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    Attorney Hired To Probe VOA's Coverage Has Active Protective Order Against Him

    The CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Michael Pack, has accused executives of hiring practices that imperil national security. The investigator Pack hired has a protective order against him.
    by David Folkenflik Sep 08, 2020 7 minutes
    A Maryland judge ordered Sam Dewey in February to stay away from his father and to surrender all his firearms. The elder Dewey told the court his son had threatened to kill both of them.

    The CEO appointed by President Trump to lead the federal agency that oversees the Voice of America and other U.S.-funded international broadcasters has made strict protocols for scrutinizing job candidates a hallmark of his brief tenure there. CEO Michael Pack suspended a slew of senior executives at the U.S. Agency for Global Media and stopped routinely renewing visas for foreign employees over hiring protocols, claiming the executives' lapses threatened national security.

    In June, Pack hired a lawyer with no background in news to investigate his agency's coverage for potential anti-Trump bias, in a way that appears to violate Voice of America's legal protections of journalistic independence. That investigative attorney has a potentially problematic record himself: he remains under a court order to stay away from his father and to surrender all firearms due to a complaint that he made detailed death threats against his father.

    These details appear in publicly available documents from a court proceeding held just 35 miles up the Baltimore-Washington Parkway from USAGM's headquarters. It raises questions about how rigorously the security-minded CEO had vetted his own newly hired legal counselor. And this is not an ancient episode:

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