Established Fact
The State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) – an entity statutorily constrained to countering foreign propaganda and disinformation – submitted Jira tickets to the EIP infrastructure targeting domestic American speech. This integration of a foreign-intelligence apparatus into domestic speech control represents a violation of the GEC’s statutory mandate and potentially the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act’s prohibition on domestic deployment of foreign influence capabilities.
Citations
Letter from Rep. Michael McCaul, Rep. Brian Mast, and Rep. Darrell Issa to Secretary of State Antony Blinken (July 8, 2024) (quoting GEC’s statutory mandate and citing EIP connection; noting GEC was subject to at least two federal First Amendment lawsuits, including Missouri v. Biden and Daily Wire, LLC v. United States Department of State), available at https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/news/press-releases/mccaul-mast-issa-send-letter-expressing-concerns-with-gec-reauthorization.
House Judiciary Committee & Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, The Weaponization of “Disinformation” Pseudo-Experts and the Jira Ticket System, Staff Report at 1–2 (Nov. 7, 2023), https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/EIP_Jira-Ticket-Staff-Report-11-7-23-Clean.pdf
Jira Ticket Dataset, https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSbP06KE51ds51-Ha6MXkuyoWuCLW168Wz9CMBbhe1BV1IVLxG660eDBUpaVw_Hs5KdhvTvOLS7BUit/pubhtml?widget=true&headers=false | Weaponization Committee in U.S. Congress