Sarah Rogers Censors Conference on Disinformation

Days before a European conference on Disinformation, the far right extremist who serves as State’s Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy, Sarah Rogers, pressured Lithuania, the EU, and Canada to withdraw support from the conference.

Three persons familiar with the matter, including European officials, confirmed that the US state department had been in touch with multiple governments over their support for the conference.

Internal state department documents seen by the Guardian also show US officials thanking Lithuania for “taking US concerns seriously”. The document says Washington was “grateful” Lithuania supposedly found a panel framing the US as a foreign information threat “reprehensible and surprising” and welcomed its decision to limit involvement in the conference.

That panel – called “USA as a FIMI threat: adapt, acknowledge, push back”, with the acronym FIMI referring to “foreign information manipulation and interference” – took place Wednesday. It explored how Europe’s disinformation community could rebuild resilience without Washington, and is the first time the conference appears to have entertained the idea that the US could be a disinformation actor in Europe. Sources and the internal document indicate the state department was explicitly focused on this panel, which included three American speakers, among them a former CIA officer.

According to one person familiar with the deliberations, other communications appeared to originate from the office of Sarah B Rogers, the US undersecretary of state for public diplomacy.

At issue was a panel that treated the US — led by a man who routinely lies about his obeisance to Russia — as a source of disinformation.

I’m at the conference. I was at the panel.

Not only did that panel not address US support for Xitter-based fraud (there was another panel that addressed US sanctions on disinformation researchers), but it largely pulled its punches.

The panel generally dodged the extent to which Trump (and Rogers, who was cuddling up with pro-Russian politicians in Montenegro recently) are pawns for Russia, but Emerson Brooking suggested that the 51-spook letter overstated Russian influence behind the laptop. (In related news, the guy who publicly unpacked the Hunter Biden laptop, Gus Dimitrelos, used forensic software recently disclosed as Russian to do that).

For much of the day, experts discussed how to counter Russian disinformation, but all the discussions about countering US disinformation lacked ambition — indeed lacked a sense of the scope of the problem — and therefore didn’t address the extent to which trolls in official positions, like Rogers, are themselves vectors Russian disinformation.