Under louche KERI LAKE, VOA is undermining democracy. Our mystifying misguided St. Johns County Republicans feted this fetid fascist at a 2023 fundraiser. Hang your heads in shame for supporting her unAmerican activities. Pray for them. From Washington Post;
Kari Lake moves to consolidate her power to dismantle Voice of America
The Arizonan, an ally of President Trump, has managed to lock out her nominal boss and is trying to dispatch VOA’s director to North Carolina.
Lake, a former TV journalist in Phoenix, came on the national stage in recent years with two unsuccessful runs for higher office — first for Arizona governor in 2022 and then for a U.S. Senate seat from the same state last year. When she lost, President Donald Trump brought her to Washington and asked her to run Voice of America, the government broadcaster that has disseminated pro-democracy news into foreign countries since 1942.
ut before Lake could become the director of VOA, Trump fired a Senate-confirmed advisory board in charge of adding and removing the agency’s director. That means the position is still held by Abramowitz, a former Washington Post journalist.
Still, under Trump’s direction, Lake has assumed control of the agency as the senior adviser to the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, though the people told The Post she recently moved into a new position as deputy CEO. In that role, she terminated more than 500 personal services contractors at the agency and sent a reduction-in-force notice to more than 600 others, many of which have been rescinded because of processing errors and haven’t been reissued. Lake has said she wants to run the agency at its “statutory minimum.”
In a new filing in federal court, Abramowitz laid out details of the effort to move him to a new position outside Washington. On July 7, according to the filing, Abramowitz received an email from a human resources staffer asking him to join a call the next morning. On that call, he was told he was being reassigned to a role at a transmitting station in Greenville, overseen by the USAGM. That afternoon, Morales sent Abramowitz a letter — included in court documents — saying that he would be removed from his current role effective Sept. 6 and that he had to accept this assignment or be “subject to removal under adverse action procedures.”
“Absent from the letter and the call was one thing: Any mention of the Advisory Board. It had not voted. Its members had been fired. It sits vacant. It had played no role in Director Abramowitz’s removal decision,” Abramowitz’s lawyers wrote in the filing. As such, they contend, the leave-or-be-fired order is illegal under the Administrative Procedures Act.
Neither Lake nor the Justice Department responded to requests for comment.
Abramowitz said he had no further comment beyond the court documents, but in an email message to VOA staff on Wednesday, he told them about Lake’s demand to move him out of his post, saying his lawyers called it “plainly illegal.”
“I can’t say much about the details of the case beyond what is laid out in the court filing,” he wrote. “But I do want to stress that this action is not about me personally but about preserving the rule of law and fulfilling VOA’s vital mission of delivering fact-based news and information about America to the world.”
Morales has also found himself in a strange position. Conservative media critic L. Brent Bozell III was Trump’s pick to be CEO of the USAGM. But after Trump issued an executive order on March 14 ordering the USAGM to be dismantled, Bozell’s nomination for Senate confirmation was withdrawn and he was nominated instead to be U.S. ambassador to South Africa. That left Morales, a senior policy adviser who had stepped in as acting CEO, in nominal charge of the agency.
When Voice of America staffers sued the agency, contending it was illegal for the president to unilaterally dismantle an agency that Congress created and funds, Lake was a named defendant — and so was Morales. He has become the highest-ranking civil servant left at the agency, but several individuals said Morales has signed orders officially delegating his authority as the agency chief to Lake.
Through her actions this week, Lake has effectively pushed out the person whose powers she is using to run the agency.
While Morales was the nominal head of the agency, he was limited by how long he could stay in an acting capacity — eventually, the agency would need a Senate-confirmed CEO. (The previous one was Amanda Bennett, who served under President Joe Biden and stepped down in January.)
Morales was also repeatedly sidelined from decision-making, according to the people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. Reached by phone Wednesday, Morales declined to comment.
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