Senior State Department official sought internal communications with journalists, European officials, and Trump critics

The document also seeks all staff communications that merely reference Trump or people in his orbit, like Alex Jones, Glenn Greenwald, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In addition, it directs a search of communications for a long list of keywords, including “Pepe the Frog,” “incel,” “q-anon,” “Black Lives Matter,” “great replacement theory,” “far-right,” and “infodemic.” For several people who received or saw the document, the broad requests for unredacted information felt like a “witch hunt,” one official says—one that could put the privacy and security of numerous individuals and organizations at risk. Beattie, whom Trump appointed in February to be the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy, told State Department officials that his goal in seeking these records was a “Twitter files”-like release of internal State Department documents “to rebuild trust with the American public,” according to a State Department employee who heard the remarks. (Beattie was referring to the internal Twit ... Read full article.