The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Disinformation Governance Board was created on 27 April with the aim of coordinating counter-misinformation efforts related to homeland security, specifically on the US migration crisis and Russia.
The board and its authority, Nina Jankowicz, 33, immediately became the targets of the "right-wing Internet," according to the Washington Post.
"[Jankowicz] has been subject to an unrelenting barrage of harassment and abuse while unchecked misrepresentations of her work continue to go viral", the newspaper noted. As a result, she resigned on 17 May, while the panel's work was put on pause for up to 75 days.
"Instead of ushering in a moment of reflection, the decision that the board’s work would be 'paused' immediately segued into a new scandal when the DHS appointed former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to co-lead a 'review and assessment' of the organ’s future," The Nation journalist Lev Golinkin reported on 27 May.
Michael Chertoff speaking at Oxford University
© Sputnik / Vin Sharma
According to The Nation, the assumption that the controversy caused by the board, Jankowicz and Chertoff only occurred on the right side of the US political aisle "is itself a lie": "Warnings about the danger of government-run disinformation policing came from across the political spectrum" with a diversity of actors dubbing the newly-established entity an "Orwellian Ministry of Truth."
Meanwhile, criticism surrounding the Jankowicz candidacy stemmed, in particular, from her past work in StopFake, a US government-funded Ukrainian "anti-disinformation" entity founded in March 2014.
The Nation noted that in StopFake episode 117, released on 29 January 2017, Jankowicz strongly defended Ukrainian volunteer battalions while an on-screen graphic displayed patches of four paramilitaries: Aidar, Dnipro-1, Donbas and Azov, which were not only notorious for crimes against eastern Ukrainian civilians, but also embraced a neo-Nazi ideology.
However, attorney Michael Chertoff is no less controversial than Jankowicz. Chertoff, the co-author of the Patriot Act, which granted sweeping surveillance powers to the government, has repeatedly come under criticism from groups like Human Rights Watch and the ACLU. According to The Nation, he was lambasted for baseless detentions, covering up the CIA torture programme which allowed the agency to continue using brutal interrogation techniques, and government surveillance advocacy.
Right-wing media outlet The Federalist has also raised the alarm over Chertoff's appointment. According to The Federalist's Beth Whitehead, the Biden appointee has "a detailed history of falling for or waving away security risks or political hoaxes."
In particular, Chertoff strongly supported Hillary Clinton despite being aware of her mishandling of the government's classified information by processing it through her private unsecured email server.
When asked about the matter, the attorney said: "The ability to spend an inordinate amount of time chasing small peccadilloes is a luxury we only have in a world at peace. In a world at war, you’ve got to focus on the top priority which is protecting the United States and protecting our friends and allies."
Similarly, the Clinton campaign’s peddling of the Russiagate hoax about Trump's "collusion" with the Kremlin – which was assessed by ex-Attorney General William Barr as "seditious" in his latest interview with The BlazeTV – didn’t strike Chertoff as a red flag, according to The Federalist.
"So the man tapped to help assess the Orwellian 'disinformation board' endorsed the very woman who helped plant an incredibly damaging hoax aimed at undermining her opponent in the 2016 election," Whitehead summed up.
In addition, Chertoff pushed disinformation himself, according to the Washington Free Beacon: the veteran lawyer was one of those who insisted that Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" was "Russian disinformation" in October 2020. According to Chertoff, the whole story about Hunter's laptop abandoned in a repair shop was "preposterous." He further claimed that "it looks like the evidence that's emerging shows that these purported documents were circulating by the Russians in Ukraine for some period of time."
"This suggests that this information is not only online but it's an old-fashioned spy story involving human intelligence sources," concluded Chertoff.
However, the Hunter laptop has been proven to be genuine since, with the latest forensic analysis carried out by a prominent Secret Service expert at the request of the Washington Examiner indicating that the hard drive is 100% authentic with thousands of files belonging to or being generated by Hunter Biden himself.
"The disinformation board was already raising hackles with its Orwellian undertone," wrote The Nation. "It would not have been difficult to find a candidate whose record on enabling unwarranted surveillance and torture as well as manipulating public perception in favour of lucrative consulting gigs was, if not cleaner, then at least a little less conspicuous."