It has become rote, when nearing an election, for Republican radicals to momentarily feign a bit of moderation in the hopes that less-radical voters will forget in those last months all the egregious and radical stuff that they had been doing through the rest of their tenures. Not the Trump crowd, though. Staff an administration with paranoid ultra-conservative megafreaks and tell them to cut the brake lines, and it's a sure bet you're going to careen into Election Day with no brakes.
One of the more overtly radical actions undertaken by Team Trump this last year has been the attempted reformation of Voice of America and its parent agency, the U.S. Agency of Global Media (USAGM), into a partisan-led pro-Trump propaganda bucket. To this end, new Trump-selected USAGM Chief Michael Pack and subordinates have been mounting numerous inquiries aimed at pushing out Voice of America employees deemed insufficiently supportive of Dear Leader, including Voice of America White House Bureau Chief Steve Herman. Pack, a Steve Bannon associate described as "paranoid" in his hunt for anti-Trump witches among the agency's reporters, was put into the position to do exactly that.
There is, however, a problem: The purge of insufficiently Trump-loyal reporters technically is a huge violation of the agency's own rules and regulations, which required a "firewall" between the agency's political appointees and USAGM's federally run news agencies to prevent exactly the kind of partisan vengeance-seeking and hackery Pack is engaged in. In premise, Voice of America and other USAGM products sell themselves to the world as neutral, factual news sources unhindered by the propaganda-laced, government-enforced reportage of authoritarian governments, and maintaining a reputation for factual neutrality is essential to the agency's mission.
In September, agency whistleblowers stepped forward to file a claim with the State Department inspector general charging him with violating those rules. Now Pack is responding to those complaints.
His response? Michael Pack has unilaterally rescinded the "firewall" rule. As of this Monday, Pack says, it no longer exists.
By way of explanation, Pack offered up a typically self-serving interpretation of events. He complains that the rule was the product of the "final hours of existence" of the agency's Broadcasting Board of Governors, which Pack himself shuttered shortly afterwards. He also asserts that the rule is unconstitutional, and based on "flawed" reasoning, and "made the agency difficult to manage," and take-your-pick. And, importantly, the rule "threatened constitutional values because the Constitution gives the President broad latitude in directing the foreign policy of the United States."
If a president decides that sycophantic polishing of his own nether regions is now the official foreign policy of the United States, then by God it would be unconstitutional not to enforce it.
The short version, however, is that Pack now asserts total authority in managing the agency's reporting, including the right to prevent stories from being published and the authority to himself decide which stories represent "biased reporting." There were rules against that; now there aren't, because the Steve Bannon-allied "paranoid" Trump-obsessed movement ideologue has declared them to be inconvenient.
Again, this is the sort of thing that cleverer hyperpartisans would generally do after an election, effectively running out the clock on public outrage before the next go-round. The same considerations do not seem to rattle around current Republican heads, though. It seems to be a lack of impulse control; Pack probably knows full well this makes him look cheap and crooked, but like a certain head of the postal service retooling the agency in ways that help The Shipping Company He Holds Stock In, he can't help himself.
If Trump loses, expect these individuals to set fire to each and every agency rulebook in the months before their replacements take over—and try to make off with everything that isn't nailed down. Subtlety isn't in their repertoire.
