For 17 months, the State Department has promised to deliver proof of a long-promoted conspiracy theory about its own agency: that its officials routinely censored conservative Americans. This week, it failed that mission, as Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers released a trove of documents that proved nothing.
The conspiracy theory has grown during President Donald Trump’s second term, providing the State Department with a rationale for dismantling the offices that once studied and countered foreign disinformation campaigns, for firing officials with decades of experience and for shuttering entire departments.
The effort was first led by acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie, a former far-right academic who had been fired from the first Trump administration after he attended a white nationalist conference. Beattie claimed the DOGE-style decimation of the State Department was necessary to rid the agency of officials who were tied to a baseless conspiracy theory known as the “censorship-industrial complex.”
Promoters of the censorship-industrial complex — a secret but somehow sprawling partnership between the Biden government, journalists, academics and civil society groups, aimed at silencing conservative Americans — have repeatedly failed to prove their case, in congressional investigations and in the courts, including the Supreme Court. Still, the theory persists.
Beattie had no evidence for his unfounded claims that the State Department had participated in that conspiracy, but in March 2025, he launched an investigation inside the State Department that he said would reveal all. Beattie requested the files, emails and other communications of State Department officials, including any records with seemingly random keywords like “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory” and “Pepe the Frog,” as well as any communications with figures Beattie believed to be part of the conspiracy. (These included The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, Bill Gates, disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz and some 60 others, including this reporter.)
In the official announcement for the closure of the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC), Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Mike Benz, a former pseudonymous racist YouTuber and chief architect of the censorship-industrial complex theory, that a reckoning was coming. It would be driven by evidence, disclosed in the model of the “Twitter Files,” a 2022 dump of internal Twitter records that Elon Musk gave to selected writers to show the alleged censorship of conservatives. (It didn’t.)
Rubio said the job now was to “document what happened.”
“Because one thing is to say it in a broadcast like this, another thing is to actually put it on paper,” he said.
This week, Rogers, Beattie’s replacement, finally had something to share.
According to a series of posts on X, some since deleted, Rogers messaged Jennica Pounds, a self-described analyst who goes by the moniker Data Republican, known for creating massive, if amateur, data troves used to allege government waste, fraud and abuse, which made her a favorite of Musk’s.
Pounds said she thought Rogers was handing documents about Cuba, but got “shoved a bunch of hard copy documents to leak” about the GEC.
“I wanted to give you the option of ‘breaking’ the story as sort of a gift,” Rogers told her, according to a direct message that Pounds posted.
Then things got weird. Pounds has been a reliable vector for the Trump administration to push its narrative that a so-called deep state, or shadow government, was operating in secret and against the best interests of its citizens. But when she received the State Department’s “gift,” Pounds determined that it was a plot by Rogers to entrap her into committing a crime, asserting that releasing or reporting on the documents would be illegal.
Rogers responded “lol” and released the documents herself in a series of 35 posts that borrowed the breathless cadence of the Twitter Files, drawing ominous connections between GEC emails, international projects to combat foreign disinformation, and nongovernmental coalitions. It all implied the existence of a censorship-industrial-complex operation — without proving it. Rogers’ document dump got little attention from right-wing media.
“There were State Department employees sharing news articles. Diplomats had communicated with foreign governments. And somewhere in the rubble was a project examining ‘gendered disinformation’ that had been — wait for it — announced at the Summit for Democracy and published on the State Department website,” former senior foreign service officer Orna Blum wrote sarcastically on Substack.
Pounds seemed to agree with the former State Department official.
“The actual documents were nothingburgers,” she posted.
Neither the State Department nor Pounds responded to requests for comment.
The debacle may show that the half-decade of unproven censorship claims has exhausted their audience.
“The under secretary is yet again twisting decontextualized snippets of emails and long-public documents to try to propagate a conspiracy theory,” said Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown University. As the former research manager for the Stanford Internet Observatory, DiResta has long been a boogeyman of the censorship-industrial complex theory.
“The mass censorship claims were a hoax,” DiResta said.
Over the weekend, some of the State officials pushed out in last year’s purge lit up Signal chats, commenting on Rogers’ rollout of the long-promised proof of the conspiracy that had cost them their jobs and hollowed out the agency where they had spent their careers. One former senior official, granted anonymity to speak candidly, told MS NOW: “In the end, it’s not the greatest consolation on earth to find out that the people who wrecked 10 years of your work and your career are a bunch of galaxy-level dipshits.”
The release did reveal something, however: an unintentional revelation about an undisclosed relationship between a federal agency and Pounds, a professed independent researcher who has often criticized others, without evidence, of being “a fed.”
In her posts, Pounds alleged that Rogers was trying to threaten her employment, revealing along the way that since July she had been a special government employee of the Department of Defense. Before that, Pounds had been provided credentials as a member of the Pentagon’s hollowed-out press corps.
A Defense Department official confirmed her employment but declined to give further details.
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