The far-Left Atlantic wrote a hit piece on Kari Lake last week, leveling accusations of mismanagement and self-promotion at the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM). However, the Atlantic has been exposed for intentionally misrepresenting Lake’s statements in response to alleged waste of taxpayer dollars.

“The Arizona politician has wasted millions of dollars while blocking U.S. efforts to bring reliable news to repressive countries,” thearticleby Anne Applebaum and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez states in its subheading.

The lengthy piece, titled “What Is Kari Lake Trying to Achieve?” goes on to paint Lake as a partisan pro-Trump sycophant, who did “profound damage to America’s foreign broadcasters, and to America’s ability to communicate with the world” and who “ceded influence to Chinese and Russian state media all over the world,” all in an effort to appease Trump and Elon Musk.

She is further smeared for defunding USAGM’s globalist propaganda-pushinggrantees, speaking out against stolen elections, “broadcasting conspiracy theories,” gutting the agency ofunscrupulous employeesand replacing them with better-suited allies, and pushing a pro-America message to the world, among other disingenuous accusations.

A central point of the story concerns the alleged waste of hundreds of millions of dollars during Lake’s tenure at the agency, using selective quotes to claim she hadn’t “disputed any of the numbers.”

The Gateway Pundit obtained a copy of quotes that Lake provided to the Atlantic’s associate editor, Yvonne Kim. In an email to Kim, Lake answered a long list of questions on topics, ranging from a potential 2026 candidacy for Lake, to her dismantling of the agency, to claims that Lake had cost the agency more than $200 million in unnecessary expenses.

The answers show that Lake previously refuted the numbers in statements to the Atlantic on February 4, one full week before the article was published, but her statements were not used in full in order to portray the claims as accurate. A spokesperson for Lake wrote Kim in an email with Lake’s comments, “I expect when any of these mischaracterizations and lies are printed in your fake news rag that they will be accompanied by Kari’s full statements related to that question/topic. Please print her statements in full. Don’t take the liberty of twisting her words into whatever narrative your pathetic excuse for an ‘article’ seems desperate to manufacture.”

In one portion of the article the writers estimate that an additional $50 million has been spent by the agency after Lake offered employees a buyout package, which reduced the USAGM workforceby 85%, and blames her for a federal judge’s decision to block the firing of employees who continue to receive salaries and benefits on administrative leave months later. Lake’s statement did not refute these numbers but instead blamed an ‘activist judge’ for obstructing her plans,” the story reads. The writers, though, conveniently leave out Lake’s full statement, which reads,

“I terminated 85% of federal employees at USAGM. A radical activist judge on a power trip has blocked that effort, forcing taxpayers to keep funding payrolls that should have ended months ago. If you weren’t such an activist reporter, you’d recognize that judicialoverreach is the only roadblock here. Once this judge stops trying to run the executive branch, we will immediately complete the RIF and free-up these government workers to spread their wings and work in the private sector.”

Another claim in the article asserts that USAGM, under former CEO Amanda Bennett, entered a more than $200 million lease over 15 years for an office building on Pennsylvania Avenue, instead of staying in the agency’s former office, which would save the agency $150 million over the lease term. But Lake “abruptly canceled the lease” and ignored lease termination procedures, instead opting to move into a NASA-operated facility recently. The story claims the lease termination added an additional $16 million in costs, which Lake declined to pay, opening her to a lawsuit to recover the costs.

Source: The Gateway Pundit