'Soviet-style political policing': Top Trump staffer creating an official 'enemies list'

01 May

U.S. President Donald Trump holds a cabinet meeting at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein

Acting Undersecretary of State Darren Beattie is looking to assemble a “Twitter files”-style document trove to “build a blacklist of people who should be frozen out or even targeted by the administration as enemies,” says Atlantic columnist Tom Nichols, who added the move could also “chill any contact between [the government] and people or organizations who have not passed the administration’s political purity tests.”

Beattie, a “self-styled ideological commissar,” left Trump’s first administration in 2018 after CNN revealed he’d attended a conference featuring prominent white nationalists. In 2019, he worked for then-Representative Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) where he argued FBI agents were in the crowd as provocateurs during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” he posted a few months ago on X.

But now Beattie is demanding all “staff emails and other records with or about a host of individuals and organizations that track or write about foreign disinformation,” and “all staff communications that merely reference Trump or people in his orbit, like Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”

In addition, he is requesting a search of communications for keywords, including ‘Pepe the Frog,’ ‘incel,’ ‘q-anon,’ ‘Black Lives Matter,’ ‘great replacement theory,’ ‘far-right,’ and ‘infodemic,’” according to MIT Technology Review.

Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland, told MIT the request “approaches the compilation of an enemies list.”

“This should be a scandal, but instead it will likely be filed away by many Americans … as just the clumsy zealotry of a minor official rather than yet another assault by one of Trump’s servants on American constitutional freedoms,” Nichols writes. “Unfortunately, Trump’s mania for loyalty above all else almost guarantees that Beattie’s disgraceful attempt will not be the last such effort at Soviet-style political policing in the United States government."

Read the full Atlantic report here.

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