Opinion | How a Trump appointee tried to destroy Voice of America

President Donald Trump nominated Mr. Pack to oversee Voice of America and related networks at the behest of alt-right provocateur Stephen K. Bannon. Mr. Pack formerly led the Claremont Institute, which also employed John Eastman, the legal architect of the plot to stop the certification of the electoral college on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Pack was confirmed in June 2020 and immediately began upheaval of the organization.

He fired the heads of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. The top two editors at Voice of America quit. A month later, he moved against six additional employees who protested decisions they saw as violating law or politicizing the agency. They were stripped of their security clearances, necessary to do their jobs, and then suspended indefinitely.

The latest review found that Mr. Pack had no legitimate basis to strip their clearances, that he broke federal rules by trying to prevent the Open Technology Fund, a nonprofit that supports internet freedom technologies, from receiving federal funding and that he violated the International Broadcasting Act of 1994 by attempting to make his own appointees impossible to remove unless they were convicted of crimes.

At least 11 agency employees filed complaints with the Office of Special Counsel during Mr. Pack’s brief tenure. Investigators spoke with 64 current and former employees, including the whistleblowers. Mr. Pack declined to cooperate with investigators and didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Much of the damning report looks at Mr. Pack’s efforts to smear longtime employees. He violated federal contracting guidelines by giving an open-ended, no-bid contract to a law firm with conservative connections to investigate employees he saw as opposed to Mr. Trump. It allowed lawyers to bill $1,470 per hour for work that, if it needed to be done at all, could have been performed by government attorneys. The sweetheart deal cost taxpayers $1.6 million.

The report also says Mr. Pack directed that dossiers about these individuals be given to people outside of government, which was against the advice of an external law firm that warned this could violate the Privacy Act. The review also found that Mr. Pack “engaged in gross mismanagement” when he moved the standards editor at VOA into a position with no assigned duties or functions and barred him from answering questions. Then he refused to backfill the position.

While the agency is funded by the government, a “firewall” is supposed to shield its journalistic independence and integrity. Mr. Pack sought to rescind regulations that codified these protections. The review team found that he “took actions that were inconsistent with the statutory mandate” but also that the law does not clearly define the limits of the CEO authority. This is something that should be rectified.

It’s not surprising that Mr. Trump wanted to exert more control over the Agency for Global Media, which employs about 4,000 people and broadcasts in more than 60 languages. The broader findings are consistent with earlier reports from the State Department’s inspector general, but it’s nevertheless a timely reminder of the damage that a single appointee can cause during just eight months in a job — and a harbinger of what a second Trump administration might look like.

Last September, the Senate confirmed former VOA chief and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Amanda Bennett as Mr. Pack’s replacement for a three-year term. The agency had already rescinded all improper suspensions of security clearances and rehired several employees. Staffers received fresh training on the importance of the firewall. The VOA standards editor returned to his job.

The work they’re doing is as important as ever. The agency says its programing in Russian and Ukrainian has been viewed more than 8 billion times since Russia’s invasion and that 1 in 4 Iranians uses circumvention tools it supports to access information blocked by the regime in Tehran. Those are healthy signs that its credibility, which depends on being perceived as factual and independent, has survived.