'You have no credibility': Lake grilled by House Committee over Voice of America cuts
While testifying before a House committee on Wednesday, Kari Lake faced severe criticism over her handling of the United States Agency for Global Media.
The former news anchor and current senior advisor to the USAGM was called before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs to discuss the future of the agency that runs Voice of America (VOA). Recent drastic cuts to the agency and lay-offs have concerned politicians on both sides of the aisle and Lake came in for a drubbing from critics.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., went after Lake for the way she went about cutting media grants and placing VOA employees on administrative leave.
'These are complex questions,' said Lake.
'It's either, you did a review or you didn't,' Meeks shot back, before repeatedly asking her if she 'had a record' of what she reviewed.
Lake held up a picture of Donald Trump, refused to answer, and said the question was 'ridiculous.'
During her testimony, Lake said that it was her goal to 'reduce' the USAGM 'to its statutory minimum' and 'that it will be gone by 2026.'
Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Ariz., accused Lake of ducking accountability for her actions. Bringing up Lake's unsucessful Senate bid, Stanton said she blamed 'everything under the sun' for her failures. He said Lake spread 'lies' about the election's integrity after he loss. Lake defended her actions, saying the media could 'literally put out a lie about anybody here.'
'You've been the victim of that,' she said. 'I remember the stories about you where they said you had a gay lover…Those kind of lies could be broadcast today by VOA.'
Lake addressed concerns from Rep. Bill Huizenga, R-Mich., about eliminating languages from international broadcasts by describing the 84 languages covered by VOA as 'languages we don't have to be covering.'
Lake claimed VOA was a 'relic' and was challenged by Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Texas. When Johnson said that over 350 million people listen to the network weekly, Lake questioned the stats.
'Those are government numbers,' Lake said. 'I don't trust those numbers.'
Johnson called Lake's response 'pathetic.'
'That's a sad state of affairs,' said Johnson, 'that you don't trust the government you're representing and the agency that you're in charge of.'
Rep. Madeleine Dean, D-Pa., dressed down Lake her time, calling her a 'propaganda mouthpiece for Trump.'
'You have no credibility,' Dean said. 'Your journalistic integrity is shot.'
Committee Chairman Brian Mast, R-Fla., ceded his remaining time to Lake, who used it to claim that VOA had not 'told the story of America properly or positively.' Lake again claimed that VOA was a mouthpiece for Iranian, Chinese, and Russian 'propaganda,' and praised Joe Rogan as an example of a 'smaller newsroom…that reaches millions of people.'
Addressing Donald Trump's desire to shutdown the agency, Lake said she was 'happy to do what the president wants to do.'
The post 'You have no credibility': Lake grilled by House Committee over Voice of America cuts appeared first on Salon.com.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Boston Globe
23 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
North Korea will open its biggest tourist site next week, though it's not yet welcoming foreigners
Kim said its construction would be recorded as 'one of the greatest successes this year' and called the site 'the proud first step' toward realizing the government's policy of developing tourism, according to KCNA. Advertisement North Korea will open the site to domestic tourists first The Wonsan-Kalma beach resort is North Korea's biggest tourist site. KCNA said it will begin service for domestic tourists next Tuesday, but the report didn't say when it will start receiving foreign tourists. Observers say the resort likely required a huge investment from North Korea's limited budget, so it eventually will have to accept Chinese and other foreign tourists to break even. Kim has been pushing to make the country a tourism hub as part of efforts to revive the ailing economy, and the Wonsan-Kalma zone is one of his most talked-about tourism projects. KCNA reported North Korea will confirm plans to build large tourist sites in other parts of the country, too. But North Korea hasn't fully lifted a ban on foreign tourists that it imposed in early 2020 to guard against the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say North Korea has been slow to resume its international tourism because of remaining pandemic curbs, a flare-up of tensions with the U.S. and South Korea in recent years and worries about Western tourists spreading a negative image of its system. Advertisement Russian and Chinese tourists will likely travel to the resort Starting from February 2024, North Korea has been accepting Russian tourists amid the booming military and other partnerships between the two countries, but Chinese group tours, which made up more than 90% of visitors before the pandemic, remain stalled. In February this year, a small group of international tourists visited the country for the first time in five years, but tourist agencies said in March that their tours to North Korea were paused. Kim's recent foreign policy prioritizes relations with Russia as he's been supplying troops and conventional weapons to support its war against Ukraine in return for economic and military assistance. But North Korea's ties with China, which has long been its biggest trading partner and aid benefactor, have apparently cooled as China is reluctant to join an anti-Western alliance with North Korea and Russia, analysts say. Tuesday's ceremony that marked the completion of the resort's construction drew the Russian ambassador to North Korea and his embassy staff, KCNA said. But it didn't say whether any Chinese diplomats were also invited. 'I think North Korea will soon accept Russian tourists, given the Russian Embassy officials attended the ceremony. Summer business is important' for the beach resort, said Lee Sangkeun, an expert at the Institute for National Security Strategy, a think tank run by South Korea's intelligence agency. 'There seems to be issues that North Korea hasn't yet resolved in its relations with China. But North Korea has put in too much money on tourism and plans to spend more. Subsequently, to get its money's worth, North Korea can't help receiving Chinese tourists,' Lee said. Advertisement Lim Eul-chul, a professor at Kyungnam University's Institute for Far Eastern Studies in Seoul, also said that foreign tourism to the Wonsan-Kalma site will begin with Russians. But he said Chinese tours to the zone, a sort of civilian exchange, will also begin soon, adding bilateral trade between China and North Korea has been recovering. South Korean and American tours won't likely happen soon Lim said that South Korean and American tours to North Korea won't likely restart anytime soon, though both new liberal South Korean President Lee Jae Myung and U.S. President Donald Trump have expressed hopes to revive dialogue with North Korea. In January when Trump boasted about his ties with Kim, he said 'I think he has tremendous condo capabilities. He's got a lot of shoreline,' a likely reference to Wonsan-Kalma. North Korea hasn't publicly responded to Trump's outreach. It has repeatedly rejected Washington and Seoul's dialogue offers and focused on expanding its nuclear weapons program since Kim's high-stakes nuclear diplomacy with Trump collapsed in 2019.
Boston Globe
23 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump picked a horrible time to crush electric cars
Just a few short months ago, American consumers had an appealing off-ramp: electric vehicles. EV sales pushed above 1.3 million vehicles in 2024. The future of cars was increasingly looking like it would be electric. Advertisement But since he took office, President Trump has been methodically stifling the EV market. He has issued orders Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up He wants to gut EV charging infrastructure and has threatened to cancel tax credits that prompted many people to switch to an electric vehicle. He even says he plans to sell the Tesla he bought from former DOGE czar Elon Musk Faced with that hostility and the ever-shifting tariff landscape, Detroit automakers have Advertisement Meanwhile, plans to build EV battery plants — many in red states — are slowing down, potentially threatening future jobs. Even those that survive are shrinking. On Monday, Ford Motor gave journalists a tour of its All this is alarming to Ford, which has another headache: It is licensing lithium-ion battery technology from a Chinese company 'We don't want to back off on scaling, hiring, or training in an industry we need to be competitive in the future,' said Lisa Drake, Ford's vice president of technology platform programs and EV systems, Trump's attacks on EVs threaten to put the United States even further behind the rest of the world. Globally, analysts think For now, the main alternative to EVs are gas-powered hybrid-electric vehicles, which are expected to set records themselves this year, in part because Toyota has switched two of its best sellers, the Camry and the RAV4, to hybrids. Advertisement Those past spikes in gas prices have also led to jumps in the popularity of hybrids. I bought my first one in 2008, when gasoline in Michigan soared above $4 a gallon, and I'm now on my second. Hybrid sales so far this year Counting hybrids and EVs together, it could turn out that one in four vehicles sold this year is 'electrified,' as Toyota calls it. Already, For now, hybrids may be the compromise for environmentally minded consumers. But who knows: Maybe they'll appear on Trump's radar once he's unplugged EVs.
24 minutes ago
The US and Iran have had bitter relations for decades. After the bombs, a new chapter begins
WASHINGTON -- Now comes a new chapter in U.S.-Iran relations, whether for the better or the even worse. For nearly a half century, the world has witnessed an enmity for the ages — the threats, the plotting, the poisonous rhetoric between the 'Great Satan' of Iranian lore and the 'Axis of Evil' troublemaker of the Middle East, in America's eyes. Now we have a U.S. president saying, of all things, 'God bless Iran.' This change of tone, however fleeting, came after the intense U.S. bombing of Iranian nuclear-development sites this week, Iran's retaliatory yet restrained attack on a U.S. military base in Qatar and the tentative ceasefire brokered by President Donald Trump in the Israel-Iran war. The U.S. attack on three targets inflicted serious damage but did not destroy them, a U.S. intelligence report found, contradicting Trump's assertion that the attack 'obliterated' Iran's nuclear program. Here are some questions and answers about the long history of bad blood between the two countries: In the first blush of a ceasefire agreement, even before Israel and Iran appeared to be fully on board, Trump exulted in the achievement. 'God bless Israel,' he posted on social media. 'God bless Iran.' He wished blessings on the Middle East, America and the world, too. When it became clear that all hostilities had not immediately ceased after all, he took to swearing instead. 'We basically have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the f— they're doing,' he said on camera. In that moment, Trump was especially critical of Israel, the steadfast U.S. ally, for seeming less attached to the pause in fighting than the country that has been shouting 'Death to America' for generations and is accused of trying to assassinate him. In two words, Operation Ajax. That was the 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA, with British support, that overthrew Iran's democratically elected government and handed power to the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The Western powers had feared the rise of Soviet influence and the nationalization of Iran's oil industry. The shah was a strategic U.S. ally who repaired official relations with Washington. But grievances simmered among Iranians over his autocratic rule and his bowing to America's interests. All of that boiled over in 1979 when the shah fled the country and the theocratic revolutionaries took control, imposing their own hard line. Profoundly. On Nov. 4, 1979, with anti-American sentiment at a fever pitch, Iranian students took 66 American diplomats and citizens hostage and held more than 50 of them in captivity for 444 days. It was a humiliating spectacle for the United States and President Jimmy Carter, who ordered a secret rescue mission months into the Iran hostage crisis. In Operation Eagle Claw, eight Navy helicopters and six Air Force transport planes were sent to rendezvous in the Iranian desert. A sand storm aborted the mission and eight service members died when a helicopter crashed into a C-120 refueling plane. Diplomatic ties were severed in 1980 and remain broken. Iran released the hostages minutes after Ronald Reagan's presidential inauguration on Jan. 20, 1981. That was just long enough to ensure that Carter, bogged in the crisis for over a year, would not see them freed in his term. No. But the last big one was at sea. On April 18, 1988, the U.S. Navy sank two Iranian ships, damaged another and destroyed two surveillance platforms in its largest surface engagement since World War II. Operation Praying Mantis was in retaliation against the mining of the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf four days earlier. Ten sailors were injured and the explosion left a gaping hole in the hull. Not officially, but essentially. The U.S. provided economic aid, intelligence sharing and military-adjacent technology to Iraq, concerned that an Iranian victory would spread instability through the region and strain oil supplies. Iran and Iraq emerged from the 1980-1988 war with no clear victor and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, while U.S.-Iraq relations fractured spectacularly in the years after. An example of U.S.-Iran cooperation of sorts — an illegal, and secret, one until it wasn't. Not long after the U.S. designated Iran a state sponsor of terrorism in 1984 — a status that remains — it emerged that America was illicitly selling arms to Iran. One purpose was to win the release of hostages in Lebanon under the control of Iran-backed Hezbollah. The other was to raise secret money for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua in defiance of a U.S. ban on supporting them. President Ronald Reagan fumbled his way through the scandal but emerged unscathed — legally if not reputationally. Only four: Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Syria. The designation makes those countries the target of broad sanctions. Syria's designation is being reviewed in light of the fall of Bashar Assad's government. From President George W. Bush in his 2002 State of the Union address. He spoke five months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the year before he launched the invasion of Iraq on the wrong premise that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. He singled out Iran, North Korea and Saddam's Iraq and said: 'States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world.' In response, Iran and some of its anti-American proxies and allies in the region took to calling their informal coalition an Axis of Resistance at times. Some, like Hezbollah and Hamas, are degraded due to Israel's fierce and sustained assault on them. In Syria, Assad fled to safety in Moscow after losing power to rebels once tied to al-Qaida but now cautiously welcomed by Trump. In Yemen, Houthi rebels who have attacked commercial ships in the Red Sea and pledged common cause with Palestinians have been bombed by the U.S. and Britain. In Iraq, armed Shia factions controlled or supported by Iran still operate and attract periodic attacks from the United States. In 2015, President Barack Obama and other powers struck a deal with Iran to limit its nuclear development in return for the easing of sanctions. Iran agreed to get rid of an enriched uranium stockpile, dismantle most centrifuges and give international inspectors more access to see what it was doing. Trump assailed the deal in his 2016 campaign and scrapped it two years later as president, imposing a "maximum pressure" campaign of sanctions. He argued the deal only delayed the development of nuclear weapons and did nothing to restrain Iran's aggression in the region. Iran's nuclear program resumed over time and, according to inspectors, accelerated in recent months. Trump's exit from the nuclear deal brought a warning from Hassan Rouhani, then Iran's president, in 2018: 'America must understand well that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace. And war with Iran is the mother of all wars.' In January 2020, Trump ordered the drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, Iran's top commander, when he was in Iraq. Then Iran came after him, according to President Joe Biden's attorney general, Merrick Garland. Days after Trump won last year's election, the Justice Department filed charges against an Iranian man believed to still be in his country and two alleged associates in New York. 'The Justice Department has charged an asset of the Iranian regime who was tasked by the regime to direct a network of criminal associates to further Iran's assassination plots against its targets, including President-elect Donald Trump," Garland said. Now, Trump is seeking peace at the table after ordering bombs dropped on Iran, and offering blessings. It is potentially the mother of all turnarounds.
