Controversial State Department Program Backing Trump’s Iran Policy Draws Congressional Scrutiny

Why was the agency hiring a Fox News journalist and funding a partisan Twitter account?

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo arrives at a closed briefing for House members on Iran on May 21, 2019.Alex Wong/Getty Images

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

House Democrats are investigating the State Department’s use of a program originally set up to counter terrorist disinformation so the Trump administration could fund attacks on critics of the president’s Iran policy.

News broke last week that the Global Engagement Center—a small office in the State Department tasked with combating foreign propaganda—had provided funding to the Iran Disinformation Project, an anonymous website and Twitter account that has been accused of harassing journalists, academics, and human rights activists who question Trump’s aggressive posture toward Iran. On Friday, the State Department announced that it was suspending funding for the project until whoever is behind it “takes necessary steps to ensure that any future activity remains within the agreed scope of work.” According to the Guardian, many of the tweets were deleted that day.

But the controversy has drawn scrutiny from Democrats in Congress. House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) this week requested that Global Engagement Center officials brief committee staff on the agency’s grant spending, a committee aide told Mother Jones. Officials from the center have agreed to meet with staffers next Monday, the aide said. Rep. Ami Bera (D-Calif.), who chairs a Foreign Affairs Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, is also looking into the issue, a Bera spokesman said.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is also examining ways to press the administration over the center’s activities. “We have both the appropriations process and the State Department authorization coming up, and we are currently looking at ways to hold the administration accountable for these activities,” an Omar spokesman said.

Democratic lawmakers are concerned that the Trump White House repurposed an office set up to combat foreign propaganda and online extremism to support allies of its hawkish stance on Iran. In February, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo named Lea Gabrielle, a former Fox News journalist—who had little diplomatic experience—to run the Global Engagement Center.

The center’s apparent shift in focus came as the Trump administration escalated its confrontation with Iran. Last year, Trump pulled out of a nuclear deal with Iran signed by former President Barack Obama. Iran and European signatories say they continue to abide by the agreement, but Trump has since slapped new sanctions on Iran and has denounced the country with bellicose rhetoric. Pompeo has demanded that Tehran agree to a long list of demands, including an end to peaceful nuclear power efforts, withdrawal of its forces from Syria, and an end to support for groups including Hezbollah and Hamas.

Brett Bruen, who was director of Global Engagement at the White House under Obama, said that under Pompeo, the repurposing of the agency was clear. “They made a decision to spend the money to align with the political agenda of the administration, rather than what it was intended to do, which was to protect Americans and our allies from disinformation,” Bruen said.

The center was established in 2016 by Obama to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.” Bruen said the center won $80 million from Congress in 2016 also to combat disinformation from Russia and other states. He argued the Trump administration was uninterested in that mission, slashing funding for the center, before late last year hastily allocating about $20 million for other purposes. “It’s unclear if they were given orders to ignore Russia,” he said. “But they certainly have prioritized Iran.”

The State Department did not respond to questions about the center’s grants. Bruen said he believed the Iran Disinformation Project received a grant worth “tens of thousands” of dollars, a small piece of the millions the center doled out to support hawkish voices on Iran. Its Twitter account, @IranDisinfo, drew notice for attacking Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who spent a year and half in prison in Iran; BBC reporters; Human Rights Watch, and especially the National Iranian American Council, a group that describes itself as a nonpartisan organization of Americans with Iranian heritage who support diplomacy with Iran. The account suggested these critics of current US policy were apologists or secret advocates for the Iranian government.

Jamal Abdi, the president of the NIAC, said in an interview that the account’s attacks were part of a broader “astroturf campaign” by Iran hawks to demonize his group. Abdi said he hopes Congress will determine if “any member of the Trump Administration or U.S. government agency has been involved in guiding, coordinating, or encouraging attacks and propaganda against critics or political opponents of the Trump Administration.”

*This article has been updated with a comment from Rep. Omar’s office.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate