There’s a lot of bleak stuff out there right now, but here’s a bright spot: Kari Lake is out of her job at the Voice of America. But more than that, her destruction of the venerable institution was also reversed.
In a little Saturday news drop, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that Lake was never eligible to be the acting chief executive officer of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent company.
The Trump administration played stupid games to keep Lake atop the agency so she could continue her assigned mission of destroying the beacon of freedom abroad. The main tactic seemed to be repeatedly changing Lake’s title. As of July 2025, she was the “acting CEO,” but before that, she was “deputy CEO” and “senior adviser.”
The Voice of America building in Washington, D.C.
None of these semantic tricks worked on Lamberth, who said that this was nothing but an attempt to try to “transform Lake into the CEO of U.S. Agency for Global Media in all but name.”
Because Lake’s appointment was never legal—nothing but an attempt to avoid Senate confirmation—Lake’s swath of destruction also wasn’t legal. That means that her layoffs of more than 1,000 people worldwide are null and void, as is her firing of the director of VOA.
Also void? Lake’s deal to stuff VOA with content from One America News Network rather than actual journalism.
Inevitably, Lake blasted the decision as “bogus” and coming from an “activist judge.”
“Activist judge” is a very curious way to describe Lamberth, an 82-year-old Reagan appointee who loves religious accommodations so much that he ruled that “QAnon shaman” Jacob Chansley was entitled to organic food while in jail. He also blocked former President Barack Obama’s stem cell research for reasons totally not related to his personal beliefs.
Lamberth has been furious with Lake and the Trump administration about this for months, particularly after they openly violated his order to restore normal news programming at VOA.
Related | How you’re paying Kari Lake to fluff Trump’s ego
Any competent administration would have tossed Lake and figured out a way to somehow achieve their aims without Arizona’s Finest Election Denier leading the way. But who else would be malleable enough to agree to cut VOA to the bone, fire everyone, and replace programming with state media praising Trump?
It’s not technically fair to say that Lake is the only person declared “illegal” in the Trump administration. She joins a rich collection of failed temporary U.S. attorney appointments, where Trump tried to install a collection of weak-sauce personal attorneys and cronies, only to get stuffed by the courts multiple times.
But it appears that Lake might be the first person outside of the Justice Department to get this treatment from the courts.
In a fun little move that has to infuriate the administration, Lamberth’s decision relied extensively on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which definitively tossed Alina Habba from her gig cosplaying as U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
Alina Habba was removed from her illegal role as U.S. attorney for New Jersey.
Even if this decision ultimately stands, we still have to grapple with the issue created by the administration’s destruction: Can VOA be meaningfully restored?
The Columbia Journalism Review pointed out that no one knows if the experienced, specialized journalists fired by Lake would even want to come back. No one knows how many of those folks have moved on to other jobs or simply won’t come back to the precarious chaos of the Trump administration.
Similarly, no one knows how difficult it will be to restore and staff all of the newsrooms abroad that Lake shuttered. And no one knows whether Lake will be able to stay on at USAGM in some other capacity, where she would wield her wrecking ball in some other way.
That said, this decision is definitely cause for celebration, even though Lake has already vowed to appeal. Sure, the administration may race to the friendly confines of the Supreme Court to seek a shadow docket to restore Lake and her toppling of VOA, but for now, it’s a triumph.
The rule of law and separation of powers has prevailed over a lawless executive branch, and we should cling to that with everything we’ve got.
