Is Biden's disinfo czar qualified?

But the chief problem with Jankowicz’s appointment, aside from the concerns about the quality of her research summarized above, is that she is a political activist, and her politics consistently color her judgment. Republican officeholders this week have highlighted Jankowicz’s embrace of the Steele dossier, her dismissal of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and her speculation that armed Trump supporters might show up at polls to intimidate voters. Each of these should disqualify her as a credible and fair-minded leader on an extremely sensitive and consequential issue for democratic stability in America. In a co-authored January 2022 piece for the Washington Post, for instance, Jankowicz claims that the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) “struggled under the politicization of the Trump administration” but “is becoming more nimble under Biden.”

This is a tendentious assessment. While it is true that the GEC got off to a rocky start under Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, significant progress was made under his successor Mike Pompeo and after Trump’s appointment of Lea Gabrielle as Special Envoy and Coordinator of the GEC in February 2019. During the latter half of the Trump administration, the GEC developed an impressive reputation with international partners. I experienced it firsthand while serving in the East StratCom Task Force. The GEC (particularly its Russia team) was our closest international partner and a staunch advocate of our work. In truth, they were often a better ally in pursuit of our shared objective of enhancing democratic security against authoritarian influence than our parent institution, the European External Action Service, which faltered under fainthearted leadership. The Trump administration did not hinder this agenda; on the contrary. Under Gabrielle’s leadership, the GEC wrote and published in August 2020 a landmark report on Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem—the first-ever such analysis by the U.S. government—that was widely endorsed by experts in the field.