Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’s pick to be his disinformation chief said the department couldn’t even settle on a good definition of what “disinformation” actually is.

Nina Jankowicz, who was director of the Disinformation Governance Board for roughly three months before quitting in 2022 amid a firestorm of criticism, said in a newly released deposition to Congress that the department bungled the rollout of her job and then abandoned her when the going got tough.

She described dysfunction and confusion throughout, saying Mr. Mayorkas’s communications advisors vetoed her plans to brief Congress on her role, allowing her job to become a target of misinformation. She said she faced “tens of thousands of death threats” and had to hire a security consultant who told her she needed to leave her home, just weeks before she was due to give birth, to protect herself.

Ms. Jankowicz told the House Judiciary Committee in the April 2023 deposition that neither she nor the disinformation board were ever meant to be disinformation cops, policing what people said.

Indeed, she said one priority, cut short by her departure, was to get her colleagues to settle on a good definition for disinformation.

“I thought there was some pretty big gaps in terms of the understanding of the concept,” she said. “You can’t say that something is a bear if you don’t know what a bear looks like. So that’s where we were.

Ms. Jankowicz, who had studied foreign disinformation, was plucked by Mr. Mayorkas to be head of his new disinformation board in early 2022. She served for about eight weeks in secrecy, with Mr. Mayorkas only revealing the board in response to a question during a congressional hearing about what his department was doing to police disinformation aimed at Hispanic and Black voters.

The announcement was met with fury and dismay from the right, where lawmakers and activists said they didn’t trust the government, much less Mr. Mayorkas, to be a judge of truth and lies in the public debate. Some compared it to an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth.”

Roughly three weeks after he announced the board, Mr. Mayorkas suspended it and Ms. Jankowicz resigned. Months later Mr. Mayorkas quietly disbanded the board altogether.

“I was thrown under the bus to some degree,” she said in the transcript of her interview, which the House Judiciary Committee released Friday. “I had spent my career and a large portion of my own kind of personal capital doing work that I thought was important for the American people, and I did not want to risk further damage to that for an agency that clearly didn’t have my — even my safety at heart.”

She said she fought to have the department roll out the board and her own role as director in a more traditional manner, with briefings to Congress ahead of time and getting outside experts on board.

She said Mr. Mayorkas’s team rejected those ideas, forbade her from coming to Capitol Hill and ordered her to be vague in congressional briefings.

The Washington Times has reached out to Homeland Security for comment.

Ms. Jankowicz, from her new role as CEO of the American Sunlight Project, said she had fought to get Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan to release the transcript.

“Chairman Jordan clearly knows this transcript destroys their conspiracy theories, which is why he withheld it for so long and released it on a Friday evening. In doing so, the Committee attempted to distract from the revelations contained within it that are embarrassing to Chairman Jordan, including that he shared a manipulated video of me in an attempt to scare American citizens into believing his lies,” Ms. Jankowicz said in her new statement.

She said the board’s purview was never supposed to be an arbiter of truth. Instead, it was going to act as a traffic cop within the government, coordinating already ongoing work while insisting that privacy and other civil liberties be protected.

In her closed-door testimony to the committee, she portrayed the board as largely toothless. It lacked the authority to set budgets, had no permanent staff other than her, and had no authority to make operational decisions.

She also bristled at those who compared it to an Orwellian nightmare

“We had no intention to take anything down,” she said.

She also connected some of the threats she received to Mr. Jordan’s criticism of the board and of her.

She said he misled the country when he said she had cast doubt on Hunter Biden’s laptop and praised the “Steele dossier,”  a compilation of anti-Trump rumors that helped fuel the FBI’s bungled investigation into then-candidate Donald Trump.

“I never commented on the Steele dossier publicly, and I’m not going to comment on it today,” she told the committee.

Republicans confronted her with her social media posts where she did comment on the dossier and its origins, and where she suggested the Hunter Biden laptop story should be seen as “a Trump campaign” tactic.

She then told lawmakers she shouldn’t be judged by “cherry-picked tweets that have been used to defame me, and frankly have led to significant threats to me and my family because they’ve been taken out of context and without nuance.”

At one point in the deposition, Ms. Jankowicz led the panel in a discussion about disinformation, saying the definition used by the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, which had been the department’s leader on the subject, didn’t track with what she or others in the research community thought.

“CISA has one definition, and one of the things that occurred to me while I was at DHS is that different entities were dealing with different definitions. So that was one of the things that I had hoped to work on,” she said, calling CISA’s definition “overbroad.”

CISA’s definition said disinformation, misinformation and malinformation are all types of false information. But Ms. Jankowicz said malinformation can be true, but is released with ulterior motives. She cited strategic leaks as a form of malinformation.

Ms. Jankowicz said her first priority would have been combatting what she said was disinformation about the border.

“Saying that you could get citizenship upon crossing the border, or that, you know, there were human smugglers who were promising wild things to people who were making that journey, we wanted to understand it better,” she said.

She said that was the priority for her superiors.

It’s an issue she didn’t have much exposure to, so she invited some academics who specialize in migrants and disinformation to do a roundtable. She told lawmakers she couldn’t remember whom she invited and the meeting never happened.

Republicans said Ms. Jankowicz seemed to have clear recollections about her commitment to civil rights but was fuzzy on the things the GOP was interested in.

She responded: “The past year of my life has been a really difficult one. I gave birth a few weeks after I left government, and over the past year I have been subject to threats, stalking, and a number of other really stressful and difficult situations.”

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.