Kari Lake, a Republican election denier who was previously appointed as senior adviser to Voice of America’s parent agency, is now heading to the State Department instead.
The shift follows the Donald Trump move to completely dismantle VOA and its parent, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), through an executive order supported by Tesla billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Lake is part of the Trump administration’s first high-profile shuffle for a political appointee, reported The Washington Post Wednesday.
“VOA’s foreign audiences must be puzzled as to why the VOA is no longer broadcasting to them,” Robert Reilly, who served as a special assistant to former President Ronald Reagan and was the director of VOA twice, told the Daily Beast. “Perhaps, they might think, it no longer considers them worth reaching, or perhaps it no longer has anything to say. Either answer is a self-inflicted public diplomacy disaster. What has happened to our ‘decent respect to the opinions of mankind’?”
Reilly, a former diplomat who also served as director during Trump’s first term, added, “The U.S. has enduring interests in the world. We need to explain ourselves in the most persuasive way we can, and by the most effective means, particularly to those peoples and countries whose future is going to most affect ours. Destroying the Voice of America is not the way to do this.”
Lake, an election conspiracist who frequently demonizes the media, was appointed to lead Voice of America in December. The media organization prides itself on political objectivity and freedom of speech, and many worried that Lake—a former Fox 10 news anchor who lost the Arizona Senate race—would steer VOA to the right.
In December, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Lake would “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.” Lake told her colleagues that she wanted to transform VOA into a “weapon” to fight an “information war.”
But she never got the chance. Musk launched an ambush on VOA as part of his move to slash the federal government and he and Trump effectively gutted the organization. Lake never became VOA director and was instead named senior adviser to USAGM with an uncertain role.
The Trump administration has not commented on whether Lake will ever become VOA’s director or whether the president aims to take VOA down for good. But Lake’s new role will help her coordinate with the USAGM and State Department to scale back the outlet, which has held decades of prominence for maintaining independence from the U.S. government and warding off political interference.
VOA was founded in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda and as of December its weekly viewership was 354 million people.
At the Republican National Convention last year Lake called journalists “monsters” and slammed the “fake news” for spending “the last eight years lying about President Donald Trump.” She believes that Trump is the true winner of the 2020 election and refused to concede her own loss in the 2022 Senate election, even after losing several court battles where she contested the results.
The Washington Post reported that Lake’s new role could take effect as early as this week.
“I remain committed to effectuating President Trump’s mission to modernize and reform the way we tell America’s story around the world while protecting the interest of the American taxpayer,” she said in a statement to The Washington Post on Tuesday. “In order to do that effectively, we look forward to working with interagency counterparts including the Department of State under the strong leadership of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.”
In February Lake said that VOA was “worth trying to save.” In the weeks that have followed, about 3,500 journalists have been impacted by Trump’s decision to gut the agency. Federal judges have momentarily prevented the administration’s shutdown, ruling that they cannot destroy a news organization that Congress established by law.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the Trump administration for comment.
The post Kari Lake Gets New State Dept. Gig in Bid to Obliterate Voice of America appeared first on The Daily Beast.
