Foe of the Freedom of Speech Loses Defamation Lawsuit

Nina Jankowicz was the chief of the Biden regime’s ill-fated Disinformation Governance Board, which was ominously part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and was widely reported to be an Orwellian exercise in policing the speech of Americans that strayed from the line of the establishment left. But the Biden regime is gone, and Nina Jankowicz is, as she was the first to tell us, “furious”: She has just lost her defamation suit against that enemy of all that is good, Fox News.

Last Monday, Jankowicz told her Substack followers: “I’m writing with bad news: my appeal of the lower court’s decision to grant Fox’s motion to dismiss was not successful. This marks the end of my defamation suit against Fox, but not the end of my fight for the truth.” She adds: “I am more than disappointed with the Third Circuit’s decision; I am furious.”

The basis of her suit was the fact that Jankowicz insisted that the Disinformation Governance Board was nothing like the way it was portrayed. She claimed that Fox’s negative coverage of it spread lies about her, endangered her life as she was inundated with death threats, and even interfered with her ability to bond with her newborn son. (Yeah, she really threw the kitchen sink into this one.) Jankowicz even published a video, “Help Nina Fight Fox,” asking for donations to help her sue the beast that ruined her life.

The slickly produced video started with Jankowicz, looking sober and professional (in a sharp departure from her notorious Mary Poppins-based musical tribute to fighting “disinformation”), saying, “I’m asking for your financial support of a lawsuit I want to bring against Fox News for their malicious, reckless lies against me.” Then the earnest music started, as Jankowicz continued to talk over a series of videos and still images. She had a “lifelong dream” of entering public service, and finally realized it when she became head of the Disinformation Governance Board.

Jankowicz insisted that this entity, complete with its sinister name, was entirely benign. “My role was to make sure different entities across DHS were coordinated, to bring the latest research to bear in the department, and to help the department ensure that its policies about its existing counter disinformation work were grounded in American values: privacy, civil rights and civil liberties. That’s all the board was. It didn’t have the ability or the authority to act on its own.”

But then, enter the black-hatted hatemongers of Fox, spreading “baseless claims that the board was an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’” Jankowicz insists that “the board had nothing to do with arbitrating or restricting speech.” Nonetheless, she charges on her GoFundMe page that the fiends at Fox “made over 500 scaremongering statements about my role, my views, and my personal life over the next nine months—an entirely disproportionate disinformation and smear campaign against a person who simply took a job to serve her country within her area of expertise.”

The video gets more melodramatic as it goes on, featuring nightmarish images of dozens of Fox broadcasts all allegedly maligning Jankowicz, causing her to be inundated with death threats and upsetting her to the extent that she has not been able to establish the proper relationship with her newborn.

That’s a shame, if true, but its truth can’t be taken for granted. Leftists love to claim that speech that is critical of them has gotten them death threats, even in the face of the fact that it is patriots such as Charlie Kirk, not leftists, who are being gunned down. The obvious unspoken corollary of these leftists claims is that this speech should be silenced, which is their actual goal all along. Also, Jankowicz doesn’t have a stellar reputation for honesty. The Daily Caller noted back in March 2023 that she had been caught “spreading disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop, the debunked Steele Dossier and former Trump advisor Carter Page.”

What’s more, Jankowicz’s claim that the Disinformation Governance Board was never going to be about “arbitrating or restricting speech” contradicts early statements from Biden regime officials. DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on April 28, 2022, “We have just established a mis- and disinformation governance board in the Department of Homeland Security to more effectively combat this threat not only to election security, but to our homeland security.”

And when Jen Psaki defended the board, she added, “We know there has been a range of [disinformation] out there about a range of topics, I mean, including COVID for example, and also elections and eligibility.” Psaki also said that “the objective of the board is to prevent disinformation and misinformation from traveling around the country in a range of communities.” How could this alleged disinformation have been fought without restricting speech?

And so now Jankowicz has lost her appeal against the initial judgment against her claims. Now that this ridiculous charade is over, the best outcome would be if this trial became the linchpin for the release of solid information about why the Biden regime decided to set up Jankowicz’s board, and exactly how they intended it to operate. In the meantime, we can just be glad that Jankowicz is whining about her legal setbacks and not heading it up.