U.S. Intelligence Community Has a New ‘Disinformation’ Center

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has stood up a new office to oversee the intelligence community’s efforts to combat “disinformation” and foreign influence campaigns in the United States, Director Avril Haines announced Thursday.

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The center will be focused on “foreign malign influence” aimed at U.S. elections but also at “public opinion within the United States,” according to the law that established the FMIC.

The new center comes amid House Republicans’ efforts to reduce the countering disinformation bureaucracy over concern they are aimed at targeting conservatives and free speech.

Last week, a group of Republicans demanded more information from Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the GEC, which they say has expanded well beyond its primary mission of fighting terrorism to funding groups that hound conservative media outlets under the guise of diminishing disinformation, Breitbart News’ Sean Moran reported.

The GEC funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), a foreign data-driven advocacy organization, which “created blacklists of U.S. domestic media voices to cripple U.S. citizen journalists’ advertising revenue,” according to House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (TX), Foreign Affairs Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee Chair Brian Mast (FL), and GOP Reps. Chris Smith (FL), Darrell Issa (CA), Maria Salazar (FL), Keith Self (TX), Cory Mills (FL), and Ken Buck (CO).

Specifically, the GDI created the Dynamic Exclusion List, which lists the likeliness of an outlet to be at risk of spreading disinformation. The GDI, which also receives funding from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, often labels right-wing outlets as being at risk of spreading disinformation.

Federal government cannot scrap the First Amendment merely because they want to curb “disinformation” or “misinformation,” the Republicans argued.

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