At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Brian Mast (R-FL) questioned Kari Lake about a representative allegedly being targeted by a staff member of USAGM.
00:00Gentlemen, I have I have a clarification question, please. If it was the middle of November, then to the gentleman's point, it was after President Trump had won and those people were out because they were in mourning because they were so partisan that they wanted to not be there. And I think he made a very good point. And I thank the gentleman. We digress. Can I can I actually just respond to that really quick? I am actually going to recognize myself for five minutes now as much as it's been a fun exercise with everybody.
00:30I would make the point that, you know, radio free is not free. And I was just thinking about this in my office the other day. And I was like, what's the most common media in America on the radio? I think it's iHeartRadio, iHeartMedia. The entire budget for iHeartMedia across the breadth of the United States of America and the globe is $90 million. That's the entire breadth. For radio free Europe, $150 million, significantly more than all of iHeartMedia.
00:58For radio free Asia, $70 million. For Middle East broadcasting, $103 million. You think of all of those individually and you compare that to iHeartMedia across America and you look at the reach of that. I just think it's an interesting note as we point out the need to downsize the size and scope of what's going on in USAGM.
01:16I did want to do my questions right now because I wanted to touch a little bit on what Representative Perry had spoken about with that IG report.
01:24But I am very surprised that nobody touched off on this on either side of the aisle. It was just said by you in your opening remarks that there is a member of Congress targeted by somebody inside of USAGM.
01:39Does that mean you were tracking their IP address and they were emailing people or they were phone calling? How do you track that? What do you mean?
01:46Well, you'd have to ask the Capitol Police. They're the ones, I believe, doing the investigation and it's an active investigation.
01:52But from my understanding, somebody was calling a beloved member of Congress who's actively in Congress right now.
02:00Republican or Democrat?
02:01I'm going to let you guess. With the bias you've seen at this agency, just take a wild guess.
02:07Can you say the name of the individual that conducted this?
02:09I think I would prefer to withhold that and maybe we can talk away from this because I don't want to sabotage the investigation.
02:17Will you keep us updated on it as the investigation goes on?
02:19What I've learned is that over the course of two years, I believe starting into roughly October of 2023, right up until January of 25, threatening phone calls were being made to a sitting member of Congress.
02:34And through the course of their investigation, they figured out where those calls were.
02:40I don't know how our investigators figured that out, but they have a ways and they found out that the phone calls to the sitting member of Congress, threatening calls, were coming from inside of VOA.
02:50Thank you for sharing. We look forward, I'm sure all of us on both sides, to hearing more information about this.
02:56I want to get to the questions about the IG reports.
02:59And it's something that I spoke about in my opening statements, individuals hired on, improperly vetted, some of these agencies asking for their own skiffs, their own secure places to view classified information, and not literally always being given security clearances, but given access to secret and top secret information.
03:19It's amazing to me to think that journalists were given what we might not give allied militaries.
03:25That, to me, is a very interesting thing to think about.
03:27But when you say we couldn't find 500 of these individuals, you mean somewhere in the government, you went to go look for who are these people that you consider suspect, and now they pulled a Kaiser Soce and we can't see them anywhere?
03:41What's going on?
03:42Sadly, yes.
03:44About 1,500 people went through this shoddy vetting, which I think could have been intentionally shoddy, because they knew there were problems.
03:55This is no fingerprints, aliases in many cases.
03:57No FBI fingerprints or something like that.
03:59Some of the times the FBI fingerprints were taken and not submitted, sometimes they were not taken at all.
04:05And then they were given PIV cards, which is the access card you need to get into federal buildings and offices.
04:11It's actually a very secure way of keeping our offices and our departments and agencies.
04:18Somebody who's hired by America, they have a direct deposit.
04:20They have, like you said, an ID card to get into a building.
04:23If they're global media, they might have a passport to travel on behalf of the United States of America.
04:28The fact that you're saying these individuals cannot be found is a staggering statement.
04:34Not only can they not be found, and we've asked for help with other agencies to try to track them down.
04:41We even asked the Doge guys.
04:42You know, these are young guys who have a way of kind of looking into things.
04:47And they said, I think we can find them.
04:49They tried and tried and tried.
04:51Did they use aliases?
04:52I mean, were these people using fake names?
04:54Yes.
04:55Okay.
04:56When they come in.
04:56Did they have social security numbers or were they foreigners working on visas?
04:59They're foreigners with no social security numbers.
05:01So they're given, just a notional number was put in on these forms.
05:06They had forms that were not filled out.
05:08I mean, this is a massive security failure in a level that should keep you up at night.
05:15I want to ask you one more question.
05:16And they could be working, by the way, at other agencies.
05:18I want to get to one more question before my time expired.
05:19Like you said, you were a big part of media in your prior roles.
05:24Did you ever have a TS or SCI clearance, or did you ever get to go into a SCIF as a member of the media?
05:29No.
05:31I now recognize Representative Sherfliss McCormick.
05:34Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Ms. Lake, for being here.
