Last weekend, federal judge Royce Lamberth—a Ronald Reagan appointee—ruled that Kari Lake had no legal authority to serve as acting Senior Advisor of the US Agency for Global Media. Lake was never Senate-confirmed for the role, instead assuming it through a backdoor delegation that the judge found violated both the Constitution and federal law.

For those unfamiliar with what Lake has been doing since losing her Senate race to Ruben Gallego, she was handed control of the USAGM—the parent agency of Voice of America, the country’s government-funded international broadcaster. Her mandate was part of the administration’s broader push to slash federal spending and bureaucracy, and USAGM was seen as an easy target: The agency had long been criticized as bloated, overstaffed, and home to people touting an anti-American message for audiences abroad.

One of Lake’s first moves at VOA was to clean house on the whole operation, including putting nearly the entire staff on indefinite leave. Once she hollowed the place out, she announced a partnership with One America News to fill the void. The network is known for many things, but their coverage of the Middle East isn’t one of them.

She then reportedly outsourced significant editorial control of VOA’s Persian service to Ali Javanmardi, a former VOA correspondent who had spent years reporting from Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan, whose appointment drew immediate controversy from the diaspora community. Opposition groups had long accused him of harboring separatist sympathies fundamentally at odds with the unified, secular Iran that the broader movement was fighting for—and these concerns have been proven to be more than justified.

The National Union for Democracy in Iran submitted a congressional complaint alleging that he had used Kurdish-language content to characterize Iran as the “primary enemy of the Kurdish people.” And shortly after joining the organization, VOA Persian reportedly began barring people sympathetic to Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi from appearing on air. Ahmad Batebi—an iconic dissident who survived nearly a decade in the Islamic Republic’s prisons and whose bloodied-shirt photograph became one of the defining images of Iran’s 1999 student uprising—was fired after refusing Javanmardi’s repeated instructions to exclude any mention of Pahlavi from his coverage.

More recently, as protests spread following Khamenei’s death, Javanmardi reportedly went even further—using VOA Persian’s platform to tell Iranians to ignore Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’s call for the next phase of mobilization against the regime, and that they should not return to the streets when he says to. The messaging drew immediate backlash from the diaspora community, with critics pointing out that a US-funded outlet was effectively telling Irans not to act—in direct contradiction of the administration’s own posture toward the regime.

Pahlavi’s call on social media prior to the internet blackout in the Islamic Republic in early January has been credited for kicking off the largest wave of protests since the 1979 Revolution.

With Khamenei dead and the Islamic Republic on the edge of collapse, the opportunity to reach the Iranian people is central to America’s national interest. VOA Persian is supposed to be exactly that source. It was built on the same model during the Cold War to beam uncensored information deep beyond the Iron Curtain to populations their governments were desperate to keep in the dark. Today, Iranians put themselves at great risk accessing media from abroad, and Tehran has gone to great lengths to jam such sources from reaching the country.

Tehran may have blacked out the internet in response to the protests and our more recent military operation, but this will be temporary—and when it lifts, millions of Iranians with access to satellites and VPNs are going to be looking for uncensored information on what’s really going on with their country.

The problem is that the staff restored by Lamberth’s ruling are not exactly a dream team. The old guard earned accusations of being the “Voice of the Mullahs” by going soft on the regime, treating it as though it were a legitimate government open to moderation rather than one that hangs dissidents and murders women for showing their hair in public. When up to 1,500 Iranians were killed during the November 2019 protests, for example, VOA Persian suppressed its coverage and aired nature documentaries instead.

Saturday’s ruling, though, clearly hit a “reset” button on the whole situation—and Lake has shown she’s not the person for the job in peacetime, let alone in wartime. This could be a blessing in disguise for the administration, handing them the ability to start fresh—and they would be wise to take it.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)