Inquiry Finds That Bannon Ally Hired To Ratf*ck VOA Was Total Ratf*cking Hack

Whodathunk that a guy like that would enact illegal loyalty purges?

Within two hours of his inauguration, President Joe Biden demanded and received the resignation of Michael Pack, the Bannon ally Trump put in charge of the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) in June of 2020. There's a reason that getting rid of Pack was one of Biden's first priorities. And that reason was that, in less than eight months, the documentary filmmaker unleashed a partisan purge and undermined independence of media outlets, giving Americans a pretty fair idea of what Republicans will ever do if they ever gain control of the executive branch again and are allowed to gut civil service protections as promised.

Pack released a hagiography of Justice Clarence Thomas in 2019. And if you're wondering if it's the same movie where the judge waxed lyrical about his love of camping out in Walmart parking lots because "I come from regular stock, and I prefer that," while omitting to mention the half a million dollars in annual vacations he was taking courtesy of a rightwing billionaire — AYUP!

PREVIOUSLY: Biden Replaces 'Voice Of America' GOP Hacks With All The Journos They Fired 

Immediately after Pack was confirmed to head USAGM, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and other US government media networks, he fired the heads of all the networks run by the agency, as well as many of the networks' top staff and replaced them with MAGA shills. Robert Reilly, author of such books as Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything and The Closing of the Muslim Mind , became head of the VOA, while former Redstate blogger Victoria Coates was put in charge of Middle East Broadcast Networks. Pack also put a ban on hiring new staff, refused to extend the visas of non-citizen correspondents, rescinded rules meant to protect USAGM journalists from political interference, and compiled lists of journalists to fire for the crime of being "not on Team Trump." He also demoted White House correspondent Patsy Widakuswara because she had the temerity to ask Mike Pompeo a question. 

Pack defended these actions to The Federalist as part of his mission "to drain the swamp, to root out corruption and to deal with these issues of bias."

Longtime agency stalwarts pointed out that the partisan purge was illegal, not to mention bad policy, and seven USAGM executives filed a whistleblower complaint in September 2020. Pack immediately revoked their security clearances on the theory that those clearances had been "improperly adjudicated," and put the employees on leave. He then dispatched the white shoe law firm McGuire Woods to comb through the whistleblowers' emails looking for post hoc justification for their removal, at a cost of $1.6 million, despite the fact that the agency had its own in-house lawyers for that job. That triggered yet another whistleblower complaint and a lawsuit.

As reported by NPR's David Folkenflik last year, the State Department Inspector General found that outsourcing the legal work amounted to "serious violations of federal law and regulation" and "waste or gross waste of government resources." And a just-published February report by the Office of Special Counsel on the agency's own investigation and remediation measures goes even further.

As summarized in a highly readable letter to the president, the OSC lays out nine categories of "Major Findings of Wrongdoing." These include:

• Retaliation against the whistleblowers by "us[ing] the mechanism of suspension of security clearances (as opposed to removing the executives by other means) to circumvent otherwise available procedural protections and legal restrictions on removal of executives."

• Violations of the Privacy Act by dispatching the outside lawyers to comb through the whistleblowers communications to compile dossiers on them which were then distributed "to newly appointed network board members" — read: Pack's cronies — "who were also active journalists.

• "Gross mismanagement and a gross waste of funds" as well as contracting irregularities in hiring the outside law firm "to conduct pretextual, retaliatory investigations."

• Abuse of grant funds to punish disfavored recipients in manner apparently "motivated by animus ... rather than a desire to protect the public interest."

• Breaching the firewall protecting journalists' independent reporting.

• Restricting employees disclosures in an effort to stifle whistleblowing.

All of which is BAD and GROSS and exactly what Republicans are planning to do to the entire federal government if they get Trump back into the White House in 2025. The Heritage Foundation is already paying Trump's body man turned loyalty enforcer Johnny McEntee to staff up a government of MAGA loyalists in waiting, and Trump tried once to abolish civil service protections by executive fiat . They want a pure spoils system where the president is entitled to gut the civil bureaucracy and install hacks beholden only to him. That's what they mean when they say they're "taking on the Deep State."

And in the words of Maya Angelou, "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

[ NPR ]

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