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Penny Salisbury

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June 26, 2025 7:23 pm

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"This place is rotten. It's rotten to the core. President Trump has asked me to go in and help clean it up… That's exactly what I'm doing. I don't care if they attack me. We're going to make it right ... View More"This place is rotten. It's rotten to the core. President Trump has asked me to go in and help clean it up… That's exactly what I'm doing. I don't care if they attack me. We're going to make it right for the American taxpayers." Kari Lake's Opening Statement before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on "Spies, Lies, and Mismanagement: Examining the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s Downfall." Kari Lake: "Good morning and thank you Chairman Mass and Ranking Member Meeks and members of this House Foreign Affairs Committee. Thanks for having me. My name is Kari Lake, I'm the Trump administration senior advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Before I get started, Mr. Chairman, I'd like to let you know this opening statement I'll be delivering is a shortened version of a longer version that I have submitted to you earlier and would love to be put into the Congressional Record. Last December, President-elect Donald Trump called me and asked if I would help reform U.S. Agency for Global Media and the Voice of America, and I said yes. I was honored and eager to help these institutions tell America's story to the world. But within days in my role as senior advisor, it became increasingly clear that reform was nearly impossible. The agency was incompetent and mismanaged and deeply corrupt, politically biased, and frankly, a serious threat to our national security. USAGM oversees VOA, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and grantees like Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, Middle East Broadcasting Network, Open Technology Fund, and Frontline Media Fund, all of which are 100% funded by the hardworking American people. Over the past 15 to 20 years, the agency has become a significant national security risk. They hire a shockingly high number of foreign nationals and they conduct subpar security vetting—so bad that top intelligence agencies revoked this agency's ability to do even the most basic background checks. So many of USAGM's hires come from countries hostile to the United States. Over the decade from 2010 to 2020, the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence repeatedly flagged severe security failures, but USAGM leadership ignored them. They continued to grant journalists and technicians, many from foreign nations, high-level security access based on falsified documents and incomplete background checks—phony names, phony Social Security numbers. Even after corrective actions were taken in the final months of the Trump administration, these safeguards were reversed by the incoming Biden administration. The scale of the problem is staggering. During the first Trump administration, the political appointees led by CEO Michael Pack got to work fixing it, and they discovered that out of 150 people who were hired during that time period, when they weren't doing appropriate vetting, 500 of them were still out there and they could not find them. They went back and re-vetted everybody, but 500 had gone missing—they could not be located for further screening. Foreign employees with Social Security numbers that are fake and fake names, given top-secret access, now missing—that keeps me up at night. My team is working to track them down. Our new security director is working to try to turn this agency around and make it where it's safer. It's a vast problem that we've uncovered. We've also uncovered that the grantees like Radio Free Europe hired people later identified as foreign spies. At one point, they nearly hired more than 20 spies from a nation hostile to America. Those hires were stopped thanks to a timely tip, and I'm happy to give you more information on that in a secure setting. Voice of America has employed individuals with direct ties to hostile nations. They even once paid a Russian who had previously worked in Russian media, writing anti-American stories, to come on the staff and continue to write anti-American stories. At one point, a serious security threat to America at the Office of Cuba Broadcasting in Cuba was declared to be a national security threat. He was fired thankfully, but he worked there for quite some time. So how did they get so many foreign nationals in? Well, they abused the J-1 visa program, which is a pathway to citizenship intended for exchange students and cultural exchanges—students, camp counselors, and au pairs. It's not intended for journalists and has created severe vulnerabilities and frankly, it has displaced many, many American workers who could have filled these jobs. VOA also sidestepped their charter to be reliable, authoritative news. Instead, being riddled with political bias and outright anti-American sentiment—examples you mentioned it, Chairman—refusing to call Hamas terrorists, glamorizing Che Guevara, airing campaign-style videos favoring President Biden, even broadcasting a graphic depicting President Trump with a swastika over his face on their news. I wouldn't want that, by the way, even if it was President Biden. That's totally inappropriate. And a ridiculous editorial firewall prevents agency leadership like myself from correcting any of the bias or having any say in the editorial content that goes on the air. We've also got financial mismanagement, which I hope we'll go into—$75,000 spent for a COVID study on how mats and computers can be used for social distancing, $100,000 in American taxpayer money to actually sponsor an Afghan cricket team, $400,000 for quid pro quo payments to African VOA affiliates—and they actually wrote 'quid pro quo' next to the budget item, $825,000 for a New York music show, and a $6 million contract for consulting advice that was never even implemented. I told these stories to people and many times they say, 'Wow, this place sounds like a crime scene.' And I frankly have just learned that it is indeed a crime scene. We've learned that there is an active investigation going on at VOA for a series of threatening phone calls that have been coming out, going after one of your colleagues, a sitting member of Congress, with years' worth of threatening phone calls, and they've discovered that those phone calls were coming from inside the Voice of America. This place is rotten. It's rotten to the core. President Trump has asked me to go in and help clean it up, and he's also issued an executive order to reduce this agency down to its mandate—to what is statutorily required. That's exactly what I'm doing. I don't care if they attack me. We're going to make it right for the American taxpayers. And with that, I'm happy to answer any of your questions."

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