H ouse Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Michael McCaul said he found credible evidence that the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) improperly shielded a Voice of America employee accused of lying about her educational background and improperly spending taxpayer funds.
On Wednesday, McCaul (R., Texas) published the findings of a three-year investigation into Setareh Sieg, who was suspended, and on track to be fired, from her position as director of Voice of America’s Persian-language service in January 2021 at the end of the Trump administration but was reinstated immediately after President Biden’s inauguration. Sieg’s lawyer, in a written statement, pushed back strongly on the report and the allegations contained in it.
“While it is difficult to address a 68 page report in a short statement, there are many incomplete, misinterpreted and defamatory conclusions,” attorney Mark Zaid said.
While the findings concern one individual’s alleged misconduct, House Foreign Affairs Committee majority staffers told National Review that they view the investigation’s findings as a shot across the bow at entrenched government bureaucracies that protect employees found to have engaged in misbehavior. “Top level executives at USAGM failed to acknowledge wrongdoing even after internal whistleblowers, Congress, and a foreign government not only cried foul, but exposed credible evidence of corruption,” the report said.
McCaul called Sieg’s case “the tip of the iceberg,” expressed concern that Democratic lawmakers “have gone silent instead of working in good faith to serve Americans who deserve transparency and accountability,” and urged the agency to revamp its vetting practices.
In a blistering statement in response to the report, USAGM CEO Amanda Bennett said the agency cannot comment on personnel matters. “However, we unequivocally reject the Committee’s allegations that the agency’s investigation of an employee’s background was politicized, corrupt or mismanaged in any way,” she said.
Bennett also said: “Further, we refute the damaging mischaracterizations of USAGM employees set forth in the report, and condemn the Committee’s callous attempts to malign hardworking civil servants, including the main subject of the investigation.”
USAGM oversees a budget that’s just under a billion dollars, with which it funds global media outlets established to provide objective news coverage, primarily to foreign audiences living under authoritarian regimes.
There’s broad support around Washington for the agency’s mission. But USAGM and its outlets also have long been dogged by allegations of mismanagement, security lapses, and biases that promote the views of authoritarian regimes and terrorist organizations.
“USAGM’s mission to connect, inform and engage people around the world in support of freedom and democracy cannot be swayed by political influence. Any notion that our work has been politicized is categorically false,” Bennett said in the statement.
A spokeswoman for VOA said the outlet does not comment on personnel matters. The McCaul report said that after his oversight efforts found wrongdoing, USAGM opted for “the most minor of slaps on the wrist — a letter of reprimand.” The agency issued the reprimand in late May, ahead of the report’s release today.
It also said the agency chose not to make Sieg available for an interview with investigators.
Bennett said the agency’s Office of Labor and Employee Relations “made tremendous efforts to locate evidence relevant to the matter in question, and aggressively pursued every possible avenue to conduct a thorough investigation.”
“We stand by the findings of our investigation.”
In his report, McCaul accused the agency of “bureaucratic incompetence and disorganization” and said the Trump-era findings in Sieg’s case were correct.
“At worst, however, it reveals a deliberate effort to protect an insider who had personal relationships with, and was politically aligned with, the senior officials who should have been impartially supervising her,” the report stated.
USAGM sources told National Review last year that Sieg is a friend of Bennett’s. The agency’s public-affairs team pushed back against that characterization, denying that there was anything improper about their relationship.
The agency had reinstated Sieg on the first day of President Biden’s term, appointing her as director of program review and special assistant to the director of VOA programming. USAGM’s human-resources office subsequently issued a report in April of 2021 finding that the allegations that led to her suspension were not substantiated.
Sieg’s legal team at the time portrayed the findings as the exoneration of a whistleblower who had spoken out against the Trump administration’s management of USAGM.
Her conduct subsequently drew the attention of congressional investigators in 2021, after agency whistleblowers claimed that Sieg had falsified her educational credentials by lying about possessing a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, wasted taxpayer funds on personal travel, and made unusual management decisions that materially benefited her favorite employees.
The McCaul report found these allegations to have been substantiated. It also said USAGM reopened the investigation into Sieg’s educational background this year under pressure from the committee, which is what led to the reprimand. The report also reveals that before Trump-era USAGM CEO Michael Pack’s team sought Sieg’s removal, a team of civil-service staffers in USAGM’s human-resources department had recommended her dismissal in September 2020 for “Lack of Candor, Waste Fraud and Abuse and Misconduct.”
But in an emailed statement, Zaid, the lawyer representing Sieg in this matter, blasted the McCaul report as “one-sided” and argued that it “continues an unexplained vendetta that has spanned two Administrations against Setareh Sieg, a dedicated journalist who has devoted years of service to the U.S. government.”
He added that McCaul knew he represented Sieg “yet never once contacted me for explanatory information or to interview my client.”
Zaid specifically pushed back on the allegations surrounding his client’s degree. He said that “we repeatedly provided documentation that confirmed Ms. Sieg’s degree, some of which was not analyzed or investigated by the committee” and that there’s “more than enough evidence” that Sieg properly described her degree and misled no one. He also provided a copy of a 2023 letter from a French higher-education attaché in New York City who wrote that Sieg “has completed all expected requirements for a doctorat which is the equivalent of an American Phd dissertation.” The McCaul report noted that USAGM’s investigation this year referred to that letter, in addition to a subsequent French embassy memo “cancelling and superseding” it.
“USAGM has mishandled this investigation from the beginning, particularly by interfering with Ms. Sieg’s right to counsel and denying her appropriate due process. While it is truly unfortunate and unbecoming that the Committee publicly singled out a federal public servant without affording her a true opportunity to respond, the fact that her own Agency failed to properly defend her and allowed this debacle to continue is shameful,” he said.
McCaul faulted Bennett for directing an agency employee in 2023 to hand-deliver a letter to the congressman’s personal office, to circumvent the investigation led by his staff on the Foreign Affairs Committee.
Bennett warned in the letter that the probe into a single “employee is draining agency resources and constraining its ability to conduct USAGM’s critical foreign policy mission.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee majority staffers told National Review that they viewed the incident as a strange and unprofessional attempt to sidestep an ongoing congressional investigation. They also said the committee will hold a hearing scrutinizing the agency and push legislation to reform it.
The findings could have consequences for USAGM’s budget, as GOP concerns with the agency’s conduct have already played a role in budget cuts that have hit the agency, two House GOP staffers told National Review. An appropriations bill that passed a House subcommittee last month would further reduce the agency’s budget to fiscal year 2019 levels.