[House Hearing, 119 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
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CENSORSHIP INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: THE NEED FOR FIRST AMENDMENT SAFEGUARDS
AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
=======================================================================
HEARING
OF THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON SOUTH AND CENTRAL ASIA
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINETEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
April 1, 2025
__________
Serial No. 119-11
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Printed for the use of the Committee on Foreign Affairs
GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT
Available: http://www.foreignaffairs.house.gov, http://docs.house.gov,
or http://www.govinfo.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
60-490 PDF WASHINGTON : 2025
COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS
BRIAN J. MAST, Florida, Chairman
MICHAEL T. McCAUL, Texas GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York,
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey Ranking Member
JOE WILSON,, South Carolina BRAD SHERMAN, California
SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania GERALD E. CONNOLLY, Virginia
DARRELL ISSA, California WILLIAM R. KEATING, Massachusetts
TIM BURCHETT, Tennessee AMI BERA, California
MARK E. GREEN, Tennessee JOAQUIN CASTRO, Texas
ANDY BARR, Kentucky DINA TITUS, Nevada
RONNY JACKSON, Texas TED LIEU, California
YOUNG KIM, California SARA JACOBS, California
MARIA ELVIRA SALAZAR, Florida SHEILA CHERFILUS-McCORMICK,
BILL HUIZENGA, Michigan Florida
AUMUA AMATA COLEMAN RADEWAGEN, GREG STANTON, Arizona
American Samoa JARED MOSKOWITZ, Florida
WARREN DAVIDSON, Ohio JONATHAN L. JACKSON, Illinois
JIM R. BAIRD, Indiana SYDNEY KAMLAGER-DOVE, California
THOMAS H. KEAN, JR, New Jersey JIM COSTA, California
MICHAEL LAWLER, New York GABE AMO, Rhode Island
CORY MILLS, Florida KWEISI MFUME, Maryland
KEITH SELF, Texas PRAMILA JAYAPAL, Washington
RYAN K. ZINKE, Montana GEORGE LATIMER, New York
JAMES C. MOYLAN, Guam JOHNNY OLSZEWSKI Jr, Maryland
ANNA PAULINA LUNA, Florida JULIE JOHNSON, Texas
JEFFERSON SHREVE, Indiana SARAH McBRIDE, Delaware
SHERI BIGGS, South Carolina BRADLEY SCOTT SCHNEIDER, Illinois
MICHAEL BAUMGARTNER, Washington MADELEINE DEAN, Pennsylvania
RYAN MACKENZIE, Pennsylvania
James Langenderfer, Majority Staff Director
Sajit Gandhi, Minority Staff Director
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SUBCOMMITTEE ON SOUTH AND CENTRAL ASIA
Bill Huizenga, Michigan, Chairman
SCOTT PERRY, Pennsylvania SYDNEY KAMLAGER-DOVE, California,
TIM BURCHETT, Tennessee Ranking Member
THOMAS KEAN, JR, New Jersey AMI BERA, California
KEITH SELF, Texas KWEISI MFUME, Maryland
JAMES MOYLAN, Guam PRAMILA JAYAPAL, Washington
JEFFERSON SHREVE, Indiana GEORGE LATIMER, New York
MICHAEL BAUMGARTNER, Washington JULIE JOHNSON, Texas
Mary Bischoping, Subcommittee Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
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REPRESENTATIVES
Page
Opening Statement of Subcommittee Chairman Bill Huizenga......... 1
Opening Statement of Subcommittee Ranking Member Sydney Kamlager-
Dove........................................................... 2
WITNESSES
Statement of Nina Jankowicz, Chief Executive Officer, American
Sunlight Project............................................... 5
Prepared Statement............................................. 8
Statement of Matt Taibbi, Twitter Files Journalist, Author,
Founder, Racket News........................................... 17
Prepared Statement............................................. 20
Statement of Benjamin Weingarten, Investigative Journalist &
Columnist...................................................... 23
Prepared Statement............................................. 25
APPENDIX
Hearing Notice................................................... 56
Hearing Minutes.................................................. 58
Hearing Attendance............................................... 59
Materials for the Record
Material for the Record, submitted by Huizenga................... 60
Material for the Record (1), submitted by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-
Dove........................................................... 66
Material for the Record (2), submitted by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-
Dove........................................................... 69
Material for the Record (3), submitted by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-
Dove........................................................... 73
Letter to Secretary Rubio, submitted by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove 78
Questions for the Record
Questions for Nina Jankowicz submitted by Rep. Huizenga.......... 83
Questions for Matt Taibbi submitted by Rep. Huizenga............. 87
Questions for Benjamin Weingarten submitted by Rep. Huizenga..... 89
CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: THE NEED FOR FIRST AMENDMENT SAFEGUARDS
AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
----------
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on South and Central Asia
Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:08 a.m., in
room 2172 Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Bill Huizenga
(chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN BILL HUIZENGA
Mr. Huizenga. 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 2024, Congress terminated an office within that
family, the Global Engagement Center--also known as GEC--after
its exposure coming out of an investigation that was done by
this committee.
The GEC was initially authorized for the statutory purpose
of countering foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts.
Despite that mandate, for years the GEC 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 GEC was terminated
the Biden State Department restructured the office into a,
quote, counter foreign information manipulation and
interference hub, also known R/FIMI.
The question we will be exploring today is whether this
restructuring is actually in name only. Put simply, whether you
call it GEC or R/FIMI 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 this 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 protections into law. I want to
thank the panel for being here today.
Ms. Jankowicz, 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.
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 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.
We, as Americans and as policymakers, must never allow
these dark days of mass censorship to happen again and that is
my goal.
With that, I am going to yield 5 minutes to the gentlelady
from California for her opening statement.
OPENING STATEMENT OF RANKING MEMBER SYDNEY KAMLAGER-DOVE
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. 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 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 ``Twenty years
ago in Moscow Matt Taibbi was a misogynist a-hole and possibly
worse'' and a Washington Post article titled ``The two ex-pat
bros who terrorized women'' correspondence in Moscow.
Mr. Huizenga. Without objection.
[Please refer to the Appendix for the above information:]
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. 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 who have deep
financial ties to our adversaries.
Meanwhile, Trump is siding with Putin against our national
security interests and risking the lives of American soldiers
in a Signal group chat.
I've been to the State Department and I do have concerns
about censorship, censorship of the employees who are terrified
to say the wrong thing, to say anything, or have the wrong word
in their job title and be terminated by an administration that
publicly relishes punishing people for their speech.
If we want to talk about censorship we should begin with
Trump's unprecedented assault on the First Amendment and rule
of law. Here are a few examples that should send shivers down
all of our spines.
Trump banned the Associated Press from the Oval Office and
Air Force One because they kept using the name Gulf of Mexico,
something that none of us would have hesitated to do a few
months ago. And by the way, the Gulf of Mexico it was assigned
that name at birth.
Trump signed executive orders targeting law firms for
representing clients that opposed or investigated him, upending
the fundamental principle that lawyers should not fear to
represent their clients, and most terrifying Trump ordered ICE
agents to arrest and detain Mahmoud Khalil, a green card
holder, and snatch off the street a Tufts University student
and visa holder Rumeysa Ozturk for protesting and writing an
op-ed for exercising their right to free speech.
I would like to play a video.
[Video shown.]
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. So now we're raiding college campuses to
silence thought and dissent of the students.
As you can see, Trump is brazenly weaponizing the
government to intimidate and silence any part of American
society that disagrees with him. Countering disinformation from
hostile foreign powers should not be a partisan issue.
Yet, this administration has crippled our capacity to
respond to these threats while aiding, abetting and amplifying
our adversaries' influence operations.
The PRC has invested billions in pumping out propaganda,
weaponizing the world's largest online disinformation operation
to silence critics, discredit lawmakers, and harass U.S.
companies who are at odds with China's interests, and Russia
maintains a sophisticated and sprawling disinformation
apparatus to manipulate American public sentiment to Putin's
advantage, even paying conservative influencers to create and
amplify pro-Kremlin content.
And how has Trump confronted these threats? He shut down
independent media broadcasters like USAGM and Radio Free Asia,
a move that was actually celebrated in Chinese State media, and
he dismantled the FBI's Foreign Influence Task Force which his
own administration first created in 2017 to uncover
disinformation and propaganda targeting Americans.
We should be exploring more real, partisan solutions to
this pressing national security on behalf of the American
people instead of perpetuating cultural wars and divisions.
Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield back.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentlelady yields back.
I had done a brief introduction to our witnesses prior. I
do want to note that the gentlelady well knows we have done a
series of round tables within the jurisdiction of this
subcommittee and, yes, this is the first hearing that this
Congress is doing on this particular issue.
Obviously, our witnesses, you can see the tone and tenor of
what's going to be happening today here, sadly.
But Mr. Taibbi, I'm going to give you a brief moment to
answer some charges that were put against you here. But I also
want to note that there are some who don't believe that the
censorship-industrial complex exists.
In fact, I think our other witness this morning on Bluesky
had said, quote, I'm going to tell them it doesn't exist; it's
a lie peddled by those who seek power and profit and a
dangerous distraction from the real threats we face.
I won't bring up the dissent cables that weren't allowed to
be sent out of Afghanistan and a number of other things that
happened in the last administration.
But, Mr. Taibbi, there are those who don't believe that
this actually exists and is going on. Can you explain what the
Election Integrity Partnership is and what its relationship to
GEC is?
If you can turn your mic on, please.
Mr. Taibbi. The Election Integrity Partnership was an
organization run out of Stanford University. It had four
nongovernmental partners.
There was a Stanford Internet Observatory. There was a
company called Graphika. There was the Center for an Informed
Public from University of Washington, and a fourth--I'm sorry,
I'm blank. I'm sorry--the Digital Forensic Research Labs of the
Atlantic Council. They also partnered with the Global
Engagement Center, and if I'm remembering correctly the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at DHS.
We came across EIP in--when we first got access to the
Twitter Files. When those documents were made known to us we
didn't have any guidance at all. We didn't know what we were
looking at. We just simply saw big pile of complaints----
Mr. Huizenga. Clearly, you uncovered it, literally, right?
Mr. Taibbi. Hmm?
Mr. Huizenga. And you just uncovered it. You came across
this.
Mr. Taibbi. They just said you can start searching and gave
us access to a search engine. We started looking at various
documents and we found these complaints that would essentially
be referrals from this nongovernmental organization that was
partnered with governmental organizations about various types
of content related to the 2020 election, and these complaints
would go into what was called the Jira ticketing system after
which there would often be a recommendation to remove or
deamplify or place some kind of restriction on the account.
So I would characterize the Election Integrity Partnership
as a wide scale organization designed to funnel complaints to
multiple internet platforms at once.
Mr. Huizenga. Mr. Taibbi, I'm so sorry. I made a terrible
mistake on this where I had fully missed--just missed it,
caught up in the moment.
Mr. Taibbi. It's Okay.
Mr. Huizenga. We needed to go and have each one of you do
an opening statement for 5 minutes.
Mr. Taibbi. Oh, Okay.
Mr. Huizenga. So my apologies. Yes, I have some confused
colleagues up here. My apologies on that.
So we're going to go to those opening statements. I will
then go into the questions that we have. I will take some time
off of my time but I do apologize to the folks on the panel and
to my colleagues for that.
All right. The committee recognizes the importance of the
issues before us and is grateful that you're here today. Your
full statements will be part of the record and I ask that you
keep--each of you keep your spoken remarks to 5 minutes in
order to allow for those times.
So, Ms. Jankowicz, if you would please take 5 minutes and
we'll have your opening statement.
STATEMENT OF NINA JANKOWICZ
Ms. Jankowicz. Chairman Huizenga and Ranking Member
Kamlager-Dove, I appreciate the invitation to speak with you
today.
I believe it's my patriotic duty to do so because the
premise of this hearing, the so-called censorship-industrial
complex, is a fiction that has not only had profound impacts on
my life and safety but on our national security.
More alarmingly, this fiction is itself suppressing speech
and stymieing critical research that protects our country.
I want to acknowledge the irony we're having this
discussion as we witness an assault on the First Amendment we
have not seen in decades. The Trump Administration has directed
far more egregious violations of our Constitution than the
imagined actions of the Biden Administration on which this
hearing is premised.
Each one is chilling, but as a Fulbright alumna the recent
arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright Ph.D. student at Tufts
University, especially disturbed me.
The Secretary of State seemingly revoked Ms. Ozturk's visa
for publishing an op-ed in Tufts' campus newspaper. For using
her constitutionally protected right to free speech she was
spirited away by plainclothes ICE officers in broad daylight.
This is what I'm used to observing in authoritarian
countries that I study and if this had happened in a country in
this subcommittee's portfolio I think you'd issue a statement
of concern.
But it happened here. So, yes, we do need some First
Amendment protections at the State Department but not for
imagined transgressions of previous administrations.
We need those protections from this administration today.
In pursuing investigations and hearings on the censorship lie
Congress has punted its responsibility on national security,
opting instead for political theatrics that are high on fantasy
and low on facts.
Congress used government resources to attack disinformation
researchers, deliberately misconstruing their work, burying
them with requests for documents and depositions, and stoking
the fires of public rage against them.
These tactics echo the dark days of McCarthyism but with a
chilling 21st century twist. Even as America faces
unprecedented threats in the information space from our
adversaries' increasing capabilities to the exponential growth
of emerging technologies, committees including this one
continue to waste valuable time and taxpayer dollars targeting
American citizens who are doing work in the public interest.
I know this intimately. In my written testimony I explain
in detail the lies that upended my life when my appointment to
lead the DHS Disinformation Governance Board was announced.
As demonstrated by both the board's founding documents and
my 5-hour sworn testimony before your colleagues on the
Judiciary Committee the board's mission was to protect civil
rights, civil liberties, privacy, and the First Amendment, the
very subject of this hearing.
Many continued to lie that the board was a censorship body
because it's politically useful to them. That lie was the first
chapter in the tall tales about the so-called censorship-
industrial complex that have since emerged.
They've been buoyed by the Twitter Files, which falsely
allege that Twitter executives were colluding with government
to censor disfavored content.
The Twitter Files crafted almost endless fiction based on
selectively edited email and text excerpts between researchers,
platforms, and Federal agencies. They're riddled with errors
and outright falsehoods.
The allegation that researchers are somehow committing acts
of censorship by conducting independent research and sharing it
is outlandish and it's harmful. Research is speech, government
funded or not.
The only reason the censorship lie has been perpetuated is
because it's politically and financially beneficial to those
who peddle it. Actions like this hearing are a dangerous
distraction from the real threats we face.
My organization, the American Sunlight Project, has
identified plenty of foreign interference we could be talking
about today including a pro-Russia content aggregation network
point pushing out 3.6 million pieces of content a year,
poisoning LLM-powered chat bots. China and Iran are also
actively targeting the U.S. as we sit here.
But our capacity to respond to these threats has been
eviscerated based on conspiracy theories, sending a signal to
our adversaries that America is weak.
Beijing, Tehran, and Moscow interpret these partisan
attacks on counter disinformation work as a sign that their
interference is likely to succeed.
Our adversaries use information operations to undermine
democratic values. We must act not only as the staunchest
defender and guarantor of those values abroad but fight just as
hard to preserve them at home. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Jankowicz follows:]
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Mr. Huizenga. The gentlelady's time has expired.
Mr. Taibbi, you have 5 minutes, the aforementioned Twitter
Files author, founder of Racket News.
You have 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF MATT TAIBBI
Mr. Taibbi. Mr. Chairman, Madam Ranking Member, thank you.
My name is Matt Taibbi. I'm the editor of the independent
site Racket and I've been covering digital censorship issues
since 2018--the fictional ones.
On March 14, 2016, Barack Obama signed Executive Order
1371, developing a new integrated Global Engagement Center to
support government wide counterterrorism communications
activities directed abroad.
It directed the Secretary of State to create a new body,
the G-E-C, or GEC, to quote, counter the messaging and diminish
the influence of international terrorist organizations
including ISIL, al-Qaeda, and other violent extremists abroad.
Seven years later while working on a story involving
internal communications at Twitter I found myself reading
emails between GEC officials and Twitter executives about
subjects ranging from COVID-19 to the 2020 election to Donald
Trump.
Mr. Chairman, you were right to point out that they were
once focused abroad. But by this time GEC officials were,
largely, concerned with domestic English language accounts,
people with no ties to terror groups or relationships with
adversary nations like Iran, China, or Russia.
When I went back this weekend through those documents to
find examples of GEC pressuring Twitter to remove or deamplify
Americans accused of misinformation I found an exchange that we
Twitter Files reporters missed in 2023.
A lawyer at the company asked several other executives if
they had any, quote, appetite for writing GEC a letter to ask
them to stop going to the media with sensationalist claims
about epidemics of foreign bots.
One of the company's senior communications executives gave
a remarkably candid answer. ``From my chair it would be very
helpful,'' he wrote. Referencing a well-known Washington
reporter, he went on, ``The prebriefed Ellen Nakashima article
in the Post on Bernie and this coronavirus story (no heads up)
are making me worry a little about how good faith these players
will be through the press into 2020.''
So it wasn't just conservatives; it was also Bernie
Sanders. The date on that email was February 24th, 2020. Three
days after the Washington Post ran a devastating feature titled
``Bernie Sanders briefed by U.S. officials that Russia is
trying to help his Presidential campaign.''
This was an extremely impactful story that opened the
floodgates on a conspiracy theory that Sanders was the
recipient of Russian help. It claimed bots helping Bernie
online were part of, quote, Russia's broader interest in sowing
division in the United States and uncertainty about the
validity of American elections.
In response to this odd sequel of claims about Russian bots
aiding Donald Trump, the company's head of trust and safety
Yoel Roth gave an unflattering description of GEC's methods.
Quote, They used Brandwatch to monitor a handful of openly
Russian accounts, for instance, RT, and an unspecified number
of accounts that they baselessly assert are inauthentic.
This is the exact formula we previously found behind
another often-used online tool called Hamilton 68 whose
founders were also quoted in the Post piece.
Hamilton 68 mixed the smattering of real Russian accounts
with a crowd of mostly American, mostly anti-establishment
accounts to create a dashboard that synthesized falsely the
appearance of Russian social media backing for everything from
the Devin Nunes memo to the Parkland shooting.
Although many of the most controversial stories about GEC
involved their funding of commercial media scoring operations
that down ranked conservative news outlets, the GEC also
pressured Twitter about left-leaning figures like Sanders,
anti-war accounts, libertarians, and independents as well as
conservatives.
They managed this by using a trick that gave domestic
propaganda the appearance of a counter terrorist operation. GEC
sent out reports that would first identify a few social media
accounts with real ties to Russia or China or Iran. Then it
would separately list accounts they called highly connective to
that country's propaganda ecosystem.
These would be American or European citizens with
inconvenient views. For instance, GEC identified the Twitter
accounts of former Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and
former Italian Democratic Party Secretary Nicola Zingaretti,
who was often compared to Bernie, as being highly connective to
Russia.
All you had to do to get on the list was retweet what they
called anti-U.S. propaganda, or GEC's subjective definition of
pro-Russian propaganda. No actual connection was required.
Through this means, the GEC exactly rehabilitated the
fellow traveler concept used by infamous smear artists and
witch hunters from history, from Leon Trotsky to the House Un-
American Affairs Committee.
It was a way to accuse someone who hasn't done anything
wrong of guilt by ideological association. And I'll just wrap
up. I've gone over my time.
But they weren't looking for misinformation and
disinformation. They were looking for orthodoxy and
unorthodoxy, obedience and disobedience.
The idea behind GEC in particular was finding a way to
propagandize American citizens and encourage acceptance of
official policy the way we had always done to foreign
populations.
It's a flagrant violation of First Amendment ideals and
should be eradicated from the government completely. No one
should have this tool----
Mr. Huizenga. The gentleman's time----
Mr. Taibbi.--not Democrats, not the Trump Administration,
nobody.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentleman's time has expired.
Mr. Taibbi. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Taibbi follows:]
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Mr. Huizenga. With that, Mr. Weingarten, investigative
journalist and columnist, you have 5 minutes.
STATEMENT OF BENJAMIN WEINGARTEN
Mr. Weingarten. Chairman Huizenga, Ranking Member Kamlager-
Dove, and esteemed members of the subcommittee, thank you for
the opportunity to testify.
The censorship-industrial complex poses a mortal threat to
our republic. The sprawling whole of society regime has sought
to purge unauthorized opinions and inconvenient facts en masse
under guise of combating mis-, dis-, and malinformation.
Today's hearing highlights one of the regime's most
insidious manifestations, the turning of Federal agencies that
are supposed to target foreign adversaries instead on Americans
and our core political speech.
The Global Engagement Center was a key cog in such efforts
through its cultivation of hundreds of ostensibly
nongovernmental counter disinformation players.
Two players the GEC funded and promoted were risk raters
so-called NewsGuard and GDI. These relationships should have
raised immediate alarm bells. The GEC's stated mission was to
counter foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts, as the
chairman noted.
Yet, NewsGuard aims to systematically defund sources of
harmful misinformation foreign and domestic. NewsGuard does so
by rating and reviewing thousands of outlets for reliability
and creating exclusion lists, that is, blacklists to feed
advertisers for use in determining where not to place ads.
GDI likewise seeks to reduce disinformation by removing the
financial incentive ad revenue it says lurks behind it. GDI,
too, arms advertisers with a dynamic exclusion list reportedly
containing 2,000 risky publications including, again, American
ones.
Perversely, then, a foreign-facing interagency entity both
funded and gave the Federal Government's imprimatur to
nongovernmental would-be destroyers of disfavored domestic
outlets.
Those outlets appear to be disfavored for ideological
reasons. NewsGuard generally lavishes significantly higher
scores on left-leaning sources over right leaning ones.
Its Kafkaesque correspondence with dissident outlets
broadly who have challenged seemingly unmerited scores,
largely, in vain further suggests a bias.
GDI's 2022 report on disinformation risk among U.S. sources
betrays a similar bent. There it lists among its 10 least risky
publications nine liberal to progressive corporate media
outlets and the Wall Street Journal.
Its 10 riskiest publications include nine conservative or
libertarian outlets and Real Clear Politics. Evidence suggests
the risk raters' profiles grew substantially after receiving
Federal support. Their ubiquity in the ad marketplace
reportedly drove declines of tens of millions of dollars in ad
revenue annually for outlets on their de facto blacklists.
Some disfavored sources report reduced traffic, diminished
search visibility, and lost operational partners. Real Clear's
experience with the risk raters is uniquely perverse.
Real Clear Politics' bread and butter is curating
compelling analysis from sources left and right, corporate and
independent, on key issues of the day so readers can weigh both
sides.
Consequently, media bias rater AllSides positions RCP in
the ideological center alongside Reuters, The Hill, and the
Wall Street Journal.
Despite our pursuit of fairness and quality journalism,
NewsGuard gives RCP a 62 on its 100-point scale as determined
by their journalists rating a sample of our journalists' work.
NewsGuard dings us in part for our purported undisclosed
conservative bent. The implication is that it either dismisses
viewpoint diversity as a feature or sees it as a bug.
Real Clear investigations likewise curates deep dives and
publishes original content from journalists with diverse
perspectives. NewsGuard has branded us biased too, albeit while
giving RCI an 80 rating.
Our bias is to pursue stories competitors miss or angles
competitors ignore. Shouldn't that be celebrated? As for GDI,
RCP may be on its secret blacklist, too.
Real Clear has thrived despite the risk raters' best
efforts but the censorship-industrial complex the GEC helped
foster has made a tough business tougher and disadvantaged us.
Our ad revenue has declined materially. We have seen a
meaningful drop in certain search rankings and we have taken a
reputational hit by being branded with the digital scarlet
letter R for risky.
Even if the risk raters were unobjectionable the fact
remains through funding and supporting such entities government
abridged speech by proxy.
The Trump Administration and its State Department have
indicated these efforts are over but the speech police have
neither laid down their arms nor recanted for past abuses,
suggesting they will, at best, lie in wait during Trump II,
only to come back with a vengeance thereafter.
So the time to act is now. Congress should codify the
President's first-day executive order restoring freedom of
speech and ending Federal censorship to permanently starve the
censorship-industrial complex of the Federal funding and
direction that are its lifeblood.
Congress should prohibit grants and contracts to
institutions engaged in domestic censorship activities and
Congress should erect a strict firewall between the U.S.
Government and our body politic a la Smith-Mundt.
To overcome our adversaries we must not emulate them by
casting dissent from ruling class orthodoxy as dangerous and
surveilling and silencing the dissenters.
Instead, let us restore the free and open public square on
which our republic rests.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Weingarten follows:]
GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT
Mr. Huizenga. Thank you.
With that, we will return to questioning. I'm going to give
myself 3 minutes and to--eaten up some of that time in a very--
unfortunately, on my part.
So, again, my apologies to the panel for any confusion
there.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. You were enthusiastic.
Mr. Huizenga. I was enthusiastic, yes, the ranking member
reminds me. So I think it was your spirited opening that may
have brought me along that path.
Well, with that, I'm going to take 3 minutes and, Mr.
Taibbi, you had started to explain and did in your opening
statement about the Election Integrity Partnership and I
appreciate that.
Mr. Weingarten, you were talking about an advertising
blacklist and that GDI and NewsGuard use these blacklists to
censor American speech and I am curious--you know, those
blacklists, how did they treat the right-leaning outlets versus
the left-leaning outlets and were outlets punished for even
attempting to provide ideological balancing?
I mean, you wrote Real Clear Politics was one of those that
was on the list.
Mr. Weingarten. I think the Real Clear Politics case study
is instructive in that if you go to our website you see sources
left and right and the whole purpose is let's provide a
balanced diet of opinion and analysis and let the American
people decide because we have faith in the American people that
they have agency and they can decide for themselves.
And the fact of the matter is the RCP and then some on the
right, libertarian, conservative and even anti-establishment
leftist publications have found themselves dinged by these so
called risk raters, and that risk, by the way, is that they may
be--brands who advertise on these sites may be targeted for
boycotts and attacks, generally by progressive groups.
So this whole sort of apparatus exists out of coercion,
essentially, from the left and as a consequence ad revenue
streams have died for many of these companies and it threatens
their viability.
Mr. Huizenga. Yes. How would these blacklists treat a
publication that had the audacity of suggesting that the COVID-
19 virus may have originated from a lab leak, which actually
turned out to be a legitimate and true theory?
I don't know about the rest of my colleagues or the
panelists but I know people who were canceled over putting out
such theories and even threatened with their job and their
livelihood on that.
So talk to me a little bit about--very quickly about COVID-
19.
Mr. Weingarten. In Real Clear's reporting we saw that at
least one source that put forth questions about all manner of
issues from the origins of COVID to mitigation measures and
beyond.
They get attacked because--they got attacked because they
dissented from what was public health orthodoxy at the time,
and as we know that public health orthodoxy, that consensus,
has shifted.
But if you differed from consensus you were dinged and you
had, essentially, no recourse or real due process to get off a
blacklist for just presenting an opinion or a substantiated
analysis.
Mr. Huizenga. I'm going to move quickly here and I know,
Mr. Taibbi, you're not the only controversial person here.
Ms. Jankowicz, as we talked about some of her posts, some
of this saying that the fairy tale about Hunter Biden's laptop
is out there and the Chris Steele provides some great
historical context about the evolution of disinformation.
So without objection, I'm going to put those into the
record as well.
[Please refer to the Appendix for the above information:]
Mr. Huizenga. I find it ironic that something called the
American Sunlight Project is actually a dark money group that
won't release its donors. Certainly, that doesn't bode well.
I'm going to--Mr. Taibbi, I'm going to give you the last
moment here. Can you explain exactly how GEC colluded with
social media companies specifically through the Election
Integrity Partnership?
Mr. Taibbi. Mr. Chairman, GEC's actual relationship to the
Election Integrity Partnership was not clear. It was made plain
in the EIP's own website.
Secretary of State Blinken mentioned that it was
cooperating with the EIP when he visited Stanford. Also, there
was a story that it was actually interns from the State
Department who came up with the idea for the EIP. So but they
were one of the two major government organizations that was
working with EIP.
Mr. Huizenga. My time has expired.
With that, I give--yield to the representative from
California.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove.
[Audio malfunction.]
So a central claim of this hearing is that states GEC first
set up under the Trump Administration and championed by then
Senator Marco Rubio supported organizations that censored
conservative speech and worked to discredit conservative
outlets.
Ms. Jankowicz, to your knowledge has State Department
funding ever gone toward suppressing domestic speech?
Ms. Jankowicz. Thank you, Ranking Member.
You know, Mr. Taibbi said when he was first searching
through the so-called Twitter Files he didn't know what he was
looking at. Well, he still doesn't.
Everything looks like a conspiracy when you don't know how
anything works and let me tell you there was no censorship
going on at the Global Engagement Center or the State
Department.
You may have heard Mr. Weingarten kind of make the
inference that all of these lists GDI and NewsGuard are making
you might have thought that they were funded by the State
Department. They were not.
Do you know what the State Department was funding for those
two organizations? Something I think the Republicans on this
committee would be very interested in, tracking and countering
Chinese State propaganda targeting Americans.
Now, I used to manage State Department grants early in my
career. I know that that is a huge fiduciary responsibility.
You have to account for every single penny that you're
spending on travel, on staff time, on supplies, and you have to
do it multiple times a year.
So for folks to sit here and say that grants dedicated to
countering CCP propaganda were somehow spent on conservative
blacklists is just ridiculous.
And I'll also add that that is those organizations' speech
to be able to do research and, you know, categorize new sites
as they see fit.
A letter sent to the Senate last week shows that actually a
lot of conservative organizations including the Heritage
Foundation, the Wall Street Journal, Reason, Cato Institute,
and the Washington Free Beacon all received great ratings by
NewsGuard while the Daily Kos only got a 45 out of 100.
So this nonsense about bias is just, frankly, not true, and
it also rings a little bit like a restaurateur who got a bad
review in the Washington Post mad that nobody wants to eat
there anymore.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. So you brought up China so let's stay
there for a second. Can you give us a snapshot of the kinds of
harmful information operations China and Russia wage against
the United States?
Maybe how this administration is dismantling our ability to
protect Americans from foreign propaganda and manipulation?
Ms. Jankowicz. Absolutely, I'd love to, Ranking Member.
So the Chinese Communist Party continues to be
extraordinarily active in the information space, using all
manner of influence operations to target Americans including
the famous Spamouflage campaign, which is fake social media
profiles masquerading as Americans, exacerbating tensions, and
there are certainly plenty of those to go around right now.
The fact that we're here in such a polarized, politicized
setting I'm sure there's somebody in Beijing watching this
hearing thinking about what they can tweet about it, right?
We have to think about that. We are doing our adversaries'
work for them.
And with Russia, you know, I'd say something that we just
discovered at the American Sunlight Project is that there's a
large network--a growing network--of a content aggregation
platform that is pushing out 3.6 million pieces of pro-Russia
content a year.
I'm not talking about, you know, Russia is great. I'm
talking about the massacre in Bucha, it did not happen--that
sort of thing. Falsehoods, right?
They are doing that not to infect--you know, to get human
readership. They're doing it to infect chat bots, ChatGPT, all
of these chat bots that we're now using that we're being told
are going to be the next great frontier in research, and that's
being shown to people who are asking questions about Russia and
Ukraine.
Our capacity to respond to these threats--the only office
that was dedicated to looking at foreign State propaganda in
the State Department now doesn't exist anymore, and R/FIMI,
it's, you know, organization that came after it doesn't even
have a website on the State Department.
So I'm not worried, Chairman. You said is this just GEC by
a different name. I'm not worried about that because they're
not even talking about what they're doing and our adversaries
are absolutely taking notice. They think it's open season on
the United States.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Another falsehood the majority witnesses
have perpetuated is that Democratic government officials and
lawmakers colluded with social media companies to suppress
content they disagreed with.
Mr. Chair, I request unanimous consent to enter into the
record a Rolling Stone article titled ``Twitter kept entire
data base of Republican requests to censor posts.''
Mr. Huizenga. Without objection.
[Please refer to the Appendix for the above information:]
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. This article describes how the Trump
Administration and congressional Republicans routinely asked
Twitter to take down posts they objected to.
In the minutes we have left, Ms. Jankowicz, what is the
difference between content moderation and censorship?
Ms. Jankowicz. The difference between content moderation
and censorship is that these platforms are private platforms.
They have the right to enforce their terms of service how they
see fit and Mr. Taibbi himself, you know, cited an email from
Yoel Roth in which he was throwing shade on the GEC's analysis.
Sounds like he wasn't listening to them to me.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield back.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentlelady yields back.
The representative from Pennsylvania is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Perry. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Jankowicz, since you brought it up, have you read the
Venona intercepts?
Ms. Jankowicz. Again, sir?
Mr. Perry. Venona--are you familiar?
Ms. Jankowicz. I'm not, sir.
Mr. Perry. You brought up McCarthy and I'd just encourage
you to go ahead and read through that. You might--as many
people disagree with his methods but you can't disagree with
the facts that the people that he listed turned out to all be
subversive communists working in our government.
With that, I'll turn to Mr. Weingarten. Your statement
notes that GEC's $100 million in grants since 2016 funded 400-
plus projects including NewsGuard and GDI, which blacklisted
2,000 U.S. outlets, costing $128 million in ad revenue by 2022.
Do you have any other concrete--well, before we get into
the other concrete examples because we have got a difference of
opinion on both sides of the dais here, you said 2,000 U.S.
outlets.
Are those U.S. outlets Chinese? Maybe they are so I'm just
asking. Are they owned by the Communist Party of China, Iran,
Russia? Or are they U.S. information purveyors?
Mr. Weingarten. As a factual matter, to my knowledge none
of those are foreign-owned publications and certainly not by
our adversaries.
Mr. Perry. So this is 2,000 U.S. outlets, $100 million in
grants. Where do you suspect that grant money came from?
Mr. Weingarten. Well, the grant money came from taxpayers.
Mr. Perry. Oh, my goodness, really? Taxpayers. Taxpayers
paying $100 million to blacklist 2,000 U.S. outlets.
Is that fiction? I've heard it's fiction. Is it fiction or
not fiction?
Mr. Weingarten. It's not fiction and let me be clear. The
2,000 is the total list. I'm not sure if it's all U.S. but
certainly a substantial percentage of them.
Mr. Perry. Okay. Is that a conspiracy theory?
Mr. Weingarten. No, sir.
Mr. Perry. I didn't think so.
Can you give us any concrete examples? Because $100 million
in grants, 2,000 U.S. outlets, costing $128 million by your
account in ad revenue.
Can you give us any concrete examples how the GEC funding
directly hit American outlets' speech or revenue other than the
ones you already have?
Mr. Weingarten. Well, the lawsuit against the State
Department from the Federalist and Daily Wire indicates their
businesses were--the viability was dramatically damaged after
GDI and NewsGuard ended up targeting them, and it's obvious
why. Because if all of the advertisers say, don't put your ads
on our websites, it saps a revenue stream.
Let's also note, by the way, that beyond NewsGuard and GDI
there was funding for dozens of other organizations that were
involved in things like mis-, dis-, and malinformation
detection and such and all of this was fueling an ecosystem
that existed ultimately to clamp down on speech whether from
individuals or outlets and that's U.S. tax dollars ultimately
funding the silencing of ourselves and that's un-American.
Mr. Perry. Yes. U.S. tax dollars through grant programs to
create a censorship empire on American citizens under the guise
of this Global Engagement Center, which was meant to--look, I
agree with Ms. Jankowicz. We want to be dealing with China,
Russia, Iran, foreign adversaries. But that's not what this
was.
Mr. Taibbi, your Twitter Files analyzed 3.8 billion U.S.
tweets and the metrics exposed GEC's ties to the Election
Integrity Project which flagged 22 million election posts in
2020.
Can you highlight the information you found that exposes
GEC's efforts to push platforms to censor Americans and how
many accounts were affected?
Mr. Taibbi. Certainly.
First, I'd like to respond to something that Ms. Jankowicz
said.
Mr. Perry. Feel free.
Mr. Taibbi. She mentioned that Yoel Roth, who is the head
of trust and safety at Twitter, threw some shade at GEC and,
indeed, that was actually a chief narrative that we were--we
found in the Twitter Files, which was that Twitter's chief
content moderation officers had too many government officials
trying to call them on the phone and they did not want to add
another group, particularly one that they felt was incompetent
and didn't understand what they were doing, to the trust tree.
Ultimately, however, after a year of very fevered
interactions within the company they were forced to allow GEC
into their weekly or monthly discussions with the government,
what they called the industry meetings, and there was an email
that we found in the Twitter Files from a former CIA officer
who went to work at Twitter who was explaining that there was
once a time when Twitter would have been able to say no to that
kind of request but our window on that is closing.
Mr. Perry. Thank you, sir. My time has expired. I yield.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentleman's time has expired.
With that, the representative from California is recognized
for 5 minutes.
Mr. Bera. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I've been in Congress for a while now so I was in Congress
during the time that the Global Engagement Center was formed,
and part of the rationale for forming it--and you mentioned it
in your opening statement, Mr. Taibbi--to counter the messaging
and diminish the influence of international terrorist
organizations including ISIL, al-Qaida, and other violent
extremists--and the reason it was created was we saw how
effective ISIL or ISIS was at recruiting folks using their
messaging, using the internet, the threat that it was to our
homeland in terms of creating homegrown threats as well and we
saw some domestic terror attacks.
So just a yes or no question. Outside of, you know, what it
may or may not have morphed into we still need a tool like that
that would--would you agree with that, Mr. Weingarten, to
counter that messaging?
Mr. Weingarten. I believe we should use every means to
counter our adversaries lawfully.
Mr. Bera. And that would include China and Russia.
Same thing, Mr. Taibbi, that we do need an effective tool
to counter messaging, recruitment, terrorism, domestic
terrorism. Whether that's the GEC or not we do need to be able
to counter misinformation and disinformation.
Mr. Taibbi. I don't think that's a yes or no answer, Mr.
Congressman.
For instance, we talk about counterterrorism with Anwar al-
Awlaki--was it appropriate for the United States to assassinate
a foreign citizen without due process, even, you know, an
American citizen.
In this case, what became the GEC started off as a counter
terrorism program but it was--as it was explained to me--excuse
me, sir--by a former GEC employee----
[Crosstalk.]
Mr. Taibbi.--switch from the CT to CP--counter terrorism to
counter populism.
[Crosstalk.]
Mr. Bera. Ms. Jankowicz?
Ms. Jankowicz. Absolutely. This should be a bipartisan
issue and it's crazy that you even have to ask the question,
Congressman.
Mr. Bera. Right. Ms. Jankowicz, is this threat going to get
worse with the evolution of AI?
Ms. Jankowicz. Oh, absolutely. We are seeing this threat
get worse with the evolution of AI already, not just the
poisoning or grooming of LLM chatbots like I've already
mentioned but there's evidence from OpenAI and their threat
team that China is using AI models in order to more effectively
translate Chinese propaganda from Chinese into English and
other languages as well.
Mr. Bera. So this shouldn't be a partisan issue. I mean,
when we get sworn into Congress our most important duty is to
protect our homeland, protect against domestic risk, and with
the advent of internet and social media, now AI, information
and misinformation, you know, radicalization, self-
radicalization, those are going to be hugely important issues
and how we do that within protecting First Amendment rights is
not going to be very easy.
And, again, I would urge Democrats and Republicans in a
nonpartisan way to protect our homeland, to try to figure this
out--inviting in the private sector as well, inviting in those
social media companies, to try to get this right.
I don't disagree that we saw a lot of politicization around
COVID. I'm a doctor and, you know, I'm agnostic on COVID
origins. I can make the case that it was a lab leak. I can make
the case that it was--and that's legitimate debate and we
shouldn't censor any of that debate.
We should have that debate. Obviously, it was a novel
virus. We're still fighting those fights and I think it's
counterproductive for us as a nation and us as an institution
in Congress. I think we do have to put that aside because these
threats are very real and I do worry about what's going to
happen with that.
Ms. Jankowicz, in the final minute I have what would your
recommendation be taking politics out of this and how we would
structure something?
Ms. Jankowicz. You know, it's really interesting,
Congressman, because a lot of the functionalities that you've
just described--coordination within the government, you know,
following these threats, making sure that we're abreast of
them, coordinating with industry--that was the job that I was
brought in to do at the Disinformation Governance Board in DHS
despite it being widely lied about.
So I think we do need some sort of coordinating function,
and if Congress is concerned about the way that, you know,
social media companies are moderating and implementing their
policies the solution is not to bandy about conspiracy
theories.
It's to pass some oversight and transparency regulation,
which I think we have been a little bit late on here in the
United States. I would love to see that happen.
Mr. Bera. Great. So I would hope, you know, if we are going
to do a State Department authorization bill that we as
Democrats and Republicans on this subcommittee would actually
take a thoughtful approach and invite folks in.
Maybe if we get it done under a Republican administration
we can take some of the politics out of it.
Let's do our job. This is about protecting our country.
This is about protecting our influence around the world and
fighting against our adversaries.
With that, Mr. Chairman, I'll yield back.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentleman yields back.
The representative from Texas Mr. Self is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Self. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You really have to admire the opposition here, diverting
our attention from the issue at hand to the current days
because we are trying to do oversight on the Biden
Administration that did do the work of our adversaries for 4
years. It ruined our credibility around the world.
So given your recent testimony, Ms. Jankowicz, so should--
and you were in the government so----
Ms. Jankowicz. For 11 weeks.
Mr. Self. So should the government have a part in enforcing
free speech--law enforcement? Should the government have some
role in it?
Ms. Jankowicz. Congressman, I believe the First Amendment
is sacrosanct. I am the granddaughter of a man that was in a
gulag--deported to a gulag by the Soviet Union. So I am pretty
intimate with these things and they're a part of my bread and
butter.
I don't think that we should be arresting people for
exercising their speech and I think that's something that you
all should be exercising your oversight over.
Mr. Self. So on April the 16th, 2022, you said, ``We need
platforms to do more and we, frankly, need law enforcement and
our legislatures to do more as well.''
So if we move past that to the right of the state--the
mission of the state--to form public opinion where would you
stand on that, given your role in what you've been involved in?
Ms. Jankowicz. Thank you, Congressman. I believe that
quote, judging by the timeframe, was about responses to online
harms which I'm happy to talk about here today, not the subject
at the hearing.
But a lot of people for expressing their First Amendment
protected speech online deal with threats. I've dealt with them
myself. My family and I were doxxed. We were threatened.
Mr. Self. Okay. I get your----
Ms. Jankowicz. I was advised to leave my home. And you know
what? That's why I was talking about law enforcement,
Congressman.
Mr. Self. I get your point, but that--and that is a quote
from you.
Ms. Jankowicz. Yes, talking about online harms and threats
against people online for exercising their speech.
Mr. Self. All right. Now, my next question is--would you
answer my next question because I have limited time.
Ms. Jankowicz. Sure.
Mr. Self. Please answer my next question.
Ms. Jankowicz. Your next question is?
Mr. Self. The one that I've already given you. You haven't
addressed it yet.
Ms. Jankowicz. Please repeat it, sir.
Mr. Self. What is the mission of the state--the right of
the State to form public opinion? Because we're talking about
our government has been involved in doing that for the last few
years.
Ms. Jankowicz. In my opinion, the government has a First
Amendment right to free speech as well and SCOTUS has just
affirmed that with a case last June.
We just heard a case that came in Federal court in New York
that actually showed that NewsGuard was not acting as an envoy
of the State as well.
Mr. Self. So what is the role of the government?
Ms. Jankowicz. The role of the government can express its
free speech, right, and citizens have a right to their free
speech as well. I'm not--I don't really understand your
question, sir. I'm not sure the point.
Mr. Self. I'm asking you what is the role of government in
public opinion? Because we're talking about actions here that
have tried to form public opinion on the Hunter laptop, on the
Russia disinformation, all of that. I'm asking you what is the
role of government in that matter?
Ms. Jankowicz. Absolutely, Congressman.
So the government is allowed to express its own opinions,
its viewpoints, as we're seeing this administration do, as we
saw the previous administration do.
Mr. Self. But when it is absolutely wrong what is their
role when it is absolutely wrong? The Hunter laptop is probably
the best example we could roll out here.
Ms. Jankowicz. I actually disagree with that because when
Twitter decided to add friction to the Hunter Biden laptop case
it actually got more views.
You've also heard Mr. Taibbi talk about, you know, 22
million tweets, millions of things censored through the GEC to
the Election Integrity Partnership. You know how many emails
went between the GEC and the EIP? Fifteen.
You can look it up in Chairman Jordan's documents that he
released at the end of last year. Fifteen emails. I've sent
more text messages to my husband about our toddler's potty
training in the last week than emails went from the GEC to the
EIP and those were all about overt Russian propaganda--RT and
Sputnik--except for one when the GEC analyst said to the folks
there, I can't comment on this one because I'm a government
employee but I think you should check it out. That's all that
happened, sir.
Mr. Self. So I'm going to leave you--and I'll yield back a
little bit of my time--a direct quote from Joseph Goebbels:
``It is the absolute right of the State to supervise the
formation of public opinion'' and I think that may be what
we're discussing here.
And yield back.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentleman yields back.
With that, the representative from Texas Ms. Johnson is
recognized for 5 minutes.
Ms. Johnson. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman.
I want to respond to what my colleague from Texas just
said. When you're quoting Joseph Goebbels about state--the role
of State in the public debate we have a big problem. Isn't that
right, Ms. Jankowicz?
That's alarming as hell to me when that becomes the gold
standard of Hitler and all that was going on in Russia--I mean,
in German atrocities during World War II when that becomes the
quote of this hearing.
I also want to respond to another comment where he said
that Biden ruined our credibility around the world. I would
argue that Mr. Trump is doing that right now--canceling USAID
contracts, breaching our promises and our agreements to our
friends and allies across the world, and making our country
less safe.
That is why we find us in this role. You know, I'm really
disappointed that we're devoting this first hearing to a
conspiracy theory that the State Department out of some larger
sinister motive routinely censors free speech. Today's
Republican hot topic roulette has us talking about an agency
that the Republicans let this Congress expire.
It's my understanding that the GEC's mandate is to address
foreign propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.
Ms. Jankowicz, I would think that that would be a
fundamental priority for the United States, that we should not
want our adversaries putting misinformation into our public
discord in order to adversely affect elections and other
things. Would you agree?
Ms. Jankowicz. I would absolutely agree and, you know, I'll
note also that the GEC was created through a bipartisan bill--
the Portman-Murphy counter disinformation bill--and many of the
actions that have been referenced so far in this hearing took
place under the Trump Administration under a Trump appointee,
Lea Gabrielle who was an intelligence analyst, a fighter pilot,
and a former Fox News host as well.
Ms. Johnson. Right. Exactly.
You know, I think that this whole notion that we want to
try to regulate the speech of people in our country and online
social media companies--did I understand your testimony
correctly that you do believe that private businesses have a
right to regulate the content on their platform?
Ms. Jankowicz. Absolutely. We sign up to terms of service
when we share our cat pictures or our kid pictures or whatever
it is that my co-witnesses share online.
We sign up to those terms of service and sometimes those
terms of service say things like, you can't share terrorist
content, you can't share child sexual abuse material, and if we
decide it you can't share what we deem disinformation also and
we being the social media platforms there.
Ms. Johnson. Right, and they have a right to do that. But
what's genesis this problem is is that so many on the far right
just make shit up in the electoral context, put stuff out
there, and then the social media platform said, you know, we're
not going to tolerate just blatant lies, blatant falsehoods on
our platforms.
There has to be some basis of reality, and now the
Republicans are pushing back because they got their hand in the
cookie jar on that, right?
Ms. Jankowicz. Well, the scientific research from
universities like New York, Indiana University, and Yale all
points to the fact that Republicans share more content that is
more likely to be moderated.
It's not that they're being censored. They're breaking the
rules that they can read if they read the fine print.
Ms. Johnson. Right. Thank you so much for your testimony
today. I yield back.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentlelady yields back.
And the chair will remind people to direct their comments,
especially curse words, at the chair rather than at our
witnesses.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Mr. Chair?
Mr. Huizenga. Yes.
Ms. Kamlager-Dove. Given the fact that we just heard a
quote from Joseph Goebbels, chief propagandist for the Nazi
Party, I request unanimous consent to enter into the record my
letter urging Secretary Rubio to fire Darren Beattie for his
dangerous anti-American, pro-CCP, white nationalist ideology.
Mr. Huizenga. Without objection.
[Please refer to the Appendix for this informaion:]
Mr. Huizenga. I will note that I believe Mr. Self's comment
and quote was his assertion that this government has been doing
that and following--or the last administration so not as a
admiration but as a rebuke.
So with that, the Congressman from Indiana Mr. Shreve is
recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Shreve. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the
witnesses for this very interesting hearing.
This is my first subcommittee hearing on free speech, not
my fifth, and I don't come to the table having this all figured
out and part of these hearings is an opportunity to listen,
learn, to ask questions and I appreciate this opportunity.
We agree broadly, both sides of the aisle, that the First
Amendment is a cornerstone of our democracy, that censorship
runs contrary to the First, that when it's wielded by private
individual groups it's inappropriate.
When a government entity is tasked with upholding the
Constitution and may, in some fashion, weaponize censorship
it's a problem.
The GEC played a role in facilitating censorship and
protected speech by Americans prior to its authority sunsetting
at the end of this past year. An example under investigations
is the GEC's involvement in suppressing dissenting voices in
the lead up to the 2020 election. We have established that.
Mr. Taibbi noted that it was established under an EO by Mr.
Obama. Its mission was to counter the messaging and reduce
influence of international terrorist organizations. Its scope
expanded countering foreign State and nonState propaganda and
disinformation efforts leading up to the 2020 election.
Some within the GEC exploited its mission to target our
American citizens rather than foreign threats. These efforts
were part of the GEC's collaboration with the Election
Integrity Project, a consortium of academic--you named a few--
and think tanks formed shortly prior to that election.
The EIP's stated goal was to monitor and correct election-
related misinformation and disinformation originating from the
United States.
Leading up to that election the EIP would contact social
media companies identifying specific posts that they--some
within the organization believed spread election
misinformation. These posts were then removed from those
platforms.
And after the 2020 election EIP officials acknowledged that
the GEC had reported such cases to them and was one of the most
frequently tagged organizations in the EIP's system--their
software system.
The GEC's mission creep from countering international
terrorist organizations to censoring the voices of our citizens
before a Presidential election is a problem.
My question for Mr. Taibbi--as part of your Twitter Files
investigation you uncovered that the GEC had provided over
5,000 account names to Twitter stating that they were Chinese
accounts engaged in state-backed coordinated manipulation.
How long did it take you to find out that this was not the
case?
Mr. Taibbi. Thank you, Mr. Congressman.
We rather quickly found that there was a heated discussion
within Twitter about the so-called China list. First of all,
what GEC did was actually par for the course.
They didn't contact Twitter first when they made up that
list. They went straight to the media, which is why you will
find numerous stories about an enormous quantity of Chinese
misinformation agents that came out in March--roughly, late
February and March 2020.
When Twitter did an analysis of those names they quickly
discovered that a lot of them were not, in fact, Chinese
misinformation agents. There were even three employees of CNN,
if I remember correctly, that were on the list and there was a
heated back and forth between GEC and Twitter about that issue.
In fact, that was one of the reasons why the trust and
safety department did not want to allow GEC to participate in
its regular industry meetings with other platforms. So that was
a big issue.
Mr. Shreve. Mr. Chairman, I yield my last 15 seconds.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentleman yields back.
With that, the gentleman from Maryland Mr. Mfume is
recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Mfume. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, to you and
the ranking member. I want to also thank and welcome our
witnesses for appearing here today.
Mr. Chairman, I have to admit that I'm quite disappointed
that we're using the first hearing of this subcommittee to talk
about conspiracy theories alleging that the U.S. Government was
targeting conservative media outlets and their free speech.
In fact, I find the hearing particularly ironic given the
distinct lack of interest in the First Amendment displayed by
the current administration in much more serious ways.
My colleagues on the other side of the aisle I don't think
are in a real position to allege free speech violations when
the leader of their party has decided unilaterally to revoke
the privileges of the Associated Press from the White House
briefing room and that's simply because that outlet did not
cite Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. That is sort of
hypocritical to say the least.
Far worse than that, the mass deportation of foreign
students that have expressed their First Amendment freedom of
speech find themselves also in that unfortunate position. You
don't even have to be a student or a foreign national or
someone visiting.
You can just be in the wrong party at the wrong time in the
wrong place and you somehow or another are deemed to be anti-
American.
So I have real concerns about the allegations raised in
this hearing because they lack any real basis. So let's start
with some of the facts which are always tricky little things.
First of all, first and false allegations against the State
Department's effort to fight misinformation and disinformation
really has a real impact on our national security and our
ability to counteract malign influence disrupt campaigns from
our adversaries.
We really don't have the time, quite frankly, to entertain
conspiracy theorists who oftentimes are domestic adversaries
when we should, I think, be focused more on combating the real
threat to our foreign adversaries and the threats that they
pose every day.
Ms. Jankowicz, could you take a couple of minutes and give
us a brief listing of the misinformation campaigns that have
been carried out by foreign countries against Americans in the
past few years?
Ms. Jankowicz. Absolutely, Congressman. I'd be happy to.
So at the American Sunlight Project we have identified a
couple campaigns, which I've talked about earlier. The one that
is targeting chatbots I've already mentioned.
We also identified what we call the sleeper agent network.
This is a network of over 1,100 accounts on X, some of which
have existed for over a decade to 15 years. They are automated
accounts.
They are AI enabled so masquerading as citizens, often with
AI-generated profile pictures, and these accounts repeatedly
retweet overt Russian propaganda within 60 seconds of it being
posted.
They have generated over 100 million tweets over their
lifetime and the only reason we have access to this data is
because we used a data set that was available to the public
before Elon Musk turned off our ability to research Twitter
without paying him $40,000 a month.
Mr. Mfume. And why would he do that?
Ms. Jankowicz. Yes. I think Mr. Musk doesn't like having
scrutiny of his platform. You know, he had an avowed interest
in getting rid of bots on the platform. We found some that had
existed for over a decade and were clearly overt propaganda.
When this story ran in Agence France-Presse--AFP--Mr. Musk did
not take those bots down.
That's just one example. We've also looked at a network
that is targeting left-leaning environmental groups at a mass
scale.
Of course, there are lots of instances of Chinese and
Iranian propaganda as well. Iran very famously hacked the Trump
campaign ahead of the election last year.
So this is a continuous threat that we need to be
coordinating at all cylinders at once on, because our
adversaries are certainly doing it.
Mr. Mfume. This is more of a threat than the Associated
Press, I take it. Is that correct to assume?
Ms. Jankowicz. I would say so, Congressman.
Mr. Mfume. And would it be more of a threat than a student
that happens to be at a university that has a position that the
President does not like?
Ms. Jankowicz. Certainly more of a threat than a student
publishing an op-ed in a campus newspaper, yes.
Mr. Mfume. Yes. So when I talked about hypocrisy I don't
mind having a debate. We can debate any time, any day,
anywhere. But in that debate we've got to be equal. We've got
to have some semblance of fairness.
In other words, if it's good for the goose it ought to be
still good for the gander. But we've gotten into this slot--
this slice of a slot--where we just point, point, point and
hurl accusations.
So I hope that as we move forward the committee will spend
a great deal more time focusing on the real issues and give us
an opportunity to deal with those things in South and Central
Asia and in that region that are just as much of a threat.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentleman's time has expired.
The gentleman from New Jersey Mr. Kean is recognized for 5
minutes.
Mr. Kean. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you to all of
our witnesses for being here today.
Mr. Weingarten and Mr. Taibbi, what is the clearest
evidence that each of you can cite to show that the censorship-
industrial complex was an attack on the First Amendment by the
Biden Administration?
Mr. Weingarten. The discovery in Missouri v. Biden, which
has been dismissed here, both at the district court level,
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals level, and among three Supreme
Court justices, showed massive pressure from the Federal
Government for social media companies to censor American
speech, whether it's the Hunter Biden laptop story, COVID-19,
election integrity matters, or beyond.
A district court judge said this was arguably the most
massive attack on free speech in U.S. history. Again, Fifth
Circuit Court of Appeals had that same view.
Three Supreme Court justices did as well, and while it's
been dismissed--that case--the fact of the matter is that the
Supreme Court specifically did not rule on the underlying
merits, the thousands of pages of discovery which blew the lid
open on this entire regime.
Mr. Kean. Thank you. Mr. Taibbi?
Mr. Taibbi. Thank you, Mr. Congressman.
I would do two quickly. There's another case after Murphy
in Missouri involving former New York Times reporter Alex
Berenson--Berenson v. Biden--who was removed from Twitter after
repeated pressure from White House officials for a tweet that
was true.
He said that the COVID vaccine does not stop infection or
transmission and for that tweet he was summarily removed from
the platform after pressure from White House officials.
The other one was an instance in which a friend of mine,
Aaron Mate, who is no Republican, the Ukrainian secret services
passed on a request to the FBI to have him removed from Twitter
and the FBI did it. They passed that request on to Twitter and
we found that ask in Twitter's files.
Mr. Kean. Thank you.
Mr. Taibbi and Mr. Weingarten, can you please explain how
the Global Engagement Center and the Federal Government as a
whole used coercive power to censor Americans?
Mr. Taibbi. Well, Mr. Congressman, first of all, I would
say that the Global Engagement Center and this entire effort is
based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the American system
and the First Amendment.
The American government has no role in protecting citizens
from speech. The whole idea of the system that was designed by
Jefferson and Madison is that the American people view each
other as adults who are capable of sorting out the truth for
themselves.
They do not need a nanny State or a guardian or a law
enforcement agency to decide for them what's true. We don't
need a truth squad and that's exactly what GEC was designed
for.
It was designed to suppress any information that countered
national policy and to identify people who may have had
opinions that were controversial or unwanted as foreign
inspired when in fact they had no connection whatsoever to
foreign governments, which is both slanderous and detrimental
to the First Amendment.
Mr. Kean. Thank you. Mr. Weingarten?
Mr. Weingarten. I would simply say that when the government
comes to you, pressures you directly using the bully pulpit,
the government has its awesome resources, obviously, in terms
of its funding streams, its regulatory powers--when it comes to
the social media companies specifically, Section 230, antitrust
enforcement, et cetera--when the government comes to you and
says, please take down this American speech--we'd really like
you to do so--or in the case of some of the Biden
Administration actually browbeats people, curses them out, and
a president goes on camera and says, your social media platform
is killing people, the government does so with the most awesome
power possible.
Government, at the end of the day, ultimately is force and
that force should not be turned on Americans and our speech.
Mr. Kean. Thank you to all of our witnesses. I yield back
my time.
Mr. Huizenga. Will the gentleman yield?
Mr. Kean. Yes. I yield back my time.
Mr. Huizenga. As vice chair of the Financial Services
Committee, I can tell you, Mr. Weingarten, you are hitting on
the exact thing that regulators do repeatedly.
You can go and do whatever you want but here's what we
would like you to see you do, and it's that threat--it's that
cudgel that they have that's over those that they are making
the, quote, request to that compels them to follow the
government request.
So with that, I yield back to the gentleman from New
Jersey----
Mr. Kean. I yield back.
Mr. Huizenga.--and the time has expired.
With that, Representative Jayapal is recognized for 5
minutes.
Ms. Jayapal. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
It is the height of hypocrisy for Republicans to hold a
hearing on the so-called censorship-industrial complex and the
need to quote First Amendment--need for, quote, First Amendment
safeguards at the State Department, when President Trump and
Elon Musk are launching the largest attack on free speech in
America in decades.
Let's be clear. The administration is right now stripping
people of the constitutional protection to free speech, to the
right to dissent, to express their views if they're counter to
Trump and Musk, to use cold war era statutes and ignore
judicial rulings, all to suit their purpose of squashing
fundamental American freedoms, and they have said they are
bending institutions to their will.
The Trump Administration is using that awesome power of
government that was just spoken about--of the Federal
Government to intimidate and neuter any opposition from the
legal establishment, academia, prominent cultural institutions,
the media, the judiciary.
Essentially, they want to strip your American freedoms for
their right to have absolute power. Instead of focusing on the
fabricated censorship of conservatives let's talk about real
threats to free speech.
This month, Secretary Rubio launched, quote, Catch and
Revoke, a horrifying program fueled by AI to monitor student
visa holders' social media accounts for pro-Palestinian views
and mark them for deportation, saying, quote, Every time I find
one of these lunatics I take away their visas.
Like many Americans I have watched in horror as students
with legal status--legal permanent residents--have been
detained for exercising their right to free speech like Mahmoud
Khalil who was snatched from his home in front of his pregnant
U.S. citizen wife.
This is the playbook of authoritarians and dictators, and
no matter how you feel about this issue we should all be
horrified by this violation of free speech protections.
Ms. Jankowicz, to clarify for my Republican colleagues--
just a yes or no is fine--is it true that the Constitution
guarantees lawful permanent residents the right to free speech?
Ms. Jankowicz. Yes, ma'am, it's true.
Ms. Jayapal. And is it true that engaging in peaceful
protests is protected by the First Amendment?
Ms. Jankowicz. That's right, Congresswoman.
Ms. Jayapal. The Trump Administration is relying on cold
war era language in the Immigration Nationality Act to strip
students of green cards by claiming that their speech has
somehow had ambiguous, quote, foreign policy consequences for
the United States.
This law has been on the books since 1952 and to my
knowledge it has never been used in this way. Since then we've
seen students exercise their right to protest against the
Vietnam War, for the civil rights movement, against apartheid.
Ms. Jankowicz, is there anything that makes this moment
substantively different than other protests that we've seen on
campuses when the authority has not been used?
Ms. Jankowicz. No, ma'am, it does not and in fact there's
Supreme Court precedent that extends First Amendment rights to
legal residents of the United States that I think was passed
in--or decided in 1953.
Ms. Jayapal. In addition to weaponizing the immigration
system to silence protected free speech reports indicate that
the Trump Administration is planning to block colleges from
accepting any foreign students if the school is deemed too,
quote, pro-Hamas simply for allowing legal protest and freedom
of expression on their grounds.
As an expert that you are on authoritarian regimes how do
these attacks on higher education mirror the repression that
you have observed by authoritarian dictators and why should all
Americans be concerned about this?
Ms. Jankowicz. Thank you for the question, Congresswoman.
This is exactly the sort of thing that I've observed when I
was studying in Russia--I'm now banned from going to Russia--
when you look at the Hungarian regime, an authoritarian regime
which has also cracked down on dissent. It's closed
universities.
Belarus also closed a university that was, you know,
somewhere where dissidents and civil society figures studied.
The right to free speech is the right to free speech no
matter if people are expressing opinions you don't like or not.
That right extends to legal residents and I certainly hope it
extends to the folks we are inviting here, Fulbright students
and others, to come study in our country, to understand our
values.
How can we project those values if we're turning them on
their heads and arresting people for using them themselves?
Ms. Jayapal. What happens when a president--an executive--
uses his or her authority to literally destroy all of the
institutions that are supposed to be checks and balances on
total power? What effect does that have on U.S. citizens who
may not be legal permanent residents?
They're, obviously, not legal permanent residents. They're
not visa holders. What effect does that have on the regular
American that's out there listening?
Ms. Jankowicz. Congresswoman, I think there's a chilling
effect. I myself have spoken with people--students, people of
color, women--who are now afraid to speak up and voice their
opinions online and off because of what's happening on campuses
today.
Ms. Jayapal. This is a slippery slope and we all should be
calling it out.
I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentlelady's time has expired.
With that, the gentleman from Washington Mr. Baumgartner is
recognized for 5 minutes.
Mr. Baumgartner. Well, thank you, Mr. Chair, and thanks to
all assembled for this important hearing.
You know, I think if the core interest here is trust with
the American people there are real issues with terrorists using
propaganda and social media to spread their nefarious aims.
But what we've seen happen in the last--particularly in the
last 4 years has very much eroded the trust of the American
people with the use of big government to censor dissent and
truth here in the United States.
So to start, Ms. Jankowicz, the organization the American
Sunlight Project claims to have a commitment to transparency
that apparently does not extend to disclosing its donors.
Has the American Sunlight Project received funding either
directly or indirectly from George Soros or his foundations
including the Open Society Foundation?
Ms. Jankowicz. Thank you, Congressman.
You know, I've received a lot of threats for speaking out
and so I've decided that we are going to abide by the rules
that other 501c)4)'s in our country abide by and we are not
required to disclose our donors small or large because I,
frankly, don't want them to be threatened the way that I have
been.
Mr. Baumgartner. So sunlight for other people but not for
your donors?
Ms. Jankowicz. If you're interested in more sunlight I
welcome you to introduce some legislation to overturn Citizens
United, sir.
Mr. Baumgartner. So, you know, this year and the past year
the American people knew there was something wrong with
President Biden in the White House. They could see it before
their very eyes.
When White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said
that videos of President Biden looking lost or being
disoriented and senile were disinformation and cheapfakes
should the government flag those videos for social media
companies or have those videos taken down?
Ms. Jankowicz. Congressman, I actually don't believe that
the government should flag those videos or have those videos
taken down. Thanks for the ability to correct the record on
this idea that I'm some sort of, you know, disinformation czar,
as the chair referred to me as.
Mr. Baumgartner. Should taxpayer-funded organizations have
flagged those videos for social medias to take them down?
Ms. Jankowicz. Taxpayer-funded organizations have a right
to free speech. If they want to talk about their research and
flag those videos that's in their right to free speech, sir.
Mr. Baumgartner. But you do acknowledge that there was a
loss of trust of the American people when you have the White
House press secretary calling them cheapfakes and the American
people could see with their very eyes that President Biden was
disoriented?
Ms. Jankowicz. Sir, I think in those cases there were
nefarious editing techniques being used to make the effect seem
worse than it actually was and actually, you know, I've talked
to a lot of American citizens who are really disturbed about
the propaganda coming out of the White House today.
I think we should focus on that in this hearing. It should
be a bipartisan interest.
Mr. Baumgartner. But do you acknowledge that there was a
change in tone after President Biden's disastrous debate
performance, almost as if there was an organized campaign?
Ms. Jankowicz. Congressman, I'm interested in the threats
facing our country today, not what happened last--what was it
even, September, June? I can't remember.
Mr. Baumgartner. But, again, this gets to the very root
interest here, which is you have U.S. Government officials in a
coordinated fashion working with the media to accelerate a
narrative to the benefit of one political party and it destroys
trust in the American people to have folks be able to fight
terrorism.
That's--if we don't have trust and transparency and
understanding of this core issue then how can we get after the
terrorists?
Ms. Jankowicz. Well, I would agree with that, sir, and I
think that if you're interested in trust and transparency,
again, it is the duty of Congress to pass regulations of the
social media platforms that would enable that.
I would love to have my hands on some more data from the
social media platforms so we can talk about the facts of what's
going on instead of the cherry picked emails that Mr. Taibbi
and Mr. Weingarten have been, you know, referencing throughout
this hearing.
Also, I think it's a great time to bring up the Supreme
Court case that was referenced earlier. I think Mr. Weingarten
said that the justices didn't rule on the facts. Actually, Amy
Coney Barrett wrote, ``The plaintiff cannot rest on mere
allegations but must instead point to factual evidence.'' The
plaintiffs didn't find factual evidence of government coercion
or censorship in the Murphy v. Missouri case, sir.
Mr. Baumgartner. Do you believe the 51 former intelligence
officials who said that the--Hunter Biden's laptop were a
product of Russian disinformation?
Do you think they impacted the trust of the American people
in the intelligence establishment to successfully use social
media to go after terrorists?
Ms. Jankowicz. Sir, does free speech only apply when you
like what's being said? Those guys were exercising their right
to free speech and actually what they said was that it bore the
hallmarks of a disinformation campaign which, based on the
evidence at the time, was true.
Mr. Baumgartner. I'd just like to give you one more
opportunity to disclose the donors that fund you.
Ms. Jankowicz. I'd like to give you another opportunity to
overturn Citizens United, sir. Thank you.
Mr. Baumgartner. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Mr. Huizenga. The gentleman yields back.
With that, I would like to thank the witnesses for their
testimony today and the members for their questions.
Members of the subcommittee may have some additional
questions for the witnesses and we ask that you respond to
those in writing in a timely manner.
Pursuant to committee rules, all members may have 5 days to
submit questions, extraneous materials, and statements for the
record, subject to the length of limitations.
Without objection the committee stands adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:34 a.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]
APPENDIX
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Material Submitted for the Hearing Record
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