What The Disinformation Bureau Is Really About

The Disinformation Bureau has not gone away. On May 18, CNS News reported the following:

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Wednesday that DHS is pausing its Disinformation Governance Board so that there can be an “assessment” by former DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, but “DHS is still going to continue the work.”

“DHS said today that they’ll be pausing the Disinformation Governance Board. Did the White House play a role at all in perhaps expressing frustration in how it was rolled out or express any involvement in how, whether or not it should be paused, and then also some experts have said that it was set up to fail the way it was rolled out.

In case you have forgotten, Jamie Gorelick was paid more than $26 million in total compensation as a top executive at Fannie Mae–before taxpayers had to bail out the mortgage giant. She has a very interesting biography.

The article notes:

“Look, the Department of Homeland Security, they began their statement repeating that the board had been intentionally mischaracterized, which is a little bit of what you were asking me, and they were explicit about what it does and does not do,” Jean-Pierre said.

“It was never about censorship, policing speech, or removing content from anywhere. Its function was to keep homeland security officials aware of how bad actors, including human smugglers, transnational criminal organizations and foreign adversaries could use disinformation to advance their goals,” she said.

If you believe that, I have some waterfront property in Arizona I can sell you.

On May 23, PJ Media reported:

Nina Jankowicz, the self-proclaimed “Mary Poppins of Disinformation” who was up until recently supposed to become the chief of Joe Biden’s Orwellian and ominous Disinformation Governance Board, can’t seem to stop herself from stepping on rakes. She has complained, now that the Board has been “paused,” that the Board itself was a victim of “disinformation,” which casts into question how effective it could possibly have ever been, if Jankowicz couldn’t even manage to counter false statements about what it was supposed to be doing. On Monday, she made matters even worse by remarking off-handedly that the Board was meant to do something that Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas had said it would not be doing: countering “disinformation” not just from foreign sources, but from Americans.

Jankowicz tweeted that she was “thinking a lot the past few weeks about the paper I co-authored in the US Army War College Quarterly in 2020,” and she provided the link. “It lays out a government strategy,” she continued, “for dealing with disinformation based on 3 Cs- capability, coordination, and cooperation.” She added: “Since this piece was published in summer 2020, the spread and effects of disinformation on American society have only worsened and become entrenched in domestic politics (as the last few weeks of my life have shown).” And: “This is the type of work I had hoped to do at DHS, and the type of work the USG sorely needs to invest in. This is the type of work that I have built my career on—not a few contextless tweets. And this is the type of work I will continue in the public sphere.”

America now has a Ministry of Truth.