The Trump administration has not revealed which administration official was targeted by the Biden administration’s State Department in a “disinformation” dossier compiling previous social media posts that identified them as “purveyors of disinformation.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio revealed at the most recent Trump administration Cabinet meeting April 30 that an unidentified Trump administration official who was present had been the subject of a State Department dossier detailing alleged promotion of social media “disinformation.”
Rubio, the State Department and the White House have not yet identified which official the Biden administration targeted. Fox News Digital has reached out repeatedly to the White House regarding the identity of the official, including on Monday, but did not receive replies.
When asked for an update on the identity of the Trump official, the State Department directed Fox News Digital to Rubio’s April 30 remark, detailing that, “We are going to be turning over these dossiers to the individuals, and they’ll decide whether they want to disclose it or not.”
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Rubio said during the April 30 Cabinet meeting that a little-known, now-defunct office within the State Department called the Global Engagement Center (GEC) had compiled disinformation dossiers on Americans across the country as part of an effort to “censor” free speech, including an individual who has since joined the Trump administration.
“We had an office in the Department of State whose job it was to censor Americans,” Rubio said during the meeting. “And, by the way, I’m not going to say who it is. I’ll leave it up to them. There’s at least one person at this table today who had a dossier in that building of social media posts to identify them as purveyors of disinformation. We have these dossiers. We are going to be turning those over to these individuals.”
Vice President JD Vance interjected, asking, “Was it me or Elon (Musk)? We can follow up when the media is gone,” which drew laughter from the Cabinet.
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“But just think about that. The Department of State of the United States had set up an office to monitor the social media posts and commentary of American citizens, to identify them as vectors of disinformation,” Rubio continued. “When we know that the best way to combat disinformation is freedom of speech and transparency.”
Though Rubio did not identify which Trump official the Biden administration kept a dossier on, Elon Musk has previously railed against the Global Engagement Center.
“The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” Musk posted to X in January 2023. That was more than a year before Musk endorsed Trump in the 2024 presidential race and became a fixture of the administration in his temporary role with the Department of Government Efficiency.
“They are a threat to our democracy,” Musk added.
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Former President Barack Obama established the Global Engagement Center in 2016 through an executive order aimed at coordinating counterterrorism messaging to foreign nations before it expanded its scope to also include countering foreign propaganda and disinformation, State Department documents show.
Conservatives have slammed the office as a political weapon to silence free speech, including Rubio in an April op-ed when he cited a 2020 GEC report claiming that a “Russian disinformation apparatus” was behind public speculation that the coronavirus was an “engineered bioweapon” or was created by “research conducted at the Wuhan institute.”
In the years following the pandemic, the Department of Energy under the Biden administration and former FBI Director Christopher Wray said evidence indicated that COVID-19 was the result of a lab leak, while the Trump administration’s CIA reported earlier in 2025 that a lab leak was the likely origin of the virus.
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In 2024, lawmakers did not approve new funding for the office in the National Defense Authorization Act, and it was scheduled to terminate on Dec. 23, 2024. The Biden administration, however, shuffled staffers and rebranded the office.
It became the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub just days before Trump’s inauguration, the New York Post reported in January.
Rubio announced in April that the office would officially shutter.
“I am announcing the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC),” Rubio said in an April 16 statement announcing the office’s closure.
“Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving,” he wrote. “This is antithetical to the very principles we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America. That ends today.”
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Rubio has railed against the office in previous interviews and op-eds, including authoring an opinion piece for the Federalist in April touting that he was dismantling the “censorship-industrial complex” that had gripped agencies such as the State Department.
“Over the past half-decade, bodies like GEC, crafted by our own governing ruling class, nearly destroyed America’s long free speech history,” he wrote in the op-ed. “The enemies of speech had new lingo to justify their authoritarian impulse. It was “disinformation,” allegedly pushed by nefarious foreign governments, that was the No. 1 threat to ‘our democracy.’ To protect ‘our democracy,’ this ‘disinformation’ had to be identified and stamped out.”
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