Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed during a Cabinet meeting that the Biden administration’s State Department kept dossiers on Americans accused of serving as “vectors of disinformation,” including a file on an unidentified Trump administration official.
“We had an office in the Department of State whose job it was to censor Americans,” Rubio said during Wednesday’s Cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump. “And, by the way, I’m not going to say who it is. I’ll leave it up to them. There’s at least one person at this table today who had a dossier in that building of social media posts to identify them as purveyors of disinformation. We have these dossiers. We are going to be turning those over to these individuals.”
Vice President JD Vance interjected, asking, “Was it me or Elon [Musk]? We can follow up when the media is gone,” and drawing laughter from the Cabinet.
“But just think about that. The Department of State of the United States had set up an office to monitor the social media posts and commentary of American citizens, to identify them as vectors of disinformation,” Rubio continued. “When we know that the best way to combat disinformation is freedom of speech and transparency.
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“We’re not going to have an office that does that.”
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Rubio appeared to be referring to an office within the State Department previously known as the Global Engagement Center, which he officially shuttered earlier this month.
When announcing a massive reorganization of the State Department, the Global Engagement Center engaged with media outlets and platforms to censor speech it disagreed with, Rubio said. The center has been accused by conservatives of censoring them.
Journalist Matt Taibbi, for example, previously reported that the center “funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer an insidious — and idiotic — new form of blacklisting” during the pandemic, Fox Digital reported in 2024.
He added that the Global Engagement Center “flagged accounts as ‘Russian personas and proxies’ based on criteria like, ‘Describing the Coronavirus as an engineered bioweapon,’ blaming ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute,’ and ‘attributing the appearance of the virus to the CIA.’”
Though Rubio did not identify which Trump official the Biden administration kept a dossier on, Elon Musk has previously railed against the Global Engagement Center.
“The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” Musk posted to X in January 2023. That was more than a year before Musk endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential race and became a fixture of the administration in his temporary role with the Department of Government Efficiency.
“They are a threat to our democracy,” Musk added.
Fox News Digital reached out to the White House for additional details on which Trump official was targeted but did not immediately receive a reply.
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Former President Barack Obama established the small office in 2016 through an executive order aimed at coordinating counterterrorism messaging to foreign nations before it expanded its scope to also include countering foreign propaganda and disinformation, State Department documents show.
In 2024, lawmakers did not approve new funding for the office in the National Defense Authorization Act, and it was scheduled to terminate on Dec. 23, 2024. The Biden administration, however, shuffled staffers and rebranded the office. It became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub in the waning days before Trump’s inauguration, the New York Post reported in January.
“I am announcing the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” Rubio said in an April 16 statement announcing the office’s closure.
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“Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” he wrote. “This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America. That ends today.”
Fox News Digital’s Michael Dorgan contributed to this report.