DOJ Seeks Dismissal of Press Censorship Allegations vs. State Department

Article III ensures that federal courts don’t become forums for venting public grievances, but the complaint alleging that the State Department is running an egregious campaign censoring the right-leaning press “violates that foundational constitutional principle in textbook fashion,” said DOJ’s motion to dismiss Monday (docket 6:23-cv-00609) in U.S. District Court for Eastern Texas in Tyler.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and the Daily Wire and Federalist media outlets allege in their Dec. 6 complaint that the State Department, through its Global Engagement Center (GEC), "is actively intervening" to render "disfavored" press outlets unprofitable by funding the marketing and promotion of "censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press" (see 2312060043). Named as defendants are Secretary of State Antony Blinken and five other State Department officials.

The plaintiffs’ claims of injury suffer from a “central Article III problem,” said the motion. They depend entirely on “a sequence of independent actions” by private third parties that aren’t before the court, it said.

Even accepting the complaint’s allegations as true, the “speculative chain of possibilities” that the plaintiffs describe can’t establish any injury-in-fact that’s “traceable” to the defendants’ conduct or redressable by the court, it said. The court should thus “dismiss the complaint on its face for lack of jurisdiction,” 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.

GEC’s funding and support of the only two private entities that the plaintiffs identify in their complaint -- the Global Disinformation Index and NewsGuard -- “focused exclusively on developing technologies to combat foreign malign disinformation aimed at undermining the policies, security, or stability” of the U.S. and its “foreign allies and partners overseas,” said the motion. That funding didn’t support those entities’ separate products that purportedly caused the plaintiffs’ claimed injuries, it said.

Texas independently lacks standing for multiple reasons, said the motion. The plaintiffs fail to explain how the defendants’ funding of technology aimed at countering foreign disinformation “has interfered with Texas’s ability to enforce a law that regulates content-moderation on social media platforms,” it said. Nor have the defendants interfered with Texas’ ability to enforce that law “since it has never been in effect, because it is enjoined,” it said.

Even if the plaintiffs could establish standing, their Administrative Procedure Act claim should be dismissed because the plaintiffs haven’t identified “any final agency action or actions that they challenge,” said the motion. That’s “a jurisdictional requirement” in the 5th Circuit, it said. The court should dismiss the claims against the “official capacity” defendants because those claims merge with the plaintiffs’ claims against the agency defendants, “and are thus unnecessarily duplicative,” it said.