Is Biden’s Disinfo Czar Qualified?

Source: The Bulwark | May 6, 2022 | Monika Richter

Nina Jankowicz unknowingly advanced Russian propaganda about the Czech Republic. Why has she been picked to lead DHS’s new anti-disinformation board?

The rollout of the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security, announced in passing in Politico’s Playbook newsletter last Wednesday without accompanying official explanation, has been an unmitigated disaster. The hashtag #MinistryOfTruth trended on Twitter for two days after the news broke. This was exacerbated by days of inexplicably opaque communication from the White House about an initiative that was bound to be controversial even under the best of circumstances.

Thanks to a vacuum of official information, negative media coverage has dominated—particularly among right-wing sources, whose uproar about a party-political attempt to censor conservatives and undermine free speech in America helped set the tone of the public narrative. Meanwhile, much of the press coverage, starting with the original Politico item, conflated disinformation with misinformation, even though it is important to preserve the distinction between those terms. “Misinformation” refers to the unintentional spread of false information, whereas “disinformation” consists of deliberate fabrications cooked up to deceive people for strategic purposes. This sort of definitional confusion, particularly on such a complex and sensitive issue, undercuts public confidence while encouraging uncharitable speculation and conspiracism.

There is a good reason why the U.S. government has historically stayed away from the minefield that is domestic disinformation. As any expert in this field will tell you, one of the core aims of contemporary authoritarian disinformation is the erosion of trust in democratic government. What does it say of the Biden administration’s readiness to take on this problem that the launch of its anti-disinformation initiative does just what it’s meant to oppose by arousing skepticism—even among digital media and rights experts—and undermining public trust?

Compounding these issues is the matter of the individual selected to lead this new initiative. Nina Jankowicz, the Wilson Center fellow tapped for the job by DHS, launched her career as an expert on Russian disinformation with a one-year Fulbright Fellowship to Ukraine from 2016-17, during which she says that she served as a communications adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. There is reason to be skeptical that an American-educated twentysomething with a year and a half of postgraduate work experience in Washington (per Jankowicz’s own account) would serve as much of an “adviser” on counter-disinformation strategy for the government of a country that has been on the front lines of Russian information warfare for decades.

During her Fulbright, Jankowicz traveled around Europe compiling research for her first book, How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News, and the Future of Conflict, published in 2020. It looks at five Eastern European countries—Estonia, Georgia, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Ukraine, with additional material on the United States and the Netherlands—to see how Russia targeted each with bespoke disinformation campaigns. Jankowicz approaches each as a case study: She examines the various tactics used to erode trust and sow discord, each government’s response, and the immediate results, and she tries to derive lessons from these episodes that can be extrapolated to an American or a global context.

Among the countries Jankowicz profiles is one I know well: the Czech Republic.

Over the last six years, I have worked at the intersection of disinformation and authoritarian influence, both within the Czech Republic and at the level of the European Union. My experience includes serving on behalf of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs with the East StratCom Task Force, a specialized unit of the EU’s diplomatic service devoted to exposing and countering Russian disinformation operations in Europe and the EU’s Eastern Partnership region. (Full disclosure: From 2017-18, I also worked at the European Values Center for Security Policy, formerly the European Values Think Tank, whose work Jankowicz discusses in the book. We never met and I was unaware of her research or interviews at the time.)

Jankowicz’s chapter about the Czech Republic aims to evaluate the early policy response to “hybrid threats,” the term chosen by the Czech government and stakeholders to encompass a variety of security challenges stemming from anti-democratic state and non-state actors. She focuses on the establishment of a unit within the Czech Ministry of the Interior, the Center Against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats, which was founded at the beginning of 2017 on the recommendation of a National Security Audit. This audit had been prompted by changes in the security environment following Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine. The center’s founding goal was to monitor hybrid or “asymmetric” threats—not disinformation specifically—to increase understanding within state institutions and the government, and to propose policy solutions.

Jankowicz’s analysis of this initiative and its origins raises serious doubts about her qualifications for a government leadership role on disinformation policy. Her research is awash in errors, built on flawed assumptions, and—worst of all—it fails to identify and pursue real sources of pro-Kremlin influence in the country. In fact, she repeatedly indulges them.

…….

It is deeply ironic that the right-wing attacks on Jankowicz now parallel this very line: Conservatives accuse her of leading a “Ministry of Truth” that will censor American citizens. In practice, the Disinformation Governance Board is unlikely to live up to critics’ worst fears; whether it achieves much of anything at all—or instead languishes as yet another hollow organ in the federal bureaucracy destined for mothballing—seems a more apt question at this point. Indeed, in a CNN interview on Sunday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas acknowledged that the board has “no operational authority” and would not monitor American citizens. A DHS factsheet posted the following day confirms that the “working group does not have any operational authority or capability,” and was instead introduced with the goal of “ensuring” that freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy protections “are appropriately incorporated across DHS’s disinformation-related work and that rigorous safeguards are in place.”

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.

It is therefore demonstrably false to claim that the GEC “struggled under the politicization of the Trump administration,” only to become “more nimble under Biden.” This sort of partisan signposting from the government-appointed head of a new counter-disinformation initiative is the best way to politicize and discredit that initiative from the get-go. It also contributes to the hyperpolarization that has made it so difficult to establish bipartisan consensus for tackling the broader challenge of “digital information disorder”—an umbrella term for the set of social and political pathologies resulting from our growing dependence on a digital information architecture that was never designed to sustain democracy or the civic values upon which it depends.

This set of issues, of which disinformation is only one component, constitutes one of the most consequential policy portfolios for democracies in this century. As the Czech experience shows, to have any chance of successfully addressing these issues, the respective institutions and initiatives must have maximal legitimacy across the political spectrum. They must be designed to be nonpartisan as a matter of principle, and independent of the executive branch.

The Biden administration has already failed at this essential prerequisite for the new Disinformation Governance Board, preemptively delegitimizing its work by choosing a person to lead it who falls for the very thing she is meant to expose.

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