Kari Lake Bombshell: VOA managers met with Chinese to discuss more favorable coverage for Beijing

Voice of America (VOA) managers met multiple times with Chinese officials seeking to influence more favorable U.S. coverage of their country, part of a larger dynamic that proved to the "detriment of America" and its taxpayer-funded media operation for the world, Trump adviser Kari Lake told Just the News.

Lake, the president's senior adviser for the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said the meetings with communist China officials both in Washington and abroad were discovered as part of an investigation that exposed undue foreign influence on the VOA's operations.

"We found out in our investigations over the months that I've been here, that the CCP, operating out of the embassy in Washington, D.C. ... were meeting regularly with VOA management to tell them how they should be covering China," Lake said Tuesday night in a wide-ranging interview on the Just the News, No Noise television show.

Lake said the coverage was skewed to portray the country in a positive light, and that at least one VOA official with the Mandarin language division had pledged his support for the CCP at one of the meetings.

"I mean, you can't make this stuff up. It's so crazy. But then over the years, it got more brazen, and I understand that VOA management, some of them, actually went over to China and met with CCP officials there," she said. 

Lake also confirmed previous Just the News reporting that VOA hired multiple Chinese nationals with ties to Chinese state media, and sponsored hundreds of visas for other foreign journalists to come work at the USAGM subsidiary. 

The agency used J1 cultural exchange visas, which are not designed for use as a general work authorization, to sponsor more than 400 foreign journalists from 2009 through the end of the last administration. Nearly 100 of those are from countries that could present particular security concerns, including at least three Chinese nationals who worked for Chinese Communist Party-controlled state-owned media outlets.

"This agency started hiring non-Americans, people from foreign countries, many people, hundreds upon hundreds from countries that are hostile to America, hired them, brought them into our country to tell America's story," Lake explained. 

Lake argued that Chinese journalists being brought to America on the taxpayer's dime and pushing “pro-CCP propaganda" to the "detriment" of the country, contradicted the original purpose of the VOA, which was formed during World War II to combat Axis propaganda and later used during the Cold War to promote Western and American values abroad. 

The senior advisor, who has been tasked with dismantling the USAGM and VOA, additionally noted that the issue extended beyond China to impact coverage of Russia as well. Those stories, she lamented, were largely pro-Russia and "anti-American."

Lake confirmed that the agency would be ending the J1 visa program used by prior leadership to hire and retain foreign journalists, as Just the News reported on Tuesday. She also said, pursuant to Trump’s executive order earlier this year, the agency is working on an “85%” size reduction in the near term. 

Moving forward, “our goal is to shut the entire agency down as per the instructions of President Trump,” Lake said. “And so I'm working to eliminate the agency, and it's been a big job, but we're working hard at it.”