Mark Chenoweth is joined by Margot Cleveland to discuss new revelations about the State Department’s role in Biden-era censorship, uncovered through NCLA’s lawsuit and recent reporting. They trace how agencies tried to outsource speech suppression to foreign partners, why discovery unearthed “smoking guns,” and what it means for the First Amendment going forward.

Read the full Daily Wire article here: https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-state-department-puts-final-nail-in-the-coffin-of-biden-era-censorship-framework

Mark Chenoweth: If you think that unwritten law doesn’t affect you, think again. Whether you’re a business owner, a professional, just an average citizen, you are unknowingly going to fall under vague and unofficial rules, and when bureaucrats act like lawmakers, they’re really restricting your liberty without the consent of the governed. Welcome to Unwritten Law, with Mark Chenoweth, and today, special to the program — we’ve had her on before, but we have her in person today, so this is very exciting. Margot Cleveland, welcome back to Unwritten Law.

Margot Cleveland: Thank you so much.

Mark Chenoweth: So, John is off doing his special Constitution Day things, I think. So, I’m glad that you’re here, because hot off the presses, Margot, there is an article from our client, The Daily Wire, and it is an article by Mary Margaret Olohan, I believe is how she pronounces her name. “State Department Puts Final Nail in the Coffin of Biden-Era Censorship Framework.” This is something that is familiar to you. You have been suing the state department over the — leading NCLA’s effort to sue the state department over the Biden-era censorship framework. So, what’s new? What has happened that is newsworthy just this week in this area?

Margot Cleveland: Sure. So, there are actually two parts that really grabbed my eye when I saw this article. The first is that the state department is closing down the ugly stepsister of the Global Engagement Center. Folks might recall that the Global Engagement Center was the place that’s responsible for lots of the censorship activities. Congress wisely did not renew their funding.

Mark Chenoweth: Back in December, right?

Margot Cleveland: Exactly. But instead of closing down, they closed down in name only, created a new little niche, took all the people and all the money and put them over into it, and it had some amorphous name. What was it, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation Interface Center. And what was announced in this —

Mark Chenoweth: Yeah, Counter Foreign Information and Manipulation Interference.

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Margot Cleveland: Yup.

Mark Chenoweth: Yeah, that’s a government acronym for you.

Margot Cleveland: As well as a misnomer, I would say.

Mark Chenoweth: Deliberately, probably, it looks like now.

Margot Cleveland: So, Rubio said that they’re closing that out today, which is good news, we knew that they were planning on it. But to know that they finally have done it is a great thing.

Mark Chenoweth: To know that they’ve done it, but also, it’s sort of — I mean we knew that this activity was going on. We knew that they had taken these things from GEC and put them over somewhere else. Suspiciously, late December or early January, before the new administration came in. It really looked like they were trying to hide the ball from the incoming administration, and that’s what it looked like to me, anyway. But we had already heard, I mean, Marco Rubio had written an op-ed in The Federalist, I believe, right? In the publication that you write for.

Margot Cleveland: Absolutely.

Mark Chenoweth: Sort of admitting that a lot of these things had happened. But they never really admitted the extent of it.

Margot Cleveland: Right. And I still think there might be some more that’s going to drop later. But what was the second key part here, and here’s I’m actually going to quote from this article, because it really punctuates what was going on. So, the Trump guy who was charged with getting the Center closed, said that there were some “loose ends to tie up after Rubio’s April closure of the former GEC,” and this is the part that I think is key.

“One such loose end was that the GEC undertook a number of agreements with varying degrees of formality with other countries to ‘facilitate and provide a framework for cooperation on mutual objectives, including principally, combatting so-called disinformation.’”

Mark Chenoweth: So, they knew the gig was up.

Margot Cleveland: They knew the gig was up, but this to me is huge, because throughout this, we have seen through the discovery material indications that the GEC and the state department were working with other countries and working with other countries to deal with disinformation. And this is something that we were calling kind of the boomerang effect. I, state department, cannot censor speech, but I can throw over here something that’s going on, and the Europeans will catch it and throw it over to the American social media companies and censor the speech.

I also think it’s key here that it talks about varying degrees of formality, because we’re not going to find any grants that are specifically for doing some of this nefarious stuff if they didn’t have a specific grant for it. But what we did find in a lot of the documents was references to combatting disinformation with no context of it being foreign disinformation. And what is said in America, the UK will consider disinformation. So, the fact that our state department was doing this is atrocious, and the fact that —

Mark Chenoweth: They were trying to do an end run around the First Amendment, deliberately.

Margot Cleveland: Absolutely. So, I think that this is a great step forward. I still think that there’s probably a lot more of these kind of informal agreements going on, and that’s why it’s so important that individuals at the state department are following what the commander in chief, what the executive says, what our policy is, because if you just have a wink and a nod between a mid-level state department person, it’s not going to stop anything.

Mark Chenoweth: Well, that’s for sure, and it almost sounds like this loose end was it takes some time to unravel, maybe stick with the metaphor, some of these informal agreements that they had with other countries.

Margot Cleveland: Absolutely, and did they happen through agreements? So, they might have had some formal agreements too, and if so, that could have been grants to NGOs, who were kind of doing this collaboration. And again, we had a lot of documents that suggested that was going on, but we also had a lot of documents that were redacted or completely withheld based on various privileges. So, I wouldn’t be surprised that from behind the scenes, they are seeing what we were pretty sure existed.

Mark Chenoweth: Well, and there maybe a little bit of roadmap there on what was maybe redacted and what was given to us, because they only redact the good stuff. I mean, I’ve never seen a document where they hand it over to you and, “Oh, this is redacted. Oh, but that’s the irrelevant stuff was redacted.” No, no, no, that’s not the way it works.

Margot Cleveland: Yup, absolutely. I think that that is true. I do hope also that the state department looks at what was going on at NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, because that —

Mark Chenoweth: Which shut down even sooner, because there was a bipartisan board, right? Of NED, and as soon as they got wind of this last, I don’t know, maybe October, November? It seems like it was before Congress shut down GEC in December.

Margot Cleveland: Absolutely. But we haven’t had any transparency, and I think that there is a lot behind the scenes that needs to be looked at to see who was doing what at NED and what do they know.

Mark Chenoweth: What did they know and when did they know it?

Margot Cleveland: Exactly.

Mark Chenoweth: Like every good scandal in Washington.

Margot Cleveland: Absolutely.

Mark Chenoweth: Yeah. So, a couple times you mentioned discovery material; you mentioned documents. So, take us back now. NCLA filed this lawsuit against the Biden administration, and it sounds like they did turn over some of the material that led you to have further concerns and suspicions.

Margot Cleveland: Right. And actually, a lot of the concerns came before the lawsuit was filed. We never would have, obviously, gone against the state department if we didn’t have some pretty strong evidence of what was going on. And we did that through —

Mark Chenoweth: And we were skeptical, I think, when we first heard about this. We were like, “Well, the state department, they wouldn’t be doing anything domestically. That doesn’t make sense.”

Margot Cleveland: Right, exactly. And then we had some of the Twitter files that were released that showed that the GEC was involved in this. And then other types of documents that the grants were out there, and some journalists were writing on this as well, and that all kind of put together the pieces. It also gave us the chance to know what to ask for in discovery, and what we found was pretty shocking, that there was one grant given to a company called Park Advisors, which then created this huge computer system where they were listing all of these technologies. And they were testing them and rating them and saying what you can use them for, and going out and asking people, “Hey, come on Info cloud and see what you can use to censor speech.”

Mark Chenoweth: It was like a five-star rating system for censorship software. It was like, “This stuff works really good. You should use it.”

Margot Cleveland: Exactly, and the stuff that they were promoting was targeting squarely American speech and our clients’ speech. And we saw a lot of that in the discovery. I think there were over 300 tech evaluations they did, and overwhelming majority were in English only, and then there was still other ones that said that they only apply to American speech, so there was a huge problem that was going on there.

Mark Chenoweth: Yeah, so a lot of what has come out this week has been a result of an interview with acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, Darren Beattie. But Margot, the information that’s come out seems like it’s been a little more forthright than some of the things that were coming out earlier.

Because I don’t think that we had seen the kind of admissions to— and we had talked about this a little bit already— admissions that they were working with these other countries and working with some of the NGOs and so forth but sounds like they’re going to engage in a real effort at transparency here. They’re going to do with the state department files something similar to what was done with the Twitter files, maybe.

Margot Cleveland: It would be wonderful if they did, and the discovery that was provided us would be a great first step because as I said, there was a lot of details in that.

Mark Chenoweth: Now, can we just make that public, or —

Margot Cleveland: We can’t.

Mark Chenoweth: Okay.

Margot Cleveland: There is some information that is not protected but frankly, anything that would be informative to the public is under a protective order, and it is either marked as confidential or attorney-client privileged. It would be great if the state department reconsiders that, so that there is transparency. I think that that really is important so that they can see what was going on.

Mark Chenoweth: And we’ll be in a position to hold the state department accountable for being transparent, because we’ll know whether they’ve released the documents that they’ve released to us to a broader public.

Margot Cleveland: Absolutely. Absolutely. And as I mentioned earlier, I don’t know if they’ve actually gotten to the bottom of this yet. One of the things that I still have not seen —

Mark Chenoweth: How deep is the bottom?

Margot Cleveland: Right. How deep is it? But some of the embassies were actually giving grants out to do media literacy, and a couple of the grants we had very limited access during the discovery. We were only allowed to get discovery on, I want to say, about ten or so specific grants that we found through open-source research. So, by doing our own research we said, “Okay, now we want you to give us this information on these grants,” and of them I think two or three out of the ten were teaching media literacy using systems that were rating American companies. And it’s still American speech that is being abridged and infringed upon there.

So, those were the embassies. This wasn’t GEC. It was the state department much more globally, so there might be parts there. Also, the state department was working with all the other agencies, and there was promotion to all the different departments for different technologies. So, I’m hopeful that when they’re doing this transparency assessment, or they’re looking at the details here that they look at some of those other areas.

Mark Chenoweth: Well, one of the things that I think was the most amusing part of the article, Beattie is talking about the fact that officials would submit names to Twitter, for example, encouraging censorship of an individual, and then Twitter would say, “Now, wait a minute. This isn’t some Chinese group. This isn’t a Russian group. This is Bob from Minnesota. What are you talking about? Why are you wanting us to censor this guy?”

Margot Cleveland: Right. This is another key point. When the state department — and actually not just the state department but the entire government, when they were looking at “foreign disinformation”, they were looking at foreign narratives that were then being repeated by Americans. Which means that they were pulling into the idea of foreign disinformation the fact that Bob in Michigan is actually repeating this narrative out of Russia.

It doesn’t matter if the narrative is right or wrong. It’s just that he’s repeating something that the Russians want people to think. I think that that’s a huge problem, both that they’re targeting the Americans repeating the disinformation — what they call disinformation — but also that they don’t care if it’s true.

Mark Chenoweth: Right.

Margot Cleveland: So, COVID vaccines, or issues with Ukraine, or the Hunter Biden laptop. It’s that Russia wants this out there, so we want to stop it. That’s not good government, and it’s obviously a problem with the first amendment.

Mark Chenoweth: Huge first amendment problem, and very insidious because part of the justification they used all along was to stop misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. So, they purport to be monitoring for truth, but then they weren’t actually monitoring for truth, right? They didn’t want the Hunter Biden laptop out. They didn’t want accurate news about the Wuhan Institute of Virology out.

They didn’t want accurate information about how COVID vaccines don’t stop transmission, etcetera. And so, it wasn’t actually policing for truth. It was policing for government preferred narratives, and that’s even more dangerous than policing for truth, and the first amendment doesn’t allow them to do either one.

Margot Cleveland: Absolutely, and if there was a problem, frankly, more speech is what the government should be doing. If the narrative is it came from the lab in China, if the government knows that’s false, they should come out and say, “That’s false, and this is how you know it’s false,” and when they do that, and they’re proven to be liars, then there is a way to hold them accountable.

There is no accountability when it’s done behind the scenes, and the problem is also that we don’t know what we don’t know. If the government is quashing these stories, people can’t actually have these productive conversations and push back on things. And it allows for real conspiracy theories to grow, but it also then prevents real theories that are actually conspiracies to be squashed. So, it’s bad from both ends.

Mark Chenoweth: That’s absolutely right, and I think that we will find out how deep this goes. According to Beattie, he told the Daily Wire that his office is conducting a “extremely laborious, comprehensive, meticulous transparency review that will reflect the extensive review of hundreds of thousands of emails.” Hundreds of thousands of emails that will more specifically and systematically document exactly the kinds of nefarious activity that the GEC was involved in in this unfortunate chapter of America’s history. So, if they are going to review hundreds of thousands of emails and let the American people in on what the Biden Administration, the Anthony Blinken-led state department was up to, then I think that will be extremely helpful.

And hopefully it will educate the Supreme Court a little bit, because I think one of the things that was working against us in the Murthy case, I don’t think that the Supreme Court believed that the administration was really, at the end of the day, doing anything wrong. Because I think — people have this bias, right? Justice Kagan’s thinking, “Well, we didn’t do that when I was in the White House,” and Kavanaugh is thinking, “Well we didn’t do that when I was in the White House,” so they’re probably doing the same kind of things we were doing back then. They’re just doing it with social media instead of with the Washington Post.

No. They were doing something completely new, completely different, completely unlawful, and I think that the Supreme Court will be shocked by the facts that come out of what was going not just at the state department, but government wide. Two separate questions here. First, let me ask about President Trump. Do you think this would have happened without President Trump’s January 20th executive order on restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship, where he really instructed everybody, Marco Rubio on down, “Get rid of this. We don’t want this happening in my administration.”

Margot Cleveland: So, I want to say on that one — somewhat, but not totally, And I say that because with our litigation, they were being confronted with the reality of what happened, and we had already, at one point, briefed the opposition to the motion to dismiss. So, the state department tried to toss the case, and we said to the judge, “Look, we already have this evidence,” and that was evidence without discovery. And before Trump came in, we were going through discovery, getting ready to do it another one, now with this strong evidence.

Mark Chenoweth: And defeating the motion to dismiss once.

Margot Cleveland: Right, so I think that there would have had to have been some comeuppance, where they had to confront what the state department was doing. But having President Trump, with the executive order, told them to take it serious. And not just, “Okay, deal with those plaintiffs and that case.”

Mark Chenoweth: Right.

Margot Cleveland: I also want —

Mark Chenoweth: Not just give lip service to it.

Margot Cleveland: Right. I also think part of this was President Trump recognizing what happened under Trump one, because this was going on under Trump one. Not because of anything he did, not because of anything his state department officials did, but because President Obama started the GEC, changed its directive, and because those mid-level bureaucrats didn’t care, and they were very politically oriented, which again, some of the emails I saw, you could tell that that was going on.

So, I think President Trump realized, “This is going on throughout the government. It was going on when I was there the first time, and I’m putting an end to it now,” because we saw how bad it got when he ran for reelection in 20, and even up to after President Biden was back in.

Mark Chenoweth: Yeah. Yeah, last January. So, my last question for you, Margot, is do you think any of this would have happened without NCLA’s lawsuit? We were able to work with the Daily Wire and the Federalist. They were the ones that were suffering the brunt of the censorship and were willing to stick their necks out and serve as plaintiffs here. NCLA can’t bring lawsuits without plaintiffs.

So, hats off to the Daily Wire and to the Federalist for being willing to go to bat for the first amendment. But do you think that any of this would have come to light? I mean, we had some of the stuff that came out of the Twitter files, but it seems like an awful lot of this came out of the work that you did, and that came out as a result of NCLA’s lawsuit.

Margot Cleveland: Right. And I don’t think that this would have come out, because the state department, even though it was one of the defendants in the Murthy case, the court had actually found that there wasn’t enough evidence for an injunction against the state department.

Mark Chenoweth: At the district court level, even.

Margot Cleveland: At the district court level, where he found it with everyone else. And without our lawsuit, we would not have had the smoking guns to say, “This is what is happening.” Now, Beattie’s come out and said, “Yes, there’s this informal agreement with the foreign governments.” Well, you know what? That’s something we had been telling the attorneys on the other side that this is what is going on, and the same with the GEC and the new organization. Right when Congress took away the funding and they created this new entity, still under Biden, and they wouldn’t tell us anything about this new entity.

We were making a huge deal of that saying, “Look, we need to know what you’re doing, how it’s continuing on.” And that was kind of waving the red flag saying, “Hey, this is where you need to come and look.” And I would like to say that a lot of our briefing probably did the same thing, especially these informal agreements with these other countries. That was something that we have been hammering with the attorneys for the state department. So, I’m hopeful that they follow the breadcrumbs that we got.

Mark Chenoweth: It absolutely sounds like it. And the way I think you had put it to me earlier today, Margot, is that you’re not sure they would have known there was a thread to pull, if it weren’t for the lawsuit and some of the questions that we asked and discovery that we got and so forth. I’m glad to see that they are pulling the thread and that they are unraveling this entire censorship network, because what happened to Americans’ first amendment rights under the Biden administration was horrific.

And the censorship that our clients and others suffered is something that needs to be exposed completely and fully so that hopefully it won’t happen again. The article is again, Mary Margaret Olohan in dailywire.com, “State Department Puts Final Nail in Coffin of Biden-Era Censorship Framework.” Margot Cleveland, thank you for being with me on Unwritten Law.

Margot Cleveland: Thanks so much, Mark.

Mark Chenoweth: As we like to say here at NCLA, let judges judge. Let legislators legislate and stop bureaucrats from doing either.

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Duration: 24 minutes