In the letter, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) raised concerns to Secretary of State Antony Blinken over “the outright censorship of Americans by the State Department under your tenure.”

The House Republican zeroed in on the agency’s Global Engagement Center, slamming the Biden-Harris administration for crafting internal press guidance that Issa argued was used to “smear” Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) and reporters covering the GEC’s ties to apparent censorship efforts in the United States.

“By smearing anyone who disagrees with it as a Russian stooge, this network conflates U.S. citizens with a U.S. adversary, as State Department talking points did to my colleague Representative Jim Banks and the award-winning journalists Gabe Kaminsky and Matt Taibbi in a scheming sleight of hand that ruled out of bounds political opinions and fact-based reporting it opposed but cannot refute,” Issa wrote in the letter to Blinken late Tuesday.

The letter comes after Banks sent his own letter earlier this month to Blinken over the 2023 press guidance. The Indiana Republican opened an investigation into a “sloppy and hypocritical lie” from the State Department over it appearing to try to link him falsely to Russia in the press guidance.

The leaked press guidance was first reported on earlier this month by the New York Post. It was issued internally to determine how to respond to Washington Examiner reporting on the GEC’s funding of a British group blacklisting conservative media outlets from advertising dollars, as well as Taibbi’s “Twitter Files” coverage of the GEC seeking to counter alleged COVID-19 disinformation.

The press guidance included a misquotation from Banks that appeared in a Russian media outlet covering a 2023 story by the Washington Examiner on the GEC. In the original quote, which Banks had given to the Washington Examiner last year, the lawmaker raised concerns over the GEC’s $100,000 grant in 2021 to the Global Disinformation Index, a group targeting outlets in the U.S.

“The intentional misquotation gives the impression that I had been speaking with a Russian propaganda outlet,” Banks told Blinken in his letter.

In his letter this week, Issa told Blinken that the GEC’s assertions that it “does not engage in domestic activity” are untrue. The GEC, an interagency group working with the Defense Department and other agencies, is mandated to act internationally.

But Republicans say the GEC’s funding of the Global Disinformation Index, among other groups, shows that it has unjustly become involved with domestic censorship groups — which the GEC has long denied. A provision through the annual State Department appropriations bill, which passed the House this summer and will be negotiated in the Senate, seeks to prohibit future funding to the GEC over the funding to GDI.

Earlier this month, the Republican-led House Small Business Committee published a report on the GEC that argued the interagency group promoted “tech start-ups and other small businesses in the disinformation detection space to private sector entities with domestic censorship capabilities.”

“The GEC is too intertwined with this ecosystem to be reformed, particularly as a matter of grants, outlook, and staffing,” Issa wrote in the letter. “The United States critically needs a peacetime information function that counters with the truth the increasingly sophisticated adversaries opposed to America’s national interest. A functional State department would begin the overdue task of working in good faith with Congress to craft an enduring, credible solution.”

“Mr. Secretary: It is time for this failed entity to be held accountable. It is time to bring an end to the Global Engagement Center,” Issa added.