The agency you never heard of run by a man you don't know that Joe Biden considered a threat
Biden's first firing just a few minutes into his administration takes on new significance in light of China's propaganda
Former U.S> Agency for Global Media President Michael Pack. (Photo: Tal Atzmon/The Epoch Times)
In the first hour of Joe Biden’s presidency, the commander in chief fired a little-known figure running an agency most Americans have likely never heard of.
Yet that firing was symbolically and substantively significant.
Its significance has only grown two months into an administration that has conferred legitimacy on the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) narratives with respect to America’s purported moral failings — providing it a major propaganda coup — and messaged still further weakness to our other adversaries.
The opening act in President Biden’s purge of Trump administration officials was the sacking of Michael Pack.
Producer of more than a dozen Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentaries on America and past senior employee of U.S. international broadcasting entities, Pack was an eminently qualified choice for president of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM).
USAGM oversees five such networks, including perhaps most famously the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. It serves more than 350 million viewers in 100 countries and over 60 languages weekly. The executive branch agency is charged by law with, among other things, presenting U.S. government policy to the world, and providing a balanced and comprehensive view of critical issues, as part of its broader mission to promote freedom and democracy — particularly in those places lacking in such principles.
In that role, Pack threatened to do the unforgivable: Adhere to the law by fairly presenting the Trump administration’s agenda to the world, rebalancing USAGM content away from progressivism, and confronting tyrannical regimes in information cyberspace.
Consequently, the political establishment, the administrative state that executes its agenda, and the corporate media that propagandizes on its behalf, could not tolerate Pack.
First, he was subjected to an interminably long, character-assassinating confirmation process that nearly ran out the clock on his appointment entirely. At one point, the Fascist Left media attempted to smear Pack with a story claiming he skimmed money from his nonprofit Public Media Lab to benefit himself and his family. The allegations were a lie and the U.S. Attorney for Washington, D.C. was forced to publicly admit that.
Voice of America used what was considered a “repackaged Biden ad” that drew the ire of former USAGM President Michael Park, a Trump nominee fired by Biden in the first hour of his White House occupancy. (Photo Illustration: ACV Images)
Then, after being appointed, he found himself stymied at every turn. He was hit with lawsuits for making basic personnel decisions about who ought to run various organizations under his purview, and for reprimanding employees who injected rampant bias into USAGM content, in violation of the law. Such bias included producing what Pack described in a recent interview as a “repackaged Biden ad” that came out of the VOA’s Urdu service.
These moves again spurred not only legal action, but also drew the ire of the organization’s personnel, and the wrath of the media. So too did Pack’s internal security review, which found glaring gaps, for example, in the vetting of foreign employees, including from adversarial nations such as China and Iran.
As Pack recounted, stunningly, “The USAGM is an agency of 4,000 people, and over the years, 1,500 have been given improper security clearances. That’s 40 percent of the agency.”
In spite of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issuing several reports over the years highlighting this issue, USAGM leaders had cleared people who used fake false social security numbers, refused to provide fingerprints as required by law and failed to complete other security forms.
“It got to the point,” said Pack, that the OPM “revoked the ability of the agency to approve suitability clearances. … and after it was no longer allowed to grant these clearances, the agency granted them anyway. This included, in addition to the 1,500 improperly cleared … a small but significant number of top secret and above clearances.”
For having the temerity to seek, among other things, to investigate for fraud or treason, this mass of employees and remedy this major security failure, Pack faced a firestorm. This episode was illustrative of what transpired during his short tenure.
Pack’s firing represented the culmination of the more than three-year jihad waged against him. As Pack put it of his opponents, “They wanted to stop any person appointed by Donald Trump from fulfilling any aspect of the president’s agenda. The people who are against Donald Trump have been ruthless in every capacity.”
The war on Pack was a microcosm of the broader effort to deprive the Trump administration of officials who would actually faithfully serve it. It had consequences that implicated national security procedures as being lax, perhaps fraudulent, not to mention going beyond the aforementioned malfeasance in issuing security clearances.
It’s imperative to compete against foreign adversaries in the realm of ideas. Pack agrees, as does Donald Trump and a majority of his administration, that “it is very important, and it’s particularly important now that China, especially — but also Iran and North Korea and others — are ramping up their own information efforts to put forward their vision of the world and their ideas and their story, and we need to … push back and put a positive view of what our ideas and our principles are.”
He had pledged to do so, and now will not get that chance.
Specifically on China, he had also sought to “put more attention to internet firewall circumvention technology and tools” — that is, to evade China’s “Great Firewall.” For this, too, he faced criticism for challenging the USAGM’s “costly, inefficient manner” by which it had pursued such efforts in the past.
It’s unclear what, if anything, the Biden administration will do in connection with that effort. Given his admiration and sychophantry to China, it is a safe bet to say he will do nothing.
In the realm of information, the Biden administration has removed large troves of content from the State Department website aimed at exposing the Chinese Communist Party’s malign actions. It has rejected the facts that the CCP was directly involvied in the international spread of the coronavirus, and refused to declare that it will punish China for its deceitful and dastardly acts in connection with the pandemic.
When Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s CCP counterparts lambasted America for its purported human rights failings — those frequently raised by our nation’s Fascist Left — their response was to concede the premise. They went on to attempt to couch it as a strength that we could recognize our failings and seek to be better.
Beyond the fact that the Trump administration likely would have never held such a meeting, the executive branch almost certainly would not have acceded to this narrative. One can bet that the USAGM under Pack would have fought it, and exposed it for the propaganda that it was.
Instead, we are likely to see a reversion to the status quo ante, of a U.S. government media operation that speaks not for Americans but for our adversaries. The best that can be said is that it will likely do so consistent with the “executive” it is supposed to serve.