High-ranking State Department officer requested internal communications with reporters, European officials, and critics of Trump.

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The document seeks all staff communications that reference Trump or individuals associated with him, such as Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It also directs a search of communications for a comprehensive list of keywords, including “Pepe the Frog,” “incel,” “q-anon,” “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory,” “far-right,” and “infodemic.” For several individuals who received or viewed the document, the broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” according to one official—an inquiry that could jeopardize the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations.

Beattie, who was appointed by Trump in February as the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy, informed State Department officials that his intention in seeking these records was a release of internal State Department documents akin to previous disclosures to “rebuild trust with the American public,” as reported by a State Department employee who was present. Beattie’s reference is to internal documents released following significant platform changes, which aimed to demonstrate that certain viewpoints had been silenced, ultimately providing more context on challenges previously acknowledged but lacking definitive evidence.

“What would be the innocent reason for doing that?” asked Bill Kristol.

The document, dated March 11, 2025, specifically targets records and communications from the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI) Hub, a division within the State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy that monitored and countered foreign disinformation efforts. This unit was established after the Global Engagement Center (GEC) ceased operations at the end of 2024. Recent reports highlighted that R/FIMI is set to be dissolved.

Some R/FIMI staff were present at the initial meeting where the document was shared, along with State Department lawyers and personnel from the Bureau of Administration, responsible for handling public records requests. Among the nearly 60 individuals and organizations included in Beattie’s information search are Bill Gates; the open-source journalism group Hotnchill; former FBI special agent Clint Watts; Nancy Faeser, the German interior minister; Daniel Fried, a career State Department official and former US ambassador to Poland; Renée DiResta, an expert in online disinformation from Stanford Internet Observatory; and Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation researcher formerly leading the Disinformation Governance Board at the US Department of Homeland Security.

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Upon learning of their inclusion in the records request, several individuals expressed alarm over the existence of such a list within an American institution. “When I was in government, I’d never done anything like that,” Kristol, a former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, stated. “What would be the innocent reason for doing that?”

Fried shared a similar perspective: “I spent 40 years in the State Department, and we didn’t collect names or demand email records,” he said. “I’ve never encountered anything like this—in the American context, at least. It does remind me of Eastern European ‘Communist Party minder[s] watching over the untrusted bureaucracy.’”

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