package that would take the fall.
To really understand the actions described in the Missouri/Louisiana and/or the Texas cases, the legal citation must be revealed. The U.S. Government should release immediately the action memo packages for both cases in question. In my mind, an obscure and reasonable sounding law at the time may just be one of the core legal citations and its influence on the evolving totalitarian behavior of the U.S. Government should be studied. Smith-Mundt was a forgettable 1948 law that said in essence that Cold War “informationing” by the U.S. Government could only be directed at foreign audiences. Having been through the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School Psychological Operations Course in 1985, I knew Smith-Mundt well. In 2013 Smith-Mundt was updated in a strong, bi-partisan fashion. The update allowed the use of U.S. Government derived information to be shared with the American Citizen. I was in government at the time, and it seemed like a reasonable idea – why should we let perfectly good, U.S. Government (i.e. taxpayer funded) information fall on the cutting room floor and be wasted? However, as events have unfolded, my new curious posit is that this was one of the key triggering events for the weaponization of U.S. Government information against the American People and the corollary logic that if an American Citizen questioned the U.S. Government information, they must be under the influence of a foreign power.
Executive Order Executive Order 13848—Imposing Certain Sanctions in the Event of Foreign Interference in a United States Election
In steps another important document that when combined with the 2013 Smith-Mundt Modernization Act possibly completed the do-loop of Big Government illogic on the legal basis for surveilling the American Citizen. In October 2018, President Trump signed EO 13848, on its surface, intended to protect the American Election Process from the foreign threat. For those with a short memory, this was during the volcanic explosion of the FBI’s and Deep State’s fraudulent Russia, Russia, Russia assault on President Trump which with the conclusion of the Durham Investigation has been shown to be a factual fraud. This fraud was strongly perpetrated by sworn members of the Government to include Charles McGonigal, the former FBI Senior Executive in charge of Counter-Intelligence at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York Field Office and has admitted his guilt in concealing this information from the FBI. 2018 was also the era of the Vindman twins creating bat-guano crazy havoc in the halls of the EEOB in their theatrical contribution to the coup against President Trump.
With EO 13848 the do-loop of Deep State illogic was possibly completed and was perhaps, along with the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act used as the legal basis for targeting, silencing, and censoring Americans. The Action Memo/Cover Memo on the EO 13848 package should be fully de-classified and made public so that the legal citations can be made known to the owners of the U.S. Government, the American People. Once fully revealed, along with all the associated action/cover memos, more truth can be shed upon the basis for the GEC’s bizarre journey from messaging effective information to counter Al-Qaeda to ensuring that Parents attending School Board meetings were intimidated with the full force and resources of the Federal Government.
All viewpoints are personal and do not reflect the viewpoints of any organization.
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