THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE’S MISSION is “to protect and promote U.S. security, prosperity, and democratic values and shape an international environment in which all Americans can thrive.”
Notably, its mission does not include “attack U.S. citizens on official social media accounts.” But that’s exactly what Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers did on Friday night, targeting me and several other prominent American disinformation experts in a spectacular flame out on X.com.
The second Trump administration is governed by and for the trolls. It has hired trolls—and fired qualified personnel at their recommendation. It has dismantled offices and agencies based on internet rumors. It has nurtured cozy relationships with trolls to launder its attempts to suppress dissent. And now, it’s running a disinformation and smear campaign against a few of its own citizens. Like so much in Trump 2.0: this is not normal.
But, as Rogers found out this weekend when her hand-picked troll publicly rejected her, relying on online conspiracy theorists to break news is a risky strategy. They may not always lead their mobs toward your political enemies—sometimes they turn on you.
The False Promise of the So-Called GEC Files
What Sarah Rogers wrought on Friday night is cloaked in deep conspiracy lore, so strap in while I explain the background.
The MAGA world has been cashing in on conspiracies that the Biden Administration pressured or colluded with tech companies to censor conservatives for years. They were disproven. They were dismissed by the Supreme Court. But when governing by and for the trolls, facts don’t set policy, the feelings of a group of terminally-online people do. In 2025, when the Trump administration crashed into the U.S. Government, it could finally act on them.
Trump appointees quickly set about dismantling structures that dealt with countering foreign disinformation across government; one of them was the Global Engagement Center, an office at the State Department that worked “to direct, lead, synchronize, integrate, and coordinate U.S. Federal Government efforts to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts.”
MAGA world believes the GEC worked to censor them; it did not, as I explained in an April 2025 Congressional hearing when I told the deeply unserious MAGA trolls anointed with House lapel pins: “everything looks like a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.” The GEC was dismantled a few weeks later in a weird and gleeful “interview” between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and noted white supremacist troll Mike Benz.
In that conversation, Rubio and Benz promised the public the “GEC Files,” a “Twitter Files”-style document dump in which hand-selected journalists would “report” on a trove of documents from the GEC’s nearly decade-long existence that they promised would provide evidence to “people who were harmed” by the GEC. A few weeks later, the MIT Tech Review reported that the State Department was in the middle of “a sweeping effort to uncover all communications between [the GEC] and a lengthy list of public and private figures—many of whom are longtime targets of the political right.” Yours truly—along with other researchers and journalists who have covered disinformation—was on the list.
The last we heard about the so-called GEC Files was 15 months ago. Sarah Rogers inherited them when she assumed the role of Under Secretary in October 2025, and she—like so many others in this universe—is also an avowed internet troll. As she admitted to Semafor earlier this year:
I was a prolific Gawker commenter, and the reason is that I got married in 2009, and I was worried that if I got married, that my wedding announcement and my husband and my family and myself were all going to be dissected by these malicious internet commenters. And I thought about this the way that perhaps a future public diplomacy under secretary would, which is I thought if I can just have four Gawker accounts and sock puppet the thread and say good things about myself, then I don’t have to be afraid to get married because people, even if they bash me in public, I’ll be able to speak back.
The fact that Sarah Rogers believes a Public Diplomacy Under Secretary would respond to online abuse by creating her own personal troll army says a lot about her views on transparency and free speech.
Those views boomeranged right back at her this weekend.
The State Department Serves Up a Nothingburger
After presumably spending 15 months combing through the GEC Files, Rogers decided to release them to MAGA troll “DataRepublican,” a popular, Musk-aligned, deeply amateur data analyst and conspiracy theorist who was influential in dismantling USAID. She has also engaged with and promoted lies and hate about me being a censor, so Rogers probably assumed she was a kindred spirit.
According to DataRepublican’s now-deleted tweets and screenshots of text messages, Rogers offered her documents on Cuba, but instead provided her cherry-picked documents on the GEC to leak, “with the option of ‘breaking’ the story as a sort of gift.” DataRepublican got mad about this; she pronounced the documents a “nothing burger” and convinced herself that Rogers had set her up to go to jail by handing off “improperly redacted” documents.
Rogers responded with “lol”—an extraordinarily diplomatic acronym—and proceeded to tweet the documents out herself in a reply thread to DataRepublican. After close of business on a Friday, on perhaps the deadest night in Washington’s year—the end of summer break, when most parents are focused on their kids headed back to school on Monday morning—an incredible rollout strategy from the Department’s top comms official.
Orna Blum, a former senior Foreign Service Officer and public diplomacy official, tells me that Rogers’ behavior is unprecedented:
In over two decades watching how State communicates, I’ve never seen an Under Secretary run a document dump like this off an official government account — seemingly without press office coordination, including offering unredacted material to an outside researcher who refused it and flagged potential legal exposure. That raises a real question: is this an official USG account being used for something well outside the public diplomacy mandate?
The Claims
The conspiracy theories and outright lies Rogers shared in her embarrassing Friday night thread suggest that’s exactly what’s happening, and of course, given the prime real estate in the minds of the MAGA mob I’ve enjoyed over the past four years, I’m her first individual target.
The claims Rogers makes about me and my appointment as Executive Director of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board and their nexus with the Global Engagement Center are vague and meandering, drawing heavily on her audience’s pre-baked misunderstandings and hatred. They probably don’t make sense to someone who hasn’t had their brain cooked by Fox News, but the core claim boils down to this: Rogers believes that because the GEC worked in coordination with five other governments to internally publish a report on gendered disinformation that mentioned my experience of gendered-based lies, harassment, and death threats as one of nearly 70 other examples, the GEC somehow betrayed their mission.
That’s the smoking gun Rogers came up with—and chose to lead her Friday night tweetstorm with—after 15 months of searching. DataRepublican is right; it is a nothingburger. Jointly authoring a report that accurately notes the existence of a disinformation campaign is not “targeting” “criticism,” as Rogers claims. And it certainly pales in comparison to the sitting Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy using her official account to smear U.S. Citizens.
She makes false claims about me and my brief tenure at DHS (along with inexplicably misspelling my name throughout).
She alleges DHS’s Disinformation Governance Board was a “censorship effort.” It wasn’t. The Board’s founding documents, which have been public for four years, along with my sworn deposition before Jim Jordan’s Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, both disprove the baseless allegations that the Board had the authority, power, or intention to censor.
She claims the DGB was the “DHS counterpart” to the GEC. It wasn’t. I was its only full-time employee. The GEC was an office with over a hundred staff at its height, along with grantmaking and information-gathering authorities (neither of which included censorship). The Board had a completely different governing structure and served a different purpose. The Board intended to convene DHS component leaders to set Department policy, including how to respond to disinformation and protect civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy. It had no operational authority. It could not make grants. It never met.
She claims the GEC’s inclusion of me in the multilateral gendered disinformation report “is even more stunning” because she unearthed a single email where a GEC staffer shared a critical article about me. The article was based on a bizarre misreading of a chapter on the Czech Republic in my first book. It opined—based on misstatements of fact, lies, and outright fabrications of my beliefs and positions, embracing the position of partisans who claimed the Board would be censoring—that I was too political for my political appointment. But as Blum points out, “the internal emails Rogers cites are nothing—staff sharing news is routine.” That some people disagree with me and even dislike me is not news. The author of the piece (who, interestingly, now works in the Trump State Department and has scrubbed her LinkedIn of her long history of work in counter-disinformation) certainly didn’t. As usual, a conspiracy theorist has attempted to turn normal, working-level discussions into scandal, just as Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger did in the Twitter Files. Rogers included this detail—along with the disgusting attacks against me included in the GEC report—to revive the continuing smear campaign against me.
Rogers goes on to make false claims about the Election Integrity Partnership, which have been thoroughly debunked in multiple pieces of reporting since Taibbi, Shellenberger, and Congressman Jim Jordan first made them in 2023.
Let’s remember where this started: a fishing expedition based on 39 disinformation specialists’ names and a promise to find anything the GEC did that even remotely involved the manufactured claims of censorship that MAGA has alleged for years. They found so little substance that even their hand-picked troll rebuffed them and left Sarah Rogers to do her dirty work on her own.
DataRepublican and Rogers have evidently come to some sort of agreement—DataRepublican has deleted her initial tweets accusing Rogers of framing her. But not before many across the MAGA universe began calling for Rogers’ resignation.
How’s that nothingburger taste, Sarah?
The Fallout
I’m not going to lie: it was pretty delicious to watch this unfold. Rogers was so confident in her 2009 Gawker trolling credentials that she badly misread the landscape of conspiracy and intrigue that her own administration created, falling flat on her face in the process.
As much as I enjoyed watching a woman who celebrated the U.S. visa bans against five disinformation and hate speech researchers fail, it’s objectively not very fun to be targeted by a high-level government official who has used her power to abridge free expression.
I am worried—as I have been since I left government—that allegations against me and other disinformation researchers could be used as pretext for legal or administrative campaigns against us. Beyond the immediate chilling effect, this kind of campaign may also be designed to prepare the political and bureaucratic ground for later action against researchers and civil-society organizations. I can’t see a benign policy rationale for devoting this level of official attention to smearing private American citizens on social media.
“It’s one more embarrassment for the State Department,” Blum, the former senior foreign service officer tells me. But, she says, there’s a silver lining: Rogers is currently awaiting confirmation to another administration appointment, as CEO of the US Agency for Global Media. According to Blum, Rogers’ tantrum is “a real-time data point for the Senators who’ll soon decide whether to confirm Rogers to lead USAGM.” If Rogers is using her official account as a propaganda mouthpiece, what will she do when she gets the keys to American foreign broadcasting?
In the meantime, it’s possible Rogers is working to release other files to other “journalists” and “researchers” in the coming weeks. We should view any further drops for what they really are: a desperate, amateur attempt from a government by and for the trolls to suppress a group of people who are working to protect reality. 🧭