SAUNDERS: You funded a federal office that censored Americans. Marco Rubio is exposing it

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said this bombshell during Wednesday’s White House Cabinet meeting: “We had an office in the Department of State whose job it was to censor Americans.”

Rubio offered that he is surprised a federal agency monitoring the social media posts and commentary of American citizens is not a bigger story.

Maybe that’s about to change after Rubio claimed that at least one person at the Cabinet meeting was a target of an office formerly known as the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. Who is it? The beltway loves a guessing game.

On April 16, the State Department posted an interview Rubio gave to former State Department official Mike Benz. During the exchange, Rubio spoke of how the State Department launched GEC to combat messaging from al-Qaida, ISIS and other terrorist groups. But over the years, GEC devolved into a partisan machine that doled out taxpayer money to non-governmental organizations — known in federal acronym-speak as NGOs — that targeted conservatives including Ben Shapiro and The Federalist.

“American taxpayers, through the State Department, were paying groups to attack Americans and to try to silence the voice of Americans,” Rubio maintained. As a result, some Americans were de-platformed. Censored.

Last month, Rubio wrote in The Federalist: “GEC was supposed to be dead already. But, as many have learned the hard way, in Washington, D.C., few things ever truly die. When Republicans in Congress sunset GEC’s funding at the end of last year, the Biden State Department simply slapped on a new name. The GEC became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, with the same roster of employees. With this new name, they hoped to survive the transition to the new administration.”

Looks like they failed.

This story has a been-there, done-that feel to it. Who can forget what happened when COVID called and government overreach led to the censorship of unorthodox viewpoints?

Ditto the infamous New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story, which Democrats tried to bury ahead of the 2020 election.

“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,” Rubio wrote.

“Was it me or Elon?” Vice President JD Vance quipped after Rubio’s Cabinet-room scoop. Clever.

But then, Elon Musk posted on X in 2023, “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC.”

So funny, not funny.

The sad part here is that a number of national security officials were not content to concentrate on their jobs because they preferred to use their powerful perches to muzzle contrary opinions. They just can’t keep partisan politics out of the mix.

Of course there is a pattern here.

In 2016, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele tried to sabotage Donald Trump’s campaign by releasing a DNC-funded “dossier” that made bogus claims about Trump and Russia. It was a low-ball smear that lacked corroboration, and still it repeatedly ran in major outlets.

In 2020, 51 former intelligence officials, including former CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell, signed a letter that argued a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop “has the classic earmarks“ of a Russian disinformation campaign. Again no proof. Again no consequences.

This GEC story is not going away. It’s pay-back time.

Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X.