Charlie Warzel writes:

Darren Beattie, a senior official at the State Department, is concerned that his agency has abused its powers under previous Democratic administrations. To rectify that, he has decided to marshal the power of his office—in what his fellow State Department employees reportedly described as “unusual” and “improper” ways—to conduct a political witch hunt.

Yesterday, the MIT Technology Review revealed that, in March, Beattie made a request to gain sweeping access to communications between and about the State Department and journalists, disinformation researchers, and Donald Trump critics. Specifically, Beattie was targeting the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) hub, which the State Department shut down this year and the Global Engagement Center (GEC), which was shut down in 2024—both of which focused on tracking foreign disinformation campaigns. Right-wing critics have accused these offices of engaging in censorship campaigns against conservatives, under the pretense of fighting fake news.

In response to these unproven allegations, Beattie—who had also served as a speechwriter in President Trump’s first administration, though he was fired in 2018 after CNN reported that he had attended a conference featuring prominent white nationalists—asked the State Department for all “staff emails and other records with or about roughly 60 individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation.” This request included correspondence with and about journalists, including The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, researchers at institutions such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, and political enemies of the Trump administration, such as the former U.S. cybersecurity official Christopher Krebs. Beattie also wanted all staff communications that mentioned a specific list of keywords (“incel,” “q-anon,” “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory”) and Trump-world figures, like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. According to the report, he plans to publish any noteworthy internal communications he receives as part of a transparency campaign to win back public trust in government agencies. A spokesperson for the State Department declined to comment on the record when reached for this story.

Let’s be clear about what’s really happening here. A high-ranking member of the Trump administration is turning federal-government data—in this case, State Department communications—into a political weapon against perceived ideological enemies. The individuals Beattie has singled out (Bill Gates, the former FBI special agent Clint Watts, and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher who had a short and somewhat disastrous tenure at the Department of Homeland Security, to name a few) are familiar targets for the far right’s free-speech-defender crowd. The keywords Beattie has asked his department to search for (which also include “Alex Jones,” “Glenn Greenwald,” and “Pepe the Frog”) are ones that seem likely to produce a juicy piece of correspondence, but who knows? This is a fishing expedition—a government agency using a kind of grievance-politics Mad Libs in an effort to find anything that might make it appear as if vestiges of the “deep state” were biased against the right. [Continue reading…]