It didn't take long for a federal government agency originally designed to censor certain foreign entities and curate their narratives on terrorism to be turned on Americans.Then-President Barack Obama issued an executive order in 2011 establishing the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications within the State Department — an agency tasked initially with "using communication tools to reduce radicalization by terrorists and extremist violence and terrorism that threaten the interests and national security of the United States."Obama broadened the mission of the agency and renamed it the Global Engagement Center in another executive order just months prior to President Donald Trump's electoral victory in 2016.'Greatest level of disinformation risk.'The Global Engagement Center — overseen by a steering committee of deep-state officials, codified into law in the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, and afforded both grant-making authorities and the ability to "leverage expertise from outside the federal government" — eventually became, as one former intelligence source told investigative reporter Matt Taibbi, "an incubator for the domestic disinformation complex."In the final days of the first Trump presidency, the deep state and its censorship contractors — desperate to control the narratives about the 2020 presidential election and the COVID-19 virus — apparently turned this "disinformation complex" on Blaze Media in a proof-of-concept test.According to discovery evidence gleaned by the Federalist in a now-settled case against the government, the Global Engagement Center backed a trial targeting Blaze Media and the free speech it platforms, despite concerns at the State Department about possibly censoring an American company with an American audience in contravention of the agency's foreign-focused mandate.Damning discoveriesThe Global Engagement Center — which Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged "actively silenced and censored the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving" — was nominally closed in January 2025, then effectively killed by the Trump administration last April under its final name, the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub.Two years prior to the agency's demise, the Federalist and several other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the Global Engagement Center and the State Department.RELATED: The trial lawyers come for online free speech Artur Debat/Getty ImagesThe lawsuit accused the government of actively intervening in the news media market through the Global Engagement Center "to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press."Prior to negotiating a deal with the State Department and settling the case last week, the Federalist obtained discovery evidence confirming that the Global Engagement Center had regularly backed and promoted censorial technologies including NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index.Blaze Media previously reported that NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index generated blacklists of supposedly risky or misleading news outfits with the aim of getting them demonetized and directing funds to news organizations that advanced establishment narratives.In the Global Disinformation Index's fall 2022 report, for example, NPR, the Washington Post, and other liberal news outfits were labeled as the "least risky sites," whereas Blaze Media, Reason, the Federalist, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, and other conservative publications made the top 10 list of "riskiest sites" and were smeared as having the "greatest level of disinformation risk."It turns out that Blaze Media was targeted for more than just a blacklist.Testing AmericansIn an August 2020 press release, NewsGuard showcased that it and two other technology companies — PeakMetrics and Omelas — had won a $25,000 contract earlier that year offered jointly by the State Department and the Pentagon to develop solutions that would help the departments evaluate "disinformation narrative themes in near real time 'by identifying online sources spreading COVID-19 disinformation or misinformation narratives.'"The Federalist obtained evidence that these Global Engagement Center-funded companies ran a test from Dec. 14, 2020, until Jan. 7, 2021, wherein Blaze Media was apparently a featured target.The Global Engagement Center reportedly explained ahead of time that the test would entail PeakMetrics "first identify[ing] popular yet potentially divisive narratives relevant to the U.S.