President Donald Trump in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, August 21, 2026. REUTERS/Evan Vucci
President Donald Trump has repeatedly argued that a so-called "deep state" has stymied him, from claiming they were behind the multiple investigations into his alleged illegality to arguing they undermined his foreign policies.
"A botched leak of purportedly explosive government files to a prominent conservative online personality was supposed to offer proof of what the Trump administration and its allies have long alleged: that a little-known office inside the US state department, created to fight foreign propaganda, had secretly become a tool for domestic censorship," reported The Guardian's Joseph Gedeon on Sunday. "Two former high-ranking officials at the Global Engagement Center (GEC), a target of Republican ire that lost its funding in 2024 and was disbanded after Donald Trump’s return to office in 2025, say the documents show nothing of the kind."
He added, "Instead, they argue, the files are a symptom of a protracted and bitter political fight over an office that spent nearly a decade tracking and countering foreign influence operations, particularly from Russia, China and Iran. And the state department is now resuming some of this work in other parts of its operation, including plans – laid out in a proposal reviewed by the Guardian – to pay social media influencers across south-east Asia as part of an $11m campaign to counter Chinese propaganda."
Gedeon added that the State Department's Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, provided the files related to the GEC to a journalist known as "DataRepublican," Jennica Pounds, who later balked at publishing them because she believed they were furnished in an attempt to "entrap" her.
"Rogers, who denied this claim, then published the files herself, claiming officials inside the center 'betrayed their stated mission,'" Gedeon wrote. "The files included a 2022 GEC report on “gendered disinformation”, a flashpoint in the culture wars."
Throughout the report, Gedeon reveals that the Trump administration utterly failed to demonstrate that it had ever been sabotaged by the GEC. Instead, as its ability to effectively monitor the rest of the world has deteriorated under Trump's watch, the administration has revived many of the functions initially provided by the GEC — though they refuse to directly admit that is what they are doing.
“Are they trying to re-create it? Probably,” center's former acting deputy coordinator Carrie Gaux told The Guardian. “But now they’re spending a lot more tax dollars doing that, trying to get contractors to do some of the stuff that we were doing.”
Goux also told Gedeon, “The US has lost their seat at the table to do that, and that’s unfortunate. I hope we can gain it back, but we’re losing trust too, and that’s significant.”
Ironically, the Trump administration's flawed war against the GEC was unintentionally highlighted by their botched rollout of the revelatory documents.
“In Pounds’s portentous telling, an unnamed official—soon after revealed to be Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department—had offered to leak her government documents about Cuba to publish as an ‘exclusive,’” wrote The Bulwark's Will Sommer at the time. “While Pounds was initially enthusiastic, markings on the documents prompted her to panic that she was being set up. Had she published the documents, Pounds felt, she would’ve exposed herself to criminal prosecution. She took the news of her supposed entrapment directly to her audience.”
He added, “The idea that Trump administration officials would conspire to send Pounds to prison is bizarre on its face. After all, Pounds is an administration favorite. Her tweets claiming to have data to justify Elon Musk’s cuts aimed at USAID and other government agencies made her an out-of-nowhere star during the DOGE era, even though she didn’t seem to have a solid grasp of how government spending actually worked.”
