DOJ Urges Dismissal of Censorship Complaint vs. State Department for Lack of Standing

The allegations of the Daily Wire, Federalist Media and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) that the State Department and its Global Engagement Center (CEG) have engaged in a “widespread government censorship regime” to stifle right-leaning media “are laden with hyperbole and lack any factual support or basis in the law,” said DOJ’s response Friday (docket 6:23-cv-00609) in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas in Tyler in opposition to the plaintiffs’ Feb. 6 motion for a preliminary injunction (see 2402080044). GEC is an office tasked by Congress “with an essential foreign policy mission to respond to urgent, novel, and rapidly evolving threats from disinformation campaigns waged by America’s foreign adversaries,” said DOJ. Congress recognized that technology is critical to GEC’s mission “because the overwhelming majority of disinformation from foreign state and non-state actors is spread online,” it said. The plaintiffs’ claims “suffer from a central Article III problem,” it said. “As a threshold matter, the complaint should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction,” it said. Even accepting the complaint’s allegations as true, the speculative chain of possibilities that they describe can’t establish any injury-in-fact that’s certainly impending and traceable to the defendants’ conduct or redressable by the court, it said. The plaintiffs’ theory of standing also can’t survive a factual attack under Rule 12(b)(1), “because multiple links in their alleged causal chain are conclusively contradicted by the record,” it said.