#michael pack

Liz Dye at Public Notice:

During the first Trump administration, Trump put filmmaker Michael Pack, an associate of Steve Bannon's, in charge of the US Agency for Global Media. Pack fired the heads of Voice of America and the other networks under USAGM's purview, installed Trump loyalists on governing boards, paid a Republican-aligned law firm $1.6 million in a no-bid contract to compile dossiers on career executives, rescinded the rules protecting journalists from political interference, and blocked visa renewals for foreign journalists, suggesting they might be spies. This time around, it's worse.

A year ago, Trump signed an executive order targeting USAGM for destruction, along with several other “woke” agencies like the Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Each of these was created by Congress with a statutory mandate to do things and funded in the budget. Nonetheless, Trump demanded they “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

So far, he’s been unable to do it, thanks to the intervention of an 83-year-old Reagan appointee. And annoyingly, Congress refused to zero out funding for the media outlets, which have been a major source of American soft power since World War II. Now the president seems to be trimming his sails, hoping instead to turn USAGM into a North Korea-style state mouthpiece to broadcast MAGA propaganda worldwide.

Silencing America’s Voice

For more than 80 years, Voice of America and its sister networks, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Open Technology Fund, and Office of Cuba Broadcasting, have beamed high-quality media across the globe. In 2024, USAGM’s partners reached an average of 427 million people every week. Born as a counter-propaganda campaign against the Nazis, VOA outlasted the Soviet Union and transitioned to the digital age, fulfilling its statutory mandate to report the news accurately and independently, free from political interference. This put it crosswise with Trump, who routinely refers to the press as “the enemy of the people,” a term borrowed from Stalin.

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to put Kari Lake, Arizona’s sorest loser, in charge of VOA “to 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.” But the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, which must approve the VOA director, lacked a quorum after Trump fired most of its members. So in March of last year, Lake was installed as “Senior Adviser to the Acting CEO” of USAGM and later as Acting CEO, in flagrant disregard of the constitutional requirement that the CEO be confirmed by the Senate. Within 24 hours of the executive order, Lake had placed 1,042 of USAGM’s 1,147 full-time employees on leave, terminated contracts with 598 personal service contractors, and halted broadcasts to whole regions of the globe. In a cursory “Statutory Minimum Memorandum” devoid of any policy or legal analysis, Lake informed Congress that USAGM, an agency with an $882 million budget in 2024, could fulfill its statutory duties with a staff of just 68. Lake, who called USAGM “a rotten piece of fish” and a vector for foreign propaganda, proposed to replace much of its original reporting with broadcasts from such Trump-friendly outlets as One America News.

[...]

Burning down the firewall

The International Broadcasting Act requires the USAGM CEO to “respect the professional independence and integrity” of the agency’s journalists and prohibits political interference with editorial content. But Lake has been quite open about wanting to tear down this firewall. In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lake said, “We need to make sure the firewall is gone. We should be able to have control over what kind of content goes out. It should be in alignment with our foreign policy.” And last July, she warned that, “With the editorial firewall at Voice of America, they could go completely rogue, and the President couldn’t pick up the phone and stop them. There are no guardrails.”

[...]

On March 12, Trump nominated Sarah Rogers, currently Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, to serve as permanent CEO of USAGM . The previous CEO, Amanda Bennett, was a career journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize and went on to serve on the organization’s board, as well as the boards of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the German Marshall Fund, and the Neiman Fellowship program at Harvard University. Rogers, by contrast, is an extremely online right-wing lawyer who previously represented the NRA and Philip Morris, and is prone to spouting dogwhistles like “AI with a Western soul.” But Rogers is certainly confirmable, and was in fact already blessed once by the Senate for her State Department role. Rogers says she intends to keep her State Department job while running USAGM — a strong indication that she’ll be CEO in name only. Indeed, Lake seemed to confirm as much, tweeting that she’s staying right where she is, and nothing will change.

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Trump thinks the Voice of America should be the Voice of Trump.

Trump may be envious of how Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik News lavish praise on Vladimir Putin and may wish to have official praise singers glorifying him who are paid for by taxpayers.

As Vox puts it...

Trump and Steve Bannon want to turn a US-funded global media network into Breitbart 2.0

Steve Contorno at CNN:

Donald Trump has lately made clear he wants little to do with Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican president that has attracted considerable blowback in his race for the White House. “I have no idea who is behind it,” the former president recently claimed on social media. Many people Trump knows quite well are behind it. Six of his former Cabinet secretaries helped write or collaborated on the 900-page playbook for a second Trump term published by the Heritage Foundation. Four individuals Trump nominated as ambassadors were also involved, along with several enforcers of his controversial immigration crackdown. And about 20 pages are credited to his first deputy chief of staff. In fact, at least 140 people who worked in the Trump administration had a hand in Project 2025, a CNN review found, including more than half of the people listed as authors, editors and contributors to “Mandate for Leadership,” the project’s extensive manifesto for overhauling the executive branch.

Dozens more who staffed Trump’s government hold positions with conservative groups advising Project 2025, including his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and longtime adviser Stephen Miller. These groups also include several lawyers deeply involved in Trump’s attempts to remain in power, such as his impeachment attorney Jay Sekulow and two of the legal architects of his failed bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election, Cleta Mitchell and John Eastman. To quantify the scope of the involvement from Trump’s orbit, CNN reviewed online biographies, LinkedIn profiles and news clippings for more than 1,000 people listed on published directories for the 110 organizations on Project 2025’s advisory board, as well as the 200-plus names credited with working on “Mandate for Leadership.”

Overall, CNN found nearly 240 people with ties to both Project 2025 and to Trump, covering nearly every aspect of his time in politics and the White House – from day-to-day foot soldiers in Washington to the highest levels of his government. The number is likely higher because many individuals’ online résumés were not available. In addition to people who worked directly for Trump, others who participated in Project 2025 were appointed by the former president to independent positions. For instance, Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr authored an entire chapter of proposed changes to his agency, and Lisa Correnti, an anti-abortion advocate Trump appointed as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, is among the contributors. Several people involved in Project 2025 didn’t serve in the Trump administration but were influential in shaping his first term. One example is former US Attorney Brett Tolman, a leading force behind the former president’s criminal justice reform law who later helped arrange a pardon for Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law. Tolman is listed as a contributor to “Mandate for Leadership.”

The extensive overlap between Project 2025 and Trump’s universe of allies, advisers and former staff complicates his efforts to distance himself from the work. Trump’s campaign has sought for months to make clear that Project 2025 doesn’t speak for them amid an intensifying push by President Joe Biden and Democrats to tie the Republican standard bearer to the playbook’s more controversial policies.

[...]

Heritage plan becomes a political headache

Behind Project 2025 is the Heritage Foundation, a 51-year-old conservative organization that aligned itself with Trump not long after his 2016 victory. Heritage is led by Kevin Roberts, a Trump ally whom the former president praised as “doing an unbelievable job” on a February night when they shared the same stage. Heritage conceived Project 2025 to begin planning so a Republican president could hit the ground running after the election. One of its priorities is creating a roadmap for the first 180 days of the new administration to quickly reorient every federal agency around its conservative vision. Described on its website as “a movement-wide effort guided by the conservative cause to address and reform the failings of big government and an undemocratic administrative state,” Project 2025 also aims to recruit and train thousands of people loyal to the conservative movement to fill federal government positions.

[...]

Vast network of Trump allies

However, Trump’s attempts to distance himself from Project 2025 have already encountered credibility challenges. The person overseeing Project 2025, Paul Dans, was a top official in Trump’s White House who has previously said he hopes to work for his former boss again. Shortly after Trump’s Truth Social post last week, Democrats noted a recruitment video for Project 2025 features a Trump campaign spokeswoman. On Tuesday, the Biden campaign posted dozens of examples of connections between Trump and Project 2025. CNN’s review of Project 2025’s contributors also demonstrated the breadth of Trump’s reach through the upper ranks of the vast network of organizations working to move the country in a conservative direction – from women’s groups and Christian colleges to conservative think tanks in Texas, Alabama and Mississippi. New organizations centered around Trump’s political movement, his conspiracy theories around his electoral defeats and his first-term policies are deeply involved in Project 2025 as well. One of the advisory groups, America First Legal, was started by Miller, a key player in forming Trump’s immigration agenda. Another is the Center for Renewing America, founded by Russ Vought, former acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, who wrote for Project 2025 a detailed blueprint for consolidating executive power. Vought recently oversaw the Republican Party committee that drafted the new platform heavily influenced by Trump.

In addition to Vought, two other former Trump Cabinet secretaries wrote chapters for “Mandate for Leadership”: Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller. Three more former department heads – National Intelligence Director John Ratcliffe, acting Transportation Secretary Steven Bradbury and acting Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella – are listed as contributors.

CNN reports that at least 140 people who worked for Donald Trump’s administration are involved in The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. This should put an end to the nonsensical lie that Trump “know[s] nothing about Project 2025.”

See Also:

Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern?

Authoritarian regimes tend to prioritize controlling certain institutions: bureaucracy, the legal system, and higher education. Trump has shown deep interest in all. They also seek to control the press. It is easy to assume this last threat does not apply to the US. The first amendment provides strong protections to private media (although conservatives are interested in eroding those protections). The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is vulnerable to right wing threats of defunding, but NPR and PBS have other sources of funding and play a less central role in American media than, for example, the BBC does in the UK. Conservatives have their own thriving media, have captured large areas of social media, including Twitter, and have been successful at working the ref when it comes to the mainstream media. It might therefore seem that there is little reason to worry about Trump further weaponizing the press. But there are aspects of the media that the US government does directly control and fund. Americans don’t pay a lot of attention to it, because it does not broadcast to them, but it has an outsize global presence. This is the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, and is the primary funder of several other regional broadcasting networks. It has a budget of about $1 billion and 4,000 employees. While it does not have the same brand recognition as other media, AGM has a vast global audience. It estimates that it reachers over 420 million people weekly in 64 different languages. So, the US government is very much in the media business, and on a global scale. To understand how that media can be weaponized by an authoritarian in the future, we just need to look back at the final months of the Trump administration.

“Gross Mismanagement” by a Trump Appointee

The tensions between journalistic integrity and politicization exploded with the arrival of Michael Pack, the chief executive of AGM. In Spring of 2020, Trump falsely accused VOA of peddling Chinese propaganda over Covid, and then pushed Pack’s nomination, which had been stalled because of Senate concerns about his ideological leanings, and financial improprieties in his business dealings. Pack headed the Claremont Institute, which has pushed anti-democratic messaging via fellows like John Eastman. Pack had also worked on documentaries produced by Steve Bannon.

Pack perfectly reflected the paranoid style of that took hold in Trump’s last year in office. After his first impeachment, loyalty mattered above all else to Trump. Pack fit that agenda. He promised “to drain the swamp, to root out corruption, and to deal with these issues of bias” — an ethos that defines how Trumpworld is approaching a second term.

The scale of Pack’s abuses only became evident after he left the agency. He profiled his employees, speculating on their political leanings, and met with officials to prioritize which of these officials should be fired because of those political beliefs. He pushed out senior officials, putting some on administrative leave for daring to disagree with him. Pack hired a conservative law firm on a no-bid contract to investigate his own employees. It cost $1.6 million dollars. He revoked security clearances from journalists who complained about his practices. He sought to put in place unqualified appointees to oversee overseas media networks, and make their tenure permanent. His political appointees either had no experience in journalism, or were aligned with right-wing media outlets such as The Daily Caller.

Pack improperly tried to block funding for one unit, The Open Technology Fund, that Congress had appropriated. He froze the funding of other units, and blocked their recruitment efforts. Pack also created instability by removing senior officials leading parts of his organization — Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Office of Cuban Broadcasting, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Open Technology Fund.

[...] Making AGM a more explicitly partisan outlet would obviously undermine its reputation for providing quality journalism, undermining trust in the organization that is central for its ability to do its job. Its a clear example of how a more partisan operation reduces the quality of agency performance, and its ability to fulfill its mission. The mission of AGM “is to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” It is hard to do so if the agency is, itself, dancing to an authoritarian tune.