Luke Rosiak

four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

Yeah, so the State Department's agreement not to suppress domestic media comes after The Daily Wire, joined by The Federalist and the state of Texas, sued the Biden administration's State Department back in 2023.

The Global Engagement Center was originally set up to combat ISIS and al-Qaeda, but it was funding and promoting groups that were obsessed with labeling U.S.

media outlets as untrustworthy.

So while the GEC was not supposed to operate domestically, it ended up very much targeting U.S.

media outlets.

In fact, it even had an office in Silicon Valley.

It was funding groups like the Global Disinformation Index, which said that news outlets like The Daily Wire, The Federalist, Reason Magazine and The New York Post were untrustworthy, which severely undercut their ability to sell mainstream advertisements.

Yeah, I mean, they would rate entire news outlets, and those ratings were then sold to companies that buy advertising as basically a blacklist of who not to do business with.

And the idea was that a product was advertised on a news outlet that was toxic, it would be toxic to the product being sold.

But a lot of these media outlets that were supposedly so objectionable were actually just center-right media outlets that were questioning the government's preferred narrative on things like COVID vaccines or election security.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, this even went on during the first Trump administration.

A lot of government employees back then really just seemed to operate as if Trump wasn't president at all.

That's different now.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has permanently shut down this global engagement center.

But the settlement with the Daily Wire is a big deal because it's going to be binding on future administrations.

Because we're a party to a signed agreement, we'd be able to take it to a federal judge in Texas if a future administration violates the agreement by working with groups that suppress domestic media in the future.

And the State Department will actually have to submit annual reports to us showing compliance through the year 2036.