The Trump Admin’s Own Investigators Found No EU Internet Censorship. So They Ignored The Findings.

The Washington Post just published a deeply reported story about the Trump administration’s campaign to ‘expand free speech’ in Europe. That headline alone should tell you something about how the story is framed — it takes the administration’s self-description at face value, as though we’re watching some noble effort to export the First Amendment across the Atlantic. But if you get past the incredibly misleading headline, the actual reporting reveals quite an admission from within the administration, and it fundamentally undercuts everything they’ve been doing supposedly regarding ‘EU internet censorship.’ The story reveals that the Trump administration ran its own investigation into EU censorship, found nothing , and then barreled ahead with the entire crusade anyway. Worth repeating, because it’s the whole story (even if WaPo buried it with their headline): the Trump admin investigated ‘EU censorship.’ The Trump admin came up empty . And then the administration just kept going as if it were undeniable that what their own investigators couldn’t find must have happened anyway. The Post’s opening gets to it relatively quickly, but treats it as mere scene-setting rather than the incredible revelation it actually is: ‘There is no evidence.’ That’s the conclusion of the Trump administration’s own investigators, put in writing. And then, an even more remarkable quote from someone involved: ‘It was not politically convenient that we could not find anything.’ That is quite an admission. A government official is telling you directly that the conclusions were inconvenient, and therefore irrelevant. The investigation was entirely about manufacturing justification for a policy that was already decided. When the justification didn’t materialize, they just ignored it and moved forward anyway. This is the hallucination presidency in action: when the facts don’t match the narrative, just assert the narrative anyway and hope no one checks. The Washington Post, to its credit, did the hard reporting here and obtained those quotes. But the headline (‘Inside the Trump administration’s campaign to expand ‘free speech’ in Europe’) and subhed (‘The United States has banned some European researchers from entering the country and dismantled federal programs intended to fight foreign disinformation campaigns’) describe the administration’s actions without conveying the most explosive finding of the piece: that the evidentiary foundation for all of these actions does not exist . The actual story here is far bigger than the Post’s framing lets on. Because here’s what the administration did after its own investigators told them there was no evidence of EU censorship: pretty much everything you could imagine a government would do if it had found evidence. Yes, there is literally going to be a government website with a Paul Revere figure galloping over the words ‘Freedom is coming.’ Your tax dollars at work. There is a certain kind of person in government who genuinely confuses propaganda aesthetics with policy substance, and this is a pristine example. The State Department’s official response to the Post is also worth noting for its brazenness: They’re claiming they ‘never concluded’ that the DSA wasn’t censorship — even though their own staffers put it in writing that they found no evidence of censorship. The scare quotes around ‘concluded’ are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. They’re trying to gaslight their own investigation. Now, I want to be clear about something. I have been critical of aspects of the DSA for years. There are real concerns about how expansive content regulation can be abused — by governments on either side of the Atlantic. When former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton tried to use the DSA to pressure Elon Musk into not platforming Donald Trump, I called it out as