This week witnessed a truly remarkable Washington own goal by the Biden administration over the controversial issue of disinformation.
Before our 2016 election, that term, little known to the public, had a meaning, defined in fact by the KGB (“misleading by means of false information” is the short take.) I should know because I’ve worked the Russian intelligence angle for a quarter of a century.
Unfortunately, with the election of Donald Trump, Democrats decided that disinformation was too important to leave to the professionals. Instead, they redefined it to mean “anything we don’t like.” Overnight, battalions of instant “disinformation experts” appeared, lacking any credentials in that field yet possessing an ardent desire to tar their political opponents with the “disinformation” brush. This has been a particular passion of the Biden administration.
Its big disinformation push was launched last week by former President Barack Obama. Obama took to Stanford University to portray disinformation as a direct threat to democracy while warning that “regulation has to be part of the answer.” What exactly he meant by “disinformation” was left unclear. As was Obama’s view as to who, exactly, should be doing the regulating.
However, there’s a palpable irony here.
After all, when Obama was in the White House, he had no interest in disinformation. In fact, his administration, exactly one year before the 2016 election, ordered the shutdown of the only office in the entire U.S. government that was devoted to countering and debunking Russian disinformation abroad. Exactly who made that decision and why was never explained. Most of the media appear to have forgotten about it.
Democrats now are making up for lost time. The problem is that they are doing so in a way that should be distressing to anyone who cares about the free exchange of ideas.
Evincing as much, the Biden administration this week announced the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board inside the Department of Homeland Security. This will “coordinate countering misinformation related to homeland security, focused specifically on irregular migration and Russia.”
This immediately set off alarm bells among Republicans as well as bona fide disinformation experts, not least to this new office’s Orwellian title. At a minimum, this new DHS board has no reason to exist. The U.S. government already has an office dedicated to combating disinformation, the Global Engagement Center at the Department of State. Its mission is “to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States, its allies, and partner nations.”
Notice the word “foreign” there.
Until this week, the U.S. government was perfectly clear that countering disinformation means only foreign disinformation. In every administration until this one, the countering disinformation mission, whether undertaken by the GEC or its predecessors — prominently the Active Measures Working Group of Reagan-era fame, which set the benchmark for debunking KGB lies — had no domestic role whatsoever. Americans are free people who are allowed to believe whatever they like. It has never been the federal government’s job to tell citizens what to believe. Indeed, this has been a pretty formative part of our identity as a constitutional republic!
Until this week, that is.
Placing this new board inside the DHS is the tell. This new shop clearly has a domestic mission since the GEC is already handling foreign disinformation, while “Homeland” in the middle of the DHS title rather gives the game away. That unnecessary department was the worst accomplishment of former President George W. Bush that wasn’t called “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Now, the Biden administration is injecting the DHS, a powerful law enforcement arm, nakedly into domestic politics.
The politics are rabidly partisan. For proof of this, we need not look any further than the head of this new board, Nina Jankowicz. A product of the NGO-Democratic complex, Jankowicz’s prolific Twitter feed offers a panoply of stridently woke takes on everything from proper pronouns to gender issues. More importantly, Jankowicz is herself a purveyor of disinformation. She pushed the now-infamous Steele dossier, which bona fide disinformation experts called out as fake not long after it appeared, while repeatedly presenting Hunter Biden’s controversial laptop as a Kremlin disinformation scheme rather than a legitimate news story.
In this, Jankowicz executed the standard Democratic “disinformation” trick: Anything mentioned by Kremlin propagandists is automatically suspect and out of bounds for discussion. We now know that the emails on that laptop are real, as even the New York Times and Washington Post recently admitted. However, liberals only apply this standard to their enemies. Russian intelligence doesn’t care about our partisan politics; they care about causing chaos. Black Lives Matter has been praised by some Kremlin propagandists, but has any Democrat suggested that should be grounds for shutting BLM down?
Regardless, the Disinformation Governance Board clearly should not exist, particularly not inside the DHS. Congress must, without delay, remedy this threat to civil liberties raised by the Biden administration.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.
