#patsy widakuswara

Michael Sainato at The Guardian:

A federal judge ruled Saturday that Kari Lake unlawfully led the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) for several months last year and voided mass layoffs and other actions taken during that period to dismantle the agency. The US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is an independent federal agency that oversees the Voice of America (VOA), the US’s largest and oldest international broadcaster, and provides grants to Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other news agencies. The Trump administration moved to defund the agency in early 2025 and appointed Lake to oversee the agency, but did not receive Senate confirmation for her role. Despite efforts to defund the agency, Congress appropriated half a billion dollars more than Lake requested in funding for the agency in 2026. In her role, Lake cut contracts and over 1,000 staff positions at the agency when she was appointed to the role on 31 July before she relinquished the position on 19 November.

“Only the Appointments Clause or the Vacancies Act’s exclusive structure may authorize service as a principal officer, and Lake satisfies the requirements of neither the statute nor the Constitution,” US district court judge Royce C Lamberth wrote in the ruling. Lamberth leaned on the ruling by the third circuit court of appeals that ruled the appointment of Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, to lead the US attorney’s office in New Jersey was invalid.

“Adopting Lake’s position would require the Court to find that the President can fill a first assistantship at any time during a vacancy in a Senate-confirmed office and then … elevate the first assistant to serve as the acting officer,” Lamberth said in the ruling.

Lake said in a statement on social media: “We will appeal this outrageous ruling from an activist DC District Court Judge.” Lake also reposted a claim that the judge slept through arguments in the trial, responding “not surprised. Morbid obesity can cause massive issues with blood sugar.” [...] Plaintiffs in the case, Voice of America’s White House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, said they felt “vindicated and deeply grateful” for the judge’s ruling in the case.

“The judge’s ruling that Kari Lake’s actions shall have no force or effect is a powerful step toward undoing the damage she has inflicted on this American institution that we love,” they said in a statement. “Even as we work through what this ruling means for colleagues harmed by her actions, it brings renewed hope and momentum to the next phase of our fight: restoring VOA’s global operations and ensuring we continue to produce journalism, not propaganda.”

Judge Royce Lambert ruled in Widakuswara v. Lake that Kari Lake unlawfully led the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) in violation of the Appointments Clause and the Vacancies Act.

Lake’s mass layoffs of USAGM employees and dismantling of its various operations will be ruled void as a result of the ruling.

See Also:

Reuters, via HuffPost: Judge Voids 2025 Actions Taken By Kari Lake As Voice Of America CEO, Including Job Cuts

Politico: Judge says Kari Lake’s tenure atop US media agency was improper, voids actions as ‘acting CEO’

Steve Herman at Newsguy:

The Voice of America died a second time today. Nearly all staff, on paid administrative leave since mid-March, received confirmation on Friday they are never being brought back. Some dozens of journalists, editors, producers and technicians had been hastily summoned to VOA in recent days to create a fiction of a statutory minimum to demonstrate to federal judges that the destructive acts by parent Agency for Global Media (USAGM) were not arbitrary and capricious.

That resulted in a few minutes of daily broadcasts via shortwave radio from Kuwait to Afghanistan in the Dari and Pashto languages; a video package posted online in Mandarin Chinese; an hour a day in Farsi to Iran (no adequate substitute for the previous VOA Persian 24/7 TV service as a time when Tehran is being bombed and is firing ballistic missiles at Israel amid the threat of U.S. military intervention). Most remaining full-time staffers (hundreds of contractors had already been terminated), including those of the Persian Service, were informed by emails from Kari Lake, the so-called special adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, that they are part of a massive reduction-in-force and will be axed September 1, Labor Day.

[...] For the small cadre that had been brought back, badges were immediately deactivated. Some, including Persian staffers, who had briefly gone out of the Cohen Federal Building in Washington to make a mid-morning cell phone call or have a smoke couldn’t return. Left your keys or purse at your desk in the newsroom? Too bad. Some may have gone outside just to breathe. The air conditioning hasn’t functioned properly in the building for the past week.

[...]

The silencing of the Voice of America throws a couple of thousand journalists, technicians and administrators out of work, including brave freelancers who risked their lives to bring us news in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Ukraine. I had the honor of being alongside many of them over the past 20+ years. They are incredibly talented and fiercely devoted to VOA’s mission of impartial reporting. Some in our language services found a voice at VOA after their reporting had been repressed by authoritarians in their home countries and then had to flee. They are doubly traumatized today. Also among those receiving RIF notices are the named plaintiffs in the primary lawsuit filed against Lake and others, including USAGM’s installed acting chief executive officer, Victor Morales.

The historic legacy will be the loss of American soft power by destroying the country’s most cost-effective instruments of soft power: VOA, along with U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Al Hurra TV (Arabic). Perhaps because Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a fierce critic of the Cuban communist regime, another small U.S. government external broadcaster, Radio Marti, survives with a skeleton crew using an AM transmitter in the Florida Keys, a signal that is effectively jammed by Havana.

USAGM broadcasts (radio and TV) and websites reached hundreds of millions of people outside the United States. In some languages and regions, VOA, RFE/RL or RFA served as the primary and only credible source of news and information. Lake, a local TV newscaster who became a twice-failed aspirant for statewide political office in Arizona, appears full of glee in her destruction of an 83-year-old institution. *Today, we took decisive action to effectuate President Trump's agenda to shrink the out-of-control federal bureaucracy," Lake said in a letter she posted to Elon Musk’s X platform. "Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America - part of a long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy. For decades, American taxpayers have been forced to bankroll an agency that's been riddled with dysfunction, bias, and waste. That ends now. I'm proud to carry out President Trump's executive order and deliver results that put America First."

[...]

The executive branch actions and the rogue DOGE chainsaw attacks on independent agencies, including USAID, rode roughshod over legislative checks and balances. The third branch of government, the judiciary, has issued conflicting rulings that have slightly impeded the executive overreach. One or more of these cases will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court, where the majority of the justices have generally upheld the current president’s diktats and may consent to Donald Trump’s desire to destroy the career bureaucracy and remake it in his own image.

The sense of betrayal and dismay for VOA journalists goes beyond our overseers and stakeholders. For decades, my colleagues and I regularly sought out Heritage Foundation experts for comment on important issues, in order to ensure balance and scope in our news reports. It was Heritage’s Project 2025 that included the blueprint for VOA’s dismantling and criticism of the broadcaster’s charter and firewall meant to ensure fairness and autonomy for our journalism. The section’s author, Morvared Namdarkhan (aka Mora Namdar) was briefly brought into USAGM to work with Lake and has just been rewarded with a nomination to be an assistant secretary of state.

VOA’s Steve Herman has insights on how MAGA acolyte Kari Lake put the final blow to the Voice Of America’s operations.

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