Donald Trump wants Kari Lake to run Voice of America. That’s not his call.

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Donald Trump wants Kari Lake to run Voice of America. That’s not his call.

President-elect Donald Trump’s

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that he wants Kari Lake

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was heavy with his usual bombastic nonsense but light on details for how she might actually get the job.

Trump proclaimed Lake as the solution to “lies spread by the Fake News Media.” But he doesn’t have the power to install her atop that federal agency.

Congress took that power from presidents at the very end of Trump’s first term in 2021,

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that included this reform.

Why was that reform needed? Well Michael Pack,

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to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, served as an agent of partisan chaos and controversy in

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.

It seems clear that Lake, who spent the past two years pretending she won a race for governor in Arizona

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, has been selected to pick up where Pack left off. But only if she can win support from a majority of the

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, which Congress empowered

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like the director for Voice of America (VOA).

So Trump’s latest attempt to disrupt a federal agency with political shenanigans will run headlong into congressional action created to effectively curtail that sort of foolishness.

Kari Lake isn’t going to be in charge of Voice of America anytime soon

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake campaigns in Prescott, Ariz., on Nov. 4, 2024.

The advisory board, by law, has seven seats ‒ three Democratic appointees, three Republican appointees and the U.S. secretary of State (or that official’s designee.) The U.S. Senate finally got around

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.

U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican Trump selected as the next secretary of State, still needs to be confirmed by his colleagues in the Senate.

What’s clear here is that Lake, if she gets the job, isn’t going to be in charge anytime soon. She may act as if the job is already hers, just as she cosplayed being a shadow governor. But the law is the law.

Opinion: With Kari Lake as Voice of America head, Trump now has his MAGA propaganda arm

David Seide, an attorney with the nonprofit public interest law firm Government Accountability Project, has represented whistleblowers from the Agency for Global Media and its outlets. He said Trump suggested Lake for VOA instead of appointing her to head the agency because that post requires Senate approval. He didn’t think Lake could win support in the Senate.

One of the whistleblowers Seide represented is

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, now a Republican appointee to the International Broadcasting Advisory Board. Fly, who previously led the agency’s Radio Free Europe,

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to the House Foreign Affairs Committee about how Pack fired him that June along with other outlet directors in a political purge.

Fly’s testimony called on Congress to institute reforms for how those outlet directors are hired and fired. That’s the legislation that went into effect after Congress overrode Trump’s veto.

Trump seems committed to testing congressional enforcement

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake campaign in Prescott Valley, Ariz., on Oct. 13, 2024.

It’s important to note that this congressional reform is a new and untested guardrail for democracy. And Trump loves nothing more than ******** the car against those kinds of guardrails, testing for weaknesses. Here, Lake could be his latest ****** test ******.

A key component in the mission for Voice of America is a “

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” in place for 30 years that “prohibits interference by any U.S. government official in the objective, independent reporting of news.”

Based on their combined history, I don’t think Trump or Lake will much care for that kind of restriction.

“The challenge for Kari Lake is, by law, she must comply with the editorial independence requirements,” Seide told me, while also suggesting that it’s unlikely to happen. “She’s obviously being put there to blow up the agency.”

If Lake lands the job, the Government Accountability Project will be listening for whistleblowers if it all goes awry. And by if, I do mean when.

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The Office of Special Counsel last year released a report detailing and confirming several serious complaints made by whistleblowers about Pack’s actions while he led the Agency for Global Media. It concluded that Pack’s “improper activities” amounted to things such as “an abuse of authority” and “

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, rule, or regulation.”

The past feels like a prologue here. I read about things Pack did and can totally envision Lake doing more of the same.

Lake is exactly what Trump wants ‒ somebody with zero commitment to facts

The Agency for Global Media isn’t some ham radio operation piping hope into the homes of people living under dictatorships. It’s six networks, with a budget of $944 million,

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in 100 countries, listening in 64 languages.

Trump treats government agencies like a petulant boy on Christmas morning eager to smash to pieces his newest toys. Lake, a former television news anchor who just

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in Arizona, has long amplified and duplicated Trump’s lies about rigged elections.

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She’s also spent the past

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for reporting things

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. Just like Trump, if the news doesn’t serve up exactly want she wants, then it’s all “fake.”

Lake can whinge and wail all she wants about the media. But if she gets this job, she’ll be a media executive under intense scrutiny in an organization that has already proved to be staffed with people willing to call out improper behavior.

The International Broadcasting Advisory Board should think long and hard about whether it wants to enable the kind of openly obstreperous management it was created to prevent.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:

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#Donald #Trump #Kari #Lake #run #Voice #America #call

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