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Journalists sue Trump, Kari Lake over VOA cuts

homesafetytechpros — Sun, 23 Mar 2025 02:12:23 +0000

Left: Kari Lake speaking during the second day of the Republican National Convention, Tuesday, July 16, 2024, in Milwaukee (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite). Right: President Donald Trump at a press conference at the White House in Washington on February 27, 2025 (Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Sipa USA; via AP Images).

A group of journalists has sued the Trump administration over its efforts to shut down the Voice of America news network and other federally-funded global media organizations.

The lawsuit, filed Friday, names Kari Lake – the stalwart Arizona political candidate, election denier, and Donald Trump ally — along with the agency she oversees, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which houses VOA, among the defendants. The plaintiffs allege that the administration’s massive cuts to the agency, which threaten thousands of jobs, violate their First Amendment free speech rights as well as the separation of powers, by taking a chain saw to an agency approved by Congress.

The VOA network — which is not broadcast within the U.S., but is heard by more than 350 million people worldwide each week — has long been on the president’s list of agencies to be targeted. In his March 15, 2025, executive order, Trump refers to the organization as “the voice of radical America” and asserts that under his watch, “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”

The order then goes on to cite multiple right-wing media organizations, including the Daily Caller and The Washington Free Beacon, as proof of VOA’s alleged “radical” agenda.

The plaintiffs in the case include Patsy Widakuswara, previously VOA’s White House bureau chief, and Jessica Jerreat, its press freedom editor. Four other journalists sued anonymously.

The lawsuit says this move is nothing short of historic — and devastating.

“Prior to March 15, 2025, Congress’s statutory mandate that VOA continuously broadcast to the world had been honored and faithfully upheld for more than eight decades,” the lawsuit says. “Today, for the first time in VOA’s history, it is defied.”

The lawsuit lays out the stakes in stark terms:

If VOA and the other USAGM networks are to survive, this Court must act. It must recognize and protect, as the court did in Turner v. U.S. Agency for Global Media, the rights of journalists and those who assist them to work and produce content free from partisan interference by the Executive Branch — including the “interference” inherent in being locked out of their offices, computer networks, email accounts, and broadcast studios, and living under the threat of termination. It must enforce the firewall in the way Congress wrote it. And it must uphold the foundational principles of Congressional authority, appropriations, and separation of powers that are set forth in the Constitution and laws of the United States, and which prevent the Executive Branch from dismantling by decree an agency created and mandated by Congress, as a court recognized earlier this week when it blocked a similar shuttering of USAID.

According to the lawsuit, the move to gut the government-funded networks is unlawful content-based restriction barred by the First Amendment.

“Defendants have shuttered USAGM’s networks’ operations because of the content and perceived viewpoint of the networks’ speech, unlawfully interfered with the editorial independence of the networks’ journalists, and seek to chill the future speech of the networks’ journalists,” the complaint says.

The complaint also accuses Lake and the administration of unlawfully violating the “statutory firewall” that is intended to maintain the independence of VOA — and of going after individual journalists and possibly endangering their lives.

“As officers of USAGM and its associated entities, Defendants are bound by the statutory firewall,” the complaint says. “Defendants have egregiously, aggressively, and unabashedly violated the firewall by interfering with and indeed preventing VOA’s newsgathering and news dissemination. Defendants have caused the killing of valuable news stories and ‘disappeared’ editorials—and Defendants have also directly risked Plaintiffs’ livelihoods and future careers, smearing them as incompetent or, worse, as ‘spies” and “terrorist sympathizers.””

Describing “government-funded journalism” as having long been a “central component of the United States’ effort to combat disinformation and propaganda abroad,” the complaint says that VOA plays a key role in maintaining American interests around the globe.

“Today, some of American broadcasting’s biggest audiences are in North Korea, Iran, and China, where millions of people seek credible, impartial news uninfluenced by government agenda or politics,” the complaint says. “American government-funded broadcasting services have played key roles in foreign policy by providing truthful information about local and world repressive regimes that otherwise suppress or censor the press. The global public’s trust in the accuracy of reporting from these organizations is paramount to the success of their mission.”

Congress, the complaint continues, has recognized the independence of these journalists, despite being on the government payroll.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction reinstating all employees, contractors, and grantees to their jobs at USAGM, and an order that the Trump administration “take no further action to reduce USAGM’s workforce (whether employees, contractors, or grantees).” In addition, the plaintiffs seek an order that the defendants “comply with Congressional statutes that require VOA to ‘serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news,’ and require international USAGM outlets to “provide news which is consistently reliable and authoritative, accurate, objective, and comprehensive[.]’”

In addition, the plaintiffs are asking the court to “[d]eclare that Defendants violated the First Amendment and statutory firewall, separation of powers, the Administrative Procedure Act, and the appointments clause,” and to order the defendants to “cease their violations of Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights.”

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Kari Lake’s ‘surrender’ in defamation lawsuit, explained

homesafetytechpros — Wed, 27 Mar 2024 14:50:26 +0000

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer (AP Photo/Serkan Gurbuz), Kari Lake (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake will not bother defending her statements that a Maricopa County official illegally rigged the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election which the former local news anchor lost, her lawyers confirmed Tuesday by seeking a default judgment.

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a registered Republican, filed the defamation lawsuit in June 2023, claiming that Lake and her co-defendants spread “egregious and harmful falsities to further their own agendas — and line their own pockets — at Richer’s expense.”

Richer alleged that Lake’s words had real-world consequences, including “threats of violence, and even death” against him and his family.

In early March, the Arizona Supreme Court refused to keep the lawsuit on hold, meaning the defamation case would move towards discovery and trial. The high court rejection came months after a Maricopa County Superior Court judge ruled Richer made “actionable defamation claim(s)” regarding “provably false” statements that a trial jury could determine to be “either true or false.”

Lake claimed that Richer sabotaged vote tabulators in the 2022 Arizona gubernatorial election she lost. She claimed Richer purposefully printing the “wrong image on the ballot” (one inch smaller) and claimed that “300,000 illegal ballots” with “with zero chain of custody” marred the election.

The trial judge ruled that Lake’s words were no mere “imaginative expression or rhetorical hyperbole,” since ballot image size and the number of allegedly illegal ballots were matters that could be proven true or false.

On Tuesday, Lake and her attorneys motioned for a default judgment and an “accelerated damages hearing […] to adjudicate those matters which occupy less than five percent of the amended Complaint.”

Lake’s attempt to explain why she didn’t bother contesting Richer’s claims rang hollow to those who understood the meaning of the ruling. While Lake claimed in a recorded statement that she didn’t want to legitimize the lawsuit, Chief Deputy Attorney General of Arizona Dan Barr remarked that the default judgment did exactly that.

More Law&Crime coverage: Hurry up, the 2024 election is coming and Dominion voting machines need to be banned, Kari Lake tells SCOTUS

“Someone should explain to Kari Lake that by not answering @stephen_richer’s complaint and having a default judgment entered against her, she has admitted to EVERYTHING in the complaint as a matter of law,” Barr said, explaining the upshot to Kari Lake. “She has conferred 100% credibility to Richer’s lawsuit.”

Someone should explain to Kari Lake that by not answering @stephen_richer’s complaint and having a default judgment entered against her, she has admitted to EVERYTHING in the complaint as a matter of law. She has conferred 100% credibility to Richer’s lawsuit. https://t.co/XZhCAxDq22

— Dan Barr (@DanCBarr) March 27, 2024

In their court filing, Lake’s attorneys claimed that “defaulting” doesn’t amount to an admission.

“It is often said that defaulting admits the allegations in the operative complaint. This is a misnomer,” the defense wrote, before citing case law that says: “An entry of default serves as a judicial admission of all well-pleaded facts in the complaint. A party against whom default is entered, however, is not held to admit facts that are not well-pleaded or to admit conclusions of law.”

Notably, when the trial judge ruled against Lake by refusing to throw out the lawsuit, he wrote that Richer “offers well pled factual allegations to support his assertion that any statements regarding ballot manipulation are false and defamatory. ”

In a statement, Lake said that the lawsuit is “a political witch hunt and everyone knows it.”

“By participating in this lawsuit it would only serve to legitimize this perversion of our legal system, and allow bad actors to interfere in our upcoming election, so I won’t be taking part,” she said.

In summary, the lawsuit arose because of allegedly defamatory statements that Lake made about an election official sabotaging an election she lost, and now she is refusing to defend those statements in court for reasons that make little sense for someone who claims to have told the truth. After all, truth is an absolute defense.

Lake’s attorneys indicated in their filing, however, that they want this case resolved “before the forthcoming primary and general elections.”

Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer responded to the default judgment move by saying that Lake retreated because she got caught.

“After months of doubling down and defending their lies across Arizona, in the media, and on social media, when push came to shove, the Defendants decided to completely back down and concede that their lies were just that: lies,” he said in a statement. “Because of their actions, my family and I have faced an endless barrage of threats — including calls for our execution — I have lost close personal relationships, and I have had my reputation irreparably damaged.”

“I have said from the beginning that no one is above the rule of law and today further validates that belief,” Richer added. “I look forward to entering the damages phase of this case.”

Protect Democracy lawyer Jared Davidson, one of the attorneys who represented Richer, said that Lake’s “surrender” amounted to her “effectively admitting that she spread lies about Mr. Richer and did so with ‘actual malice,”” a high bar to clear in a defamation action against a public official. Lake’s refusal to assert the truth of her statements as a defense in court spoke volumes, the lawyer said, and now all that’s left is to find out how much Lake, her campaign, and the Lake Fundraising Organization must pay.

“The only thing left to do now is to determine the amount of the damage done to Mr. Richer as a result of Defendants’ misconduct,” Davidson said.

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