The Biden administration is bankrolling a little-known foreign group to thwart “disinformation” in media, despite Congress exerting pressure on Democrats over similar initiatives GOP lawmakers have equated to state-sponsored “censorship,” records reveal.
For a program running until May 2024, the State Department has pledged $24,000 in taxpayer dollars to ESTIMA, a nonprofit organization in the southeast European country of North Macedonia, to “build capacity and resilience among media and journalists to address foreign disinformation and strengthen the media space against malign influence,” according to financial disclosures. ESTIMA, which employs ex-North Macedonian government aides in the landlocked country of around 2 million people, has also partnered with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, an office facing congressional investigations following reporting from the Washington Examiner on it funding the London-based Global Disinformation Index aiming to strip revenue from conservative media outlets.
The federally-funded “disinformation” program, which comes after the GEC supported an ESTIMA initiative from September 2020 to March 2021 to counter alleged “false narratives” surrounding COVID-19, is a window into how the U.S. government frequently steers money to overseas entities purporting to be taking steps to debunk certain online discourse. Republicans often decry these initiatives as running contrary to free speech and disproportionately targeting conservatives, but Democrats hold that they are unbiased and essential due to foreign policy concerns.
ESTIMA notes on its website that the 2023 program “is motivated by the current situation where Russia and China seem to be joining forces to undermine democracies and freedom of expression around the world.” At the same time, lawmakers have grown increasingly skeptical of the State Department’s ability to facilitate projects thwarting “disinformation” due to the agency steering cash to groups such as GDI that are overtly partisan and rhetorically attacking conservatives.
The U.S. Embassy in Skopje is helping to implement the ESTIMA program, said ESTIMA President Ana Krstinovska, ex-state secretary for European Union affairs in North Macedonia.
“Freedom of expression is an integral part of the values we promote and is enshrined in our integrity code, available on our website,” Krstinovska said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “Our work aims to ensure pluralism and we strongly denounce censorship. We do not deal with ‘speech we agree or disagree’ with, as we do not assess or impose opinions, nor [do] we do fact-checking. We are scientists who do research using rigorous methodology and we share our findings to contribute to the pluralism of the scholarly and public debate in our area of expertise.”
Still, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), who sits on the House Oversight Committee, is skeptical of the initiative.
“I would never in a million years trust the Department of State to determine what foreign citizens can or cannot hear,” Grothman said. “I would not trust them on vaccines. I would not trust them to let the truth out on a wide variety of issues.”
In total, U.S. taxpayers footed an almost $50,000 bill to support ESTIMA in recent years, which also accounts for an October 2021 State Department award to the nonprofit group “to develop a comprehensive and values-based policy approach which will help the country to counter potentially negative influence and avoid sidelining democratic values in pursuit of potential economic interests,” according to government spending records.
ESTIMA, which was formed in 2016, maintains an advisory board including Francois Lafond, a former special adviser to the Serbian government, and Vesna Vasileva, a consultant for the United Nations, according to ESTIMA’s website. News of the grantee’s ties to foreign governments comes as GOP lawmakers particularly express concerns over apparent public-private sector coordination on censorship — a major theme behind the “Twitter Files,” a project that arose from sets of documents X’s Elon Musk provided to journalists on the company’s communications with U.S. officials about content moderation under ex-CEO Jack Dorsey.
Meanwhile, ESTIMA’s president appeared on a panel in Berlin in 2022 at an event organized by the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., a think tank House Republicans have investigated due to it housing Alliance for Securing Democracy, according to ESTIMA’s annual report in 2022. The program, known as ASD, launched a dashboard called Hamilton 68 to track alleged Russian disinformation, though “Twitter Files” reporting revealed that then-Twitter trust and safety head Yoel Roth in 2018 emailed his colleagues at the time asserting Hamilton 68 “falsely accuses a bunch of legitimate right-leaning accounts of being Russian bots.”
ASD spokesman Irvin McCullough has said Hamilton 68 was not used with government funding and “drew 100 percent of its revenue from private philanthropic foundations and individual donors.” Hamilton 68, which Roth told his colleagues in 2018 “is actively damaging and promotes polarization and distrust through its shoddy methodology,” counts its founder as Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent who is a national security analyst contributor for MSNBC and general manager for Microsoft’s threat analysis center, according to Watts’s LinkedIn profile and his biography on file with the Senate Intelligence Committee.
German Marshall Fund-affiliated personnel and individuals affiliated with think tanks such as the Atlantic Council, whose digital forensic research lab partnered on the 2021 GEC grant that saw the Global Disinformation Index receive $100,000 from the U.S. government, have repeatedly written articles on the website of China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe — which says it counts Krstinovska as a research fellow. In 2021, the Atlantic Council’s research lab notably sent then-Twitter’s Roth a list of roughly 40,000 accounts suspected of engaging in “Hindu nationalism” with the goal of getting Twitter to engage in content moderation, though, according to “Twitter Files” journalist Matt Taibbi, “the list was full of ordinary Americans, many with no connection to India and no clue about Indian politics.”
“It should trouble all Americans if there are shadow campaigns funded by government agencies that are preventing their business to succeed online simply because of their viewpoints,” Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX), chairman of the House Small Business Committee, which is seeking to obtain grant records from the GEC as part of a sweeping “censorship” investigation, told the Washington Examiner.
The GOP-led committee could be nearing subpoena territory due to the GEC purportedly not complying with requests and sending Congress “incomplete” federal records, according to a source familiar with the discussions. A spokesperson for the State Department told the Washington Examiner the agency “is committed to being responsive to congressional oversight and continues to work with the House Small Business Committee on its requests,” adding, “However, as a general matter, we do not comment on our communications with Congress.”
Beyond fighting alleged disinformation, ESTIMA appears to have had another priority: advising North Macedonians “how to attract private Chinese investors,” according to a February 2020 blog post authored by Krstinovska.
“Are you a government official working on attracting FDI?” Krstinovska wrote in the post. “Or a company seeking to raise extra capital? Are you looking for new business opportunities in bringing private Chinese companies over to your country? Read more about what attracts Chinese investors here.”
According to the ESTIMA leader, investors in the communist-run country gravitate toward “stability and predictability,” “familiarity and trust,” “capacity, professionalism and integrity of your team,” and, lastly, “government support and incentives.”
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“If you want to attract and maintain Chinese investments, you should make sure that you hire the right people to work with you,” Krstinovska wrote in the post. “If you work in government, make sure that you establish a competent team and a solid management system.”
The Washington Examiner reached out for comment to the State Department about its ESTIMA support.