Lawfare Archive: Tom Kent on the Dismantling of American Government Broadcasting

With an episode from the law fair archive for March 29th, 2020-6.

“On March 7th, US District Judge Royce Lamberth will let Carrie Lake's appointment to run”

the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees international broadcasts her voice of America. It was our lawful, and that Lake's actions in that role, including the firing of thousands of employees, were illegitimate. As of the week of March 23, Voice of America employees are now returning to their jobs, a year after their unlawful fireings.

For today's archive, I chosen episode from March 25th, 2025, in which Thomas Kent joined Benjamin with us to discuss President Trump's executive order attempting to dismantle voice of America in Radio Free Europe.

It's the law fair podcast I'm Benjamin Wittis, editor-in-chief of law fair with Tom Kent,

former head of Radio Free Europe. If the US government comes up with some alternative way to address the world's people in a way that is credible and not just a blast of propaganda that turns listeners off, then, you know, I suppose there's some future to the whole concept of international communication. Today we're talking about the administration's executive order, dismantling U.S.A.G.M.

the parent company of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and a bunch of other U.S. information broadcasters. All right, so let's start with your history with Voice of America and its related organizations.

“How did you come to be involved in it and what was your role?”

I had a long history in Russian affairs.

That was my specialty at university, and then I joined the Associated Press and worked in a number of overseas assignments, including as Moscow Bureau Chief, and I came back from Moscow to become a head of international news at AP and ethics editor at the AP. And remains sort of the AP's Russianist going back to Russia constantly through the end of the Soviet Union, the Gorbachev period, and a little bit into the Yatsin period.

And when I left the Associated Press in 2016, I became President and CEO of Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, which focuses heavily on the former Soviet Union countries, although its coverage area includes Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, East Europe. And I was there until about the middle of 2018. And after that, I came back to the U.S. teach now at Columbia University about the World

Information War. I write books about it, and I consult to government's militaries, NGOs, and Russian affairs, and questions of propaganda and disinformation. All right, so for those who do not understand the border lines between all of these organizations, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti, and Cuba,

Sarwa. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different U.S. government backed, or at least they were, until last weekend, government backed, news/counter propaganda organizations.

“And they are all, I think, under the auspices of an organization called U.S.A.G.M.”

So explain to us a little bit about what these different organizations are, why they're separate and why they are historically grouped under this umbrella organization. Well, there's been all sorts of adjusting and re-adjusting and re-sorting of these organizations over time, but at the moment, they are, indeed, all under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is U.S.A.G.M.

And there are all a little bit different in different ways. The Voice of America and Radio Marti, which is the French of U.S.A.M. that broadcasts to Cuba, are government agencies. So their employees are civil servants. They have all civil service protection.

They are government employees. Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, and Middle East broadcasting networks are what they call grantees. They receive a grant from the government to operate.

which is two organizations that were welded into one. So it has that kind of awkward name now. Is a private corporation based in Delaware, and receives a grant from the U.S. Agency for Global Media comes originally through Congress, and Congress designates a certain amount of the money that it gives U.S.A.G.M. a four radio for Europe Radio Liberty, and that's

how we get our funding.

“At the highest level of altitude, what happened last week, last week, and with respect to this?”

I mean, if you read the executive order, what it says is U.S.A.G.M. shall be reduced to the statutory minimum required of it. So what did that mean for Radio Free Europe Radio Free Asia, voice of America, I mean, how shut down are they at this point?

Well, ultimately, the courts are going to decide.

It depends how much money each of the grantee organizations, Radio Free Europe Middle East broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, have in their cash drawer left. Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty is still operating, a good deal. We have a little bit of cash, but we're talking about a month or two, and the courts will decide what exactly statutory requirements mean.

To me, it would seem that if Congress appropriate money for Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty, then there's a statutory requirement for the U.S. Agency for Global Media to disperse that money. But it's terribly complicated, all that legally, and we'll see. But just to be clear, for the side of it, that is actually U.S. government agencies, which

“is to save voice of America and Radio Marti, they just fired everybody, right?”

Well, they put them on a administrative leave. I think there's some people who are still there, and sometimes one can see a little flicker of action on the website, or sometimes they're still on the air. But it's obviously been neat and tremendously. Yeah, and they were put on administrative leave initially, but then a whole bunch of them

got termination notices as to their contracts. And I think that's obviously it'll be a matter of litigation, whether those are valid. But I think we have to assume that there's a certain, you know, a measure of finality. If the government really doesn't want to run a news organization, it's pretty hard to force it, too.

Right, and you lose all these people who, obviously, I think a lot of them already had their resumes. I have to because of all the hostile things that were said about U.S. international broadcasting before this last action. So you're going to lose people with a lot of language and other expertise, who will just

go elsewhere, even if the government eventually decides it wants to rehire them. All right, so let's talk about these organizations, and their actual role in the media ecosystem. So for most Americans, these organizations are completely invisible because they don't actually serve an American audience.

That's not what they're for.

Let's talk first about their historic importance, because that seems to be completely

uncontroversial, what was their role prior to the fall of the Soviet Union, and then we'll talk about the more contemporary role in a moment. But talk to us about where these organizations came from, and what was the historic role that they served. They're created at different times.

The first one was the voice of America, which is created during World War II, broadcasting first in German to Germany, and then after the war, we had radio for Europe radio Liberty, and the others followed after that. During the Cold War, radio for Europe radio Liberty was extremely active and effective in penetrating the communist block.

It was about the only way that people in Soviet occupied East Europe and in the Soviet Union itself could get outside information.

Let me cut you off there for a second.

How do we know it was effective? I mean, it's easy for us to sit here and say, hey, voice of America played a really important role in radio for Europe, played a really important role during the Cold War. But what's the actual evidence that it did?

“Well, I think what you have to do is look in the mirror and look at the Soviet reaction”

to what these broadcasters we're doing. It was a little short of hysterical, every day or two in Proveda, there'd be some cartoon denouncing radio for Europe, radio Liberty, and the same thing happened in other countries that these broadcasters targeted. They were very much hated by the government, which obviously felt a need to attack them,

it was worth being such a big deal out of it. Otherwise, it would have ignored it, there were Russians who were going out to their dashes on weekends, covering their radios with the aluminum foil, twisting them in all directions to try to find some way to hear our broadcast through the Soviet jamming. The Soviets, we estimated, spent a lot more on jamming our broadcast than we spent on creating

them. So obviously, they saw it as a mortal threat.

“There were important events in Soviet history that people principally learned about from”

these services. I'm thinking about Chernobyl, all kinds of stuff related to Czechoslovakia in the late 60s, and if you hear like Lindsey Graham talk about this executive order, he'll say, "Yeah, I'd played an important role in the Cold War, but, you know, not, I don't know what it's been up to since the end of the, since the Berlin Wall came down."

My impression is that there are still a lot of people who get their news from voice of America, from radio for Europe, radio liberty, et cetera. What is the current function as you understand it? Currently, it's what it was before, it broadcasts news for people who can't get legitimate news through the rather channels.

So we see USHMs networks completely active in all these places.

The big difference is that a lot of people still think that we basically do radio, and there

is still some radio because I'm some part of the world that's a way to get through, but the USHM networks are very active in web, social networks, satellite broadcasting, television, radio for your radio liberty has a 24-hour Russian language TV news channel, so they use all the latest technology, including an awful lot of technology to break through blockages which the Russians and others now try to put on our web services.

Right, so let's talk about that, because it seems to me that this is, and I kind of mockingly argued this in a column that if you're trying to build a foreign policy based

“on lies, it's actually not an obvious thing that you should want to have a first-rate”

set of newsrooms that operate in multiple different languages. And I mean, VOA alone is 49 or 50 languages or something that actually gives people high quality information that this is at some level, a pretty logical follow-on to a policy that adopts a lot of Russian different information as true. And when I wrote that, I was trying to be provocative, but I actually think it's right

that if you're spouting Russian propaganda from the Oval Office in meetings with the Ukrainian president, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to also employ 100 Russian speaking journalists and 40 Ukrainian speaking journalists whose job is going to be to correct you. And so I'm curious, you know, your sadness and anger over the destruction of these organizations aside, are you surprised by it?

“The administration and voice as close to it have had a lot of problems with U.S. international”

broadcasting forever, and the first Trump term, there was a Trump appointed leader of U.S.

H.E.M. by the name of Michael Pack, who set out to reform it as he put it, and a lot of people felt that his goal was essentially to get into the editorial function and make it go in a certain way. But, you know, whoever's in the Oval Office, it seems to me, should see some value in U.S. international broadcasting for one purpose or another.

For example, we at the moment, on the past few days, have been bombing Yemen. Well, for the people in Yemen, you would think that you would want to have some way to communicate to them why the U.S. is bombing their country to explain that it's because of the hooties who are firing missiles at ships, and that maybe if they could get the hooties not to fire missiles at ships, it would be a good thing.

So, whatever you're trying to do, whatever you're trying to convey, the fact that you have got an entire structure that is at your service in a total of 60 languages, so if you count them all, seems to be a significant thing, and it has a huge listenership.

Some estimates are 300,400 million people, 400 million people around the world.

Voice of America, and his car radio.

So, if you've got all these people out there, in what language, by the way, he was listening in French, but there are many other languages, of course, if they operate in, and even

“if you want to look at it, suppose you want to look at it from a really cold, hired standpoint.”

It's take away democracy and human rights, and all of that, which I think there's a lot to be said for it, but if you want to look at it just cold and hard, let's take a country like Congo. Okay, country like Congo, which has all these strategic minerals, and the United States has a great interest in having good relations with them, getting strategic materials and everything

else.

You have China and everybody else in there.

The Voice of America has services in Lingala and Swahili, which are two of the major languages of Congo in addition to French, which is widely spoken there. Why would you not want to have a way to communicate directly to these people? If you don't, what are they going to listen to? They're obviously going to be listening to Chinese Russian and Lord knows what else at

the United American content, and then when US mining engineers are trying to operate in Congo, you're going to read the whirlwind of these people being in a super-an American mood. So why wouldn't you want to talk to them?

All right, but there's, I mean, US-AGM has a additional layer, which is not simply that you

“want to talk to them, but you want to talk to them in a non-propeganistic way, right?”

You want to give them actually useful news. You want to have, I mean, the example that I used in my column about this is you want to have a newsroom that is actually talking to Ukrainians about Mike Johnson's attitudes toward the supplemental and hasn't sufficient relationship with Mike Johnson so that he's breaking news through VOA about his plans about the supplemental for Ukraine.

It does not follow from the fact that you want to talk to all these people, that you want to talk to them in a fashion that is rigorous, that is journalistically serious, that employs people like you to, you know, a long-time reporter and Russia specialist to run radio free Europe. You could put propagandists in charge of that and many countries do.

“What is the case for talking to people in Eastern Congo with serious journalism as opposed”

to raw, raw, Americanism? The case is that people can smell propaganda to suggest that people even in most distant Congo cannot tell the difference between propaganda and serious news to underestimate them. People are impressed by USAGM covering in-depth what the U.S. has to say and in conducting them as the VOA charter says, "We use it and we'll discuss them thereof."

So they get the sense from listening to our broadcaster reading our websites that they're getting something with different points of view that will lead to them actually having conversations and maybe leading them to expect from their own media some kind of balance coverage. So I'll give you an example during the State of the Union broadcast by President Trump.

The Voice of America broadcast that worldwide live in languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Persian, and so forth. There was no way that people in these countries and with these languages and other languages too would have gotten such an immediate, such thorough coverage of what Trump had to say. Yes, after that VOA broadcast to the Democratic response, but the message to these people

is that the United States is a country where there are different points of view where you don't go to jail for disagreeing with the President and maybe it would trigger some people to think that, "Well, this wouldn't be such a bad idea in our country either." Indeed, that's out of rhythm. In my cancelling, it's time to write, "Oh, that's recruiting."

David Keinfalsch's "cycness" up-geleaked. What do you take to be the administration's beef with VOA?

They've actually articulated a different one, which is that VOA is full of leftist propaganda

“and which I don't take to be remotely accurate.”

But I'm curious, you point out that in the first administration, there was a attempt to radically

reform the USAGM in a more Trumpy direction, what do you understand the motivation and rationale here to be? Well, there are a few things to begin with, USAGM, like any government agency, obviously could be more efficient. People question, "Why do we need all these different networks?"

Don't they all do the same thing? Actually, there's an answer that we can come to if you want, is to why we need these different networks.

But on the surface, it looks like duplication.

It's an agency that could be more efficient in many ways. As I say, it's headquarters in Washington, VOA headquarters is huge, old, rat-infested building literally. There's a lot that could be cleaned up, literally and figuratively at USAGM. All that said, I don't think that that's primarily what the government is conserved with,

because any kind of cleaning up or reorganization can be cleaned up and reorganized. It doesn't require getting rid of the organization.

“I think what's operating here is that for some years, there's been a group of people”

who have thought that USAGM was left-wing.

I don't think it is from having followed it very carefully, but they have collected over a decade or so, some examples of unfortunate comments on the air, unfortunate posts by individual journalists. I'm sure that if you went to cherry pick any news organization, maybe even law fair, you could find something in the past X years that maybe you'd done differently or someone

went a little too far. They have created a list of these incidents, which probably number fewer than 20, or the past decade, and have managed to convince a number of conservatives. You can see this, we've left it in the 2025 project in elsewhere, that this organization is full of some kind of raging leftists.

So if you think that the organization is full of raging leftist journalists, and you love the idea of sticking it to leftist journalists, then the opportunity to fire thousands of leftist journalists seems like a great idea, even if you're cutting off your own ability to speak to the world. Yeah, one way to think about it is that the administration has an ongoing war on the bureaucracy,

it hates the press, and it has various initiatives that are directed at sort of contempt

“for foreigners, and this brings all three together, right?”

It's a war on an American bureaucracy composed of journalists that speaks to foreign countries and foreign languages. So those of us who have been arguing that this is a real gift to our strategic information competitors, specifically to the Russians, but also the Chinese, what is your long-time Russia watcher among other things?

What has been the reaction to this in Moscow? The Russian government, at its highest level, officially is being very diplomatic and saying, "Well, this is a internal affair for the United States," but Russian commentators on television and elsewhere, of course, are turning cartwheels. This is something that the Russian authorities have spent endless amounts of time and money

trying to block out to their audiences, so they won't have that problem anymore, assuming that this broadcasts do end, and these web services do end. There are all sorts of pro-Russian groups in East Europe that feel the same way, regimes like that in Hungary feel the same way. The Iranian Iotollas will be pleased because U.S.A.G.M provided multiple services to Iran

that, for example, when they had demonstrations in Iran, and years ago, it was a big anecdote about demonstrations, Iranians knew about these demonstrations in great part because of U.S.A.G.M broadcasting that let people in one town know what was happening in another.

throughout the Middle East, all the anti-American contingents there, and in Africa where Russia

and China have sharply stepped up their information operations, they will increasingly be able to control the information space. And sometimes they will even literally take over. There have been cases, for example, when the BBC stopped its broadcasting to the Middle East in some languages, the Chinese radio took over those very same frequencies.

So when people turned on the frequency, they heard the BBC, they would then hear Chinese broadcasting.

“So what are the prospects, if any, for a reversal of this decision?”

You mentioned that there's a possibility of litigation, there's also traditionally serious

constituencies for these programs in Congress, and they're not just Democrats, right? I mean, these are these programming instruments, actually, a lot of them have their origins in conservative politics, the fact that we shouldn't see it in information space to the Soviets, or to the Chinese, or to the Iranians. I mean, for the O.A. appears to be really shut down at this point.

Radio for your radio liberty are because they're private organizations, and as you say, there's some money in the bank, they're moving along, but they're going to have to find alternative funding sources real fast to stay alive.

So my question is, what's the, what's the prospect, either, for Congress to get involved

in a constructive way, for the courts to get involved in a constructive way, or for the executive branch to realize that they've really cut off their nose despite their face here, and sort of save some of these organizations or some portions of these organizations? You write that traditionally Congress has had a real bipartisan support for these broadcasters, and they're coming from different sides when I would go to meet with Congress as president

of RFERRL, and we had to go and explain to them what we were doing and justify our budget. Some people in Congress would say to me, what we like about you is you broadcast a truth

“in all sides of them fair and objective, and that's really great, and that's why we support”

you. People would say, we hope you're giving Putin a taste of his own medicine, implying that they thought that we should go off and do disinformation or anything else to advance America's goals. So whatever you wanted, however you imagined in your mind, USAGM networks to be, there was

a strong support. What there'll be now is obviously going to be a function, not only what people think about RFERRL and the other networks, but the America and the overall relationship between the Congress and the President, which is subject to many other factors. The courts will see, they can demand that USAGM hand this money over to the grantee agencies,

but USAGM has many ways since it administers the funds and does accounting and so forth, as many ways it could probably make life miserable for the grantee networks. In any case, there's been talk of the EU, I was just in an EU conference in Brussels a couple days ago, and there's talk of the EU picking up some of the funding for RFERL and that could happen.

But there's a larger question too, and here maybe we could say something positive, potentially about the administration, and that is that maybe it considers that the USAGM is a rotten old husk and it's, you know, can think what it wants, but the question then is, so what? So what do you want to do? I think that the administration ought to realize that there is a value to being able to address

foreign populations, whatever the hell we want to tell them. So there could be some kind of other structure, something potentially more related to the state department, which is what Project 2025 referred to or to the National Security Council or whatever.

“I don't think that the USAGM structure, as it exists now, is necessarily the only way”

and the cosmos that this kind of international communication can take place. I think it would have been lies to leave it there while they were figuring out something else, but we are where we are, and if the US government comes up with some alternative way

that turns listeners off, then, you know, I suppose there's some future to the whole concept of international communication. So that's super optimistic of you and I love that, but I want to ask is there any evidence that that's what they're thinking?

I don't know, I mean, you can always go back to Project 2025 and some of those things are

carried out and some of them are not, but there seems to be a recognition among the kinds of people who did that, that we do need to have that communication. It seems to me that if I were the State Department or I were the National Security Council or I were the Department of Defense, which also has a potent communications capability, that I would want some way to get messages out fast to people.

If only because, you know, if we're going to wind up intervening in some country or another, you know, to free an American or at attack terrorists or whatever, it helps a whole lot if local population knows something about the United States, feels some sympathy for the U.S., understands why the U.S. acts as it does.

“It's a huge force multiplier if you want to look at it just in very clearly strategic terms”

and the incremental cost of having these kinds of broadcasters that can use the Voltaire terminology, shape the battlefield to affect hearts and minds where U.S. forces may be engaged, where U.S. business may be engaged, where U.S. citizens may be in peril. It sounds as some value. If you take something like the, I referred earlier, to Swahili and Lingala services

of the voice of America, you know, those services cost a million dollars or two million

dollars and Apache attack helicopter cost 52 million dollars. So you would hope that when it comes to the point in it will at some point somewhere that those Apache helicopters have to set down, you would hope that the population there would not be totally under the sway of hostile and American propaganda from our adversaries. Right.

So what's what is the total cost per animal of U.S. A.G.M? I know V.O.A. is something

“like 23240 million dollars, but what's the rest of U.S. A.G.M. together?”

You put it all together and it's around 800 million dollars. So again, what less than a single one of these highly bespoke weapon systems iterated once. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, it all depends on how you want to view it. I mean, obviously, I come from a journalism background. I believe in free press. I believe in democracy. I believe in human rights.

“I believe in modeling responsible journalism, because I think that countries that are democracies”

are less likely to attack each other and create the kinds of wars that the United States

seems always to get dragged into.

So I think there's a lot to be said for democratic countries. But even if I were, you know, just just sitting there with the Pentagon with, you know, 100 medals on my chest, thinking about, you know, how are we going to obtain our military objective? I would want to have a capability to have people around the world on our side.

So I want to tell you a personal story about V.O.A. offices, different language services, and then just get your response to it. So as you may know, in one of my non-law fair lives, I do a series of protests at the Russian embassy where I use projectors and lasers to put symbols of Ukraine, as well as various obnoxious slogans on the face of the embassy and the Russians really don't like this.

But both at different times, both the Ukrainian language service and the Russian language service of V.O.A. have covered it, and they've covered it in very different ways. So the Ukrainian language service covered it in quite a bit of depth as part of a long story about the Russian embassy neighborhood and how they have rallied the block across the street from the embassy has really rallied in favor of Ukraine, and it's kind of like a human

interest story about American neighbors of the Russian embassy rallying to Ukraine. It received a lot of attention in Ukraine and not the projections in particular, but the idea

The Russian language service covered it in a different way, which was that when Ambassador

and Tonov, the last Russian ambassador left, I projected a farewell message to him, and the Russian language service covered that, which I thought was really interesting. They kind of broadcast interrush that some American guy was taunting the Russian ambassador on his way out.

“And so I think it's an interesting micro-picture of your point that V.O.A. and these other”

AGM services give the United States the ability to talk in fairly micro-targeted ways to individual communities, some of which are language based, some of which are regionally based, about things that maybe the American population doesn't care that much about. So I'm just interested for any thoughts that that example brings up for you. Sure.

One thing that comes to mind is that what is a Russian to think when he sees a broadcast about how you're projecting images onto the Russian embassy? Now some Russians will think, "Oh, these are horrible Americans doing all this at a Russia propaganda." But at another level, I think the thing that sinks in is that an individual of American,

this Ben-Wittis, whoever he is, has the right to do this. He's not arrested.

“I mean, he can go and operate from a window across the street of the sidewalk or whatever”

you do. And this is like freedom of speech, and this can happen.

I think that is the amazing thing.

And so a lot of the VOA's coverage of the United States, which at its surface might look one way, can have a different effect. For example, the VOA covered the George Floyd protests in the United States. And if you were an American propaganda, you might say, "Oh, this is terrible." The VOA shouldn't cover George Floyd demonstrations, because it makes America police look

bad. But the fact that people could demonstrate against the police and the United States was just stunning for listeners in so many countries. And that is really the message. And it makes people think that, gee, despite everything we hear, the Americans have

got something there that I think rebounds to our benefit. So I want to ask you to look forward over the next few months and describe what a positive scenario for the next few months in this area looks like, and what a negative, I mean, I suppose a negative scenario is that these organizations, whether and die, or become simple propaganda outlets.

If we're inclined toward optimism, what should we be looking for to happen over the next few weeks and months? If we're inclined toward optimism, we would look for indications that the State Department or the NSC, or somebody, is going to get back into the international communication business.

“That could be through broadcasting, which I think is absolutely essential in web services,”

the kind of all the things that USAGM does now, perhaps in a different structure. And also things like international exchange programs and educational programs and things

that have such a huge impact when you go abroad, people are always saying, you know,

important people are always saying, when I was a student, I got this trip to the US through the US State Department that paid for it. In ever since then, you know, I've really understood the United States and I'm a fan. So all this international communication is important, I think it's strategically important, I think it's militarily important, I think it's economically important, and I can't imagine

that we would want to leave that completely fallow. In terms of other optimism or pessimism, a huge amount of it in my mind turns around the 10 USAGM journalists who are currently in prison in places like Vietnam, Iran, Belarus, Russia, and I'm just horrified at the thought that the US government will just sort of let them rot, that you know, take away the organizations that they worked for and that the US

embassies in these countries, you know, sensing the hostility toward these organizations by the administration, will do nothing. I mean, this administration is a pretty good at getting out of jail, a number of Americans and people who are close to US interests in various ways.

Thomas Kent teaches at Columbia University.

“He is the author of striking back overt and covert options to combat Russian disinformation”

and how Russia loses.

And of course, he was the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty prior to 2018.

“Tom, thanks so much for joining us today.”

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