A federal judge rained on Kari Lake's very sad parade on Saturday, ruling that her stint running the U.S. Agency for Global Media — the folks behind Voice of America — was, shockingly, not exactly by the book. Imagine that. And this happened to the filter queen, who claims that every race is rigged if it's not in her favor.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth determined that Lake was never actually qualified to strut into the role of acting CEO when the Trump administration handed her the position on July 31 without bothering to go through that pesky Senate confirmation process. She held the job for a whopping few months before stepping down on November 19 — surely plenty of time to leave her mark, legally or otherwise, Politico's Kyle Cheney reports.
Lamberth didn't stop there — he declared that everything Lake got up to during her four-month reign of questionable authority must be treated as "void," including her August 29 workforce purge, which, it turns out, was just as illegitimate as the position she held.
But wait, there's more! The judge also threw out the work Lake did before her formal appointment, when the agency's previous acting CEO, Victor Morales, generously handed over nearly all of his responsibilities to her. Lamberth wasn't buying that creative workaround either, ruling that it was just another clever attempt to sidestep the Senate's pesky little role in confirming who actually gets to run federal agencies.
“The Court finds that these expansive delegations were an unlawful effort to transform Lake into the CEO of U.S. Agency for Global Media in all but name,” the judge wrote.
Lake told Politico in a statement that she “strongly disagrees” with the ruling and that the government will appeal.
“The American people gave President Trump a mandate to cut bloated bureaucracy, eliminate waste, and restore accountability to government,” she added. “An activist judge is trying to stand in the way of those efforts at USAGM.”
Lamberth was nominated by Ronald Reagan and has been a senior judge since 2013.
On the Bad App, Lake wrote, "We will appeal this outrageous ruling from an activist DC District Court Judge," because in MAGA Land - where up is down and war is peace - any judge that doesn't rule in your favor is an "activist judge." We're starting to see a pattern here.
She's not good at taking the L. She shared the tweet below. By the way, it's 2026.
