By Adam Taylor and Meg Kelly 

“Newly disclosed emails reveal confusion at the State Department during the Trump administration’s push last year to destroy almost $10 million worth of family planning commodities in a Belgian warehouse that were intended for distribution in some of the world’s poorest nations.

U.S. diplomats in the region were left in the dark about the supplies sitting in the warehouse in Geel, while a senior official privately shared erroneous information that suggested some of the contraceptives could be used to induce abortions.

In one email, a diplomat working at the U.S. Embassy to Belgium wrote to a colleague at the State Department in Washington “there is no one here that knows definitively what is in the warehouse,” after The Washington Post and other news organizations had reported that the facility housed contraceptives and HIV-prevention medications purchased by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

The exchange on August 13th is part of a tranche of dozens of internal emails and other internal documents from last summer that were released by the State Department after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Center for Reproductive Rights, an advocacy group based in New York City.”