Administration official complains nominee to be director hit by ‘personal attacks’
Bob Unruh
WND News Center
The Biden administration has suspended what many observers considered his latest big blunder, the creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security that triggered widespread outrage from free speech advocates and comparisons to George Orwell’s fictional thought police in “1984.”
The Washington Examiner said the board was “being paused following concerns it would infringe free speech.”
It also cited complaints about the proposed executive director, Nina Jankowicz, a political operative with a long history of participating in disinformation herself.
The report said not even a month after Biden’s administration bragged about its plans, DHS suspended the board pending a review, “with the future of its leader, Nina Jankowicz, still undecided.”
Some reports said Jankowicz already had departed from the Biden administration completely.
A DHS spokesperson told the Washington Post that Jankowicz was “subjected to unjustified and vile personal attacks and physical threats,” and promised the DHS would continue to defend her as qualified.
The Examiner said ex-White House press secretary Jen Psaki also had defended Jankowicz as having testified before Congress and having testified “in Europe.”
But WND carried the report when research revealed Biden’s so-called “Minister of Truth,” Jankowicz, was identified by a Revolver report as having participated in a “secret NATO-funded cabal” that was intended to “subvert Western democracies using disinformation.”
Jankowicz already was known to have been used to push government censorship of speech – even while pushing the now-debunked Russia collusion conspiracy theory herself. And many people know her for a raunchy video she released where she sings about wanting to be rich and powerful, and being willing to do anything to get there.
Now the concern over her participation in any sort of “disinformation” agenda has been ratcheted up, with documentation that she previously provided “information” to the public … that the “Deep State” of entrenched bureaucrats running many government functions in Washington doesn’t exist.
She said, “Talking about the deep state and things like that which is a thread among conspiracy communities here in the United States, that there is this secret cabal here in Washington working to undermine the American people couldn’t be further from the truth, as someone who works with and around these public servants every day.”
The report said, additionally, that her name “appeared in one of the most explosive and aggressively censored national security leaks of the century. The leak in question exposed the ‘Integrity Initiative,’ a dark government-funded NGO that appears to have engaged in political meddling and covert influence operations in Western countries under the guise of fighting ‘disinformation.'”
That named group was founded back in 2015 under the sponsorship of the “Institute for Statecraft,” which is funded by the British government.
It claimed to protect democracy by setting up “clusters” of specially chosen people who then engaged in fighting disinformation, the report said. Those clusters were to make people understand the threat of Russian disinformation in order to provide a response. It confirmed itself that NATO’s political committee “can plan an important role.”
It later was canceled, but before then, “hackers leaked a huge swath of internal documents from the Integrity Initiative.”
The report said Jankowicz appears in a 2018 leak as a member of the “inner core” of the Integrity Initiative’s U.K. Cluster.
It explained, “From the Integrity Initiative’s formal description of ‘clusters’ … it is somewhat difficult to infer what sort of activity Nina Jankowicz may have been involved in. But as luck would have it, the leaks included documents describing the activity of the Integrity Initiative’s Spanish cluster.”
There, the “cluster” worked behind the scenes to prevent the appointment of one person to Spain’s national security department, alleging he was “pro-Kremlin.”
The report explains the coalition also interfered with another political event in Spain, and it boasted of influencing the Catalan independence referendum process.
The report said, “First, we note the sinister irony that the NATO-funded Integrity Initiative, whose ostensible purpose is to ‘Defend Democracy Against Disinformation,’ was caught red-handed conducting a secretive influence operation to meddle in the internal politics of Spain, a democratic NATO member.
“Second, we note how crucial — indeed, indispensable — the social media platform Twitter was to the influence operations in question. It is precisely the importance of Twitter as a theater for U.S., U.K., and NATO backed psychological influence operations that informed our analysis of Elon Musk’s attempt to purchase the platform. We weren’t exaggerating when we described Elon’s threat to allow free speech and transparency on Twitter as a ‘declaration of war’ against the regime.”
The report bluntly called the Integrity Initiative “a secret, government-funded influence operation that engaged secret ‘clusters’ of journalists and academics to coordinate in order to meddle in the political process of Western democracies under the guise of combating ‘disinformation’ and ‘defending democracy.’
“Not only was the Integrity Initiative funded by national security bureaucracies, it conducted itself in precisely the same surreptitious manner one would typically associate with the world of spooks and espionage.”
The report said the leaks from the Integrity Initiative happened in 2018 and were published on an Anonymous-linked hacker site called Cyberguerilla, which now is defunct.
In the September 2021 hearing, a British lawmaker asked Jankowicz if she favored setting minimum speech standards, such as banning the celebration of misogyny on the internet, Breitbart News reported.
“Yes,’’ she replied, suggesting that as a “starting point,” the British Office of Communication could assess fines.
Jankowicz also advocated shadow banning, or “demoting conduct.”
“[T]his is not only about taking down content. It can be about demoting content too and saying, ‘You can shout into the black void, but you don’t get a huge audience to do that,” she said.
She said demoting content “allows us to get around some of the free speech concerns.”
Jankowicz was a promoter of the debunked claim concocted by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama administration that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election.
Along with dismissing the Hunter Biden laptop story and the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, she promoted the fact-free dossier of Russian propaganda compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele as well as the false claim that Trump had a secret communication link with the Kremlin through a Russian bank, the report charged.
Jankowicz was the overseer of Russia and Belarus programs at the National Democratic Institute, a Washington non-profit. She advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on disinformation and strategic communications. She serves on the Board of Trustees for the Eurasia Foundation and is a global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center
In a speech last November, Jankowicz branded parents across the nation voicing their concern to school boards about the teaching of Critical Race Theory as disinformers “weaponizing” the issue “for profit.”
