President Donald Trump nominated a senior State Department official Thursday for the top post at the U.S. Agency for Global Media after a federal judge ruled that Kari Lake’s leadership violated federal law.
Trump nominated Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, less than a week after U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered that all actions Lake took as acting CEO from July 31 to Nov. 19 be considered void, including an Aug. 29 reduction-in-force that eliminated jobs for more than 500 employees at Voice of America and elsewhere within USAGM.
Lake insulted Lamberth’s appearance Thursday as she criticized his ruling last weekend. She said on X that she would stay on as deputy CEO and that Michael Rigas, who is deputy secretary of state for management and “a patriotic fighter with experience reducing the size of government,” will be acting CEO.
“Together, Mike and I, while we wait for Under Secretary Rogers (@UnderSecPD) to be confirmed as USAGM CEO, will root-out corruption at the agency and make it more accountable to American taxpayers,” she said.
A spokesperson for the State Department said that if the Senate confirms Rogers for the post, she will serve concurrently as undersecretary for public diplomacy.
“USAGM’s mission has long been closely aligned with the Department of State, and the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy has always held consultative authorities with the agency,” the spokesperson said after the nomination. “Rogers would be uniquely well positioned to significantly strengthen coordination between U.S. international broadcasting and American public diplomacy in the national interest.”
In a report in November, the Trump administration suggested integrating the “function” of Voice of America into the State Department bureau led by Rogers, rather than its being “a semi-independent agency.”
Voice of America Director Michael Abramowitz congratulated Rogers on her nomination.
“I would welcome the opportunity to work with her and to rebuild Voice of America’s ability to fulfill its vital mission,” Abramowitz said in a statement.
Rogers is a former First Amendment lawyer. Her clients included the National Rifle Association, and she led challenges to “social media censorship” of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and others.
Rogers now leads the Trump administration’s campaign against European Union and United Kingdom regulation of online hate speech and misinformation overseas, celebrating U.S. sanctions on European officials and meeting with some of the most anti-immigration figures of Europe’s far right.
“These countries that are arresting their citizens for calling a rapist a pig, which is true, or for praying outside of an abortion clinic are now trying to enforce their laws against American citizens and American companies,” Rogers said last year on “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast in her first public appearance as undersecretary of state.
A little more than a month later, Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, was slapped with a $140 million fine under Europe’s sweeping Digital Services Act for failing to combat hate speech and misinformation.
“The EC [European Commission] claims today’s levy is about bluechecks — @elonmusk dares apportion them to users that European bureaucrats dislike — algorithms, and ads,” Rogers said on social media. “In reality, a strange civilizational death drive stalks Europe. It makes misguided leaders dismantle their own nuclear power plants, deluge their own cities with hostile low-human-capital migrants, and choke off their own citizens’ speech on the topics that matter most.”
More recently, Rogers said on X that “Germany infamously retains very few Jews, yet imported barbarian rapist hordes (as an American, I’m allowed to call them that),” referring to dozens of reported robberies, sexual assaults and rapes by roving gangs of men, including immigrants and asylum-seekers, in Cologne, Germany, over New Year’s Eve 2015.
After she said her words were designed to provoke debate, Rogers posted: “A German lawmaker was later threatened with criminal prosecution for using the language I quote here (regarding barbarian hordes), and additional censorship constraints were placed on social media companies. This obviously contravenes free expression — and common sense.”
The German lawmaker, who was temporarily blocked from Twitter, now X, for her remarks was a member of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, better known as AfD.
AfD has risen in popularity in Germany since 2015. The German intelligence agency has classified it as a “proven right-wing extremist organization,” making it the first party to be designated as such since the Nazi era.
High-level officials in the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Secretary Marco Rubio, have protested the German government’s labeling of AfD. Rogers met with Markus Frohnmaier, a senior lawmaker of the party, in December.
“Unlike the Russian government (and the current German one), AfD took an anti-censorship stance in its meeting with me last week,” Rogers said on X at the time. “One reason they’re gaining popularity in Germany.”
The Trump administration has faced scrutiny for its own actions on speech, including revoking the visas of foreigners who it says “celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk” and attempting to deport international students for expressing their views on the war in Gaza through campus protests or op-eds in student newspapers.
Rogers responded to the accusations of hypocrisy in an interview this year.
“We could not throw a woman in jail for calling a rapist a pig, even if she were a foreign national, because she has some of the same First Amendment rights as Americans,” she told Semafor. “The privilege of coming here on a visa is not a right under the First Amendment or any other, and this secretary of state has enormous discretion there.”
