Official Trump Swamp Thread: Still Corrupt as Fuck

WakeForestRanger said:

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Pack was finally confirmed, on a party-line vote, on June 4. A few days later he arranged, with a ghoulishly Orwellian touch, for the removal of a portrait of his popular predecessor, John Lansing, who departed the building last autumn. Quotes from a Lansing speech that had been painted on the wall beside the picture—“Since our country’s founding, journalists and journalism have stood watch over private and public officials to hold them accountable”—were painted over, causing some to wonder whether the sentiment was going to be erased as well. Then, on the evening of June 17, Pack fired the heads of all the networks, plus many senior staff, in a series of curt emails.

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Equally unprecedented was Pack’s decisions to freeze all spending and to replace all of the organizations’ bipartisan boards with six people, including himself, who appear to have been selected for no discernible reason beyond ideological purity. Among these freshly minted political commissars are Rachel Semmel, who has used her position as spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget to provide caustic responses to questions about Trump’s disputed decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine; Bethany Kozma, who has brought her anti-abortion-rights activism to USAID; and Jonathan Alexandre, senior counsel for Liberty Counsel, an organization dedicated to “religious freedom” that once threatened legal action against a Jacksonville, Florida, library for holding a Harry Potter event, on the grounds that this constituted promotion of witchcraft.

None of these new board members has any background in international broadcasting. None of them has worked in any of the most relevant geographic areas (Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, the Middle East) or in the world of anti-censorship technology. I asked a spokesperson for the new Agency for Global Media leadership about them—he would not go on the record—and all he would say in their defense was that they are “interim.” He refused to say whether the institution intends to create bipartisan boards in the future.

How is it possible that a critically important, multimillion-dollar U.S.-government-funded institution could be hijacked by the extremist and most ideological wing of a single political party? Here the story gets worse, for it seems to have happened in a congressional fit of absentmindedness. Some in Congress and around Washington had indeed talked for a long time about disbanding the bipartisan board and giving the USAGM a proper CEO, but many wanted guardrails in place, some further guarantees of ongoing bipartisanship. Congressman Ed Royce, then Chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, tucked his version of the law—with nothing but a powerless “advisory board” to oversee the CEO—into the authorization of the 2017 defense budget. By the time others noticed, it was too late, I was told, to pick apart the whole bill. When President Barack Obama signed the legislation in December 2016, he expressed concerns about the constitutionality of this particular provision. In theory, new rules could be written to restrain Pack; in practice, with so much else going on, this isn’t going to happen.

David W. Blight: The United States is being taught by facts and events

Thus has the U.S. taken some of its most powerful foreign-policy tools—technology that helps people in repressive countries access the internet; video and audio programs that are crucial to the fight against disinformation; trusted journalists who bring real news to people in closed societies—and stupidly handed them over to a bunch of people who don’t understand them, or may even intend to abuse them. This method of taking over an independent institution—fire all of its senior leadership, get rid of experts, bring in pliable ideologues—is well known in many of the countries where RFE/RL and RFA have long worked. Senator Robert Menendez, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and an opponent of Pack’s confirmation, told me that “pushing a partisan or political editorial agenda through a governing structure of hyper-partisan appointees risks making the USAGM no better than the state-run media outlets in the countries in which it operates.” I watched a group of extremists destroy Polish state media in 2015, and I am sorry to say that it wasn’t at all different.

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Or maybe the idea is to help Trump politically, at home. This would be illegal: An act of Congress passed in 1948 explicitly prohibits U.S.-government-funded foreign-information services from making programs targeted at domestic audiences. But the act’s strictures were eased somewhat in 2013, and it’s very hard to enforce: In a digital world, it’s impossible to stop domestic audiences from reading the material put out by VOA online. As he grows less enamored of Fox News, Trump may want something that he can control completely. If Pack can produce the rough equivalent of “Trump TV,” then the president will finally have a true state media at his command and no longer need to rely on Rupert Murdoch.

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Deacon923 said:

This is a truly disturbing development.

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WakeForestRanger said:

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