Kari Lake, special advisor to the federal parent agency overseeing Voice of America, said she was working to dismantle the news agency because it had published items like a graphic of "President Trump with a swastika over his face."
During a Monday interview on Steve Bannon's War Room, Lake gave her view on why Voice of America's staff had been placed on leave.
"President Trump wants this agency scaled back, boiled down to the bare minimum, and that's what we're doing," she said. "And you could argue that they stopped being pro-America, they stopped putting out a pro-America story many years ago."
"And I recently tuned in and saw a graphic on Voice of America that showed President Trump with a swastika over his face," Lake continued. "That's not what our taxpayer-funded media should be putting out."
Lake noted that the effort to take down Voice of America wasn't "only about the editorial content."
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"This is about getting our government, you mentioned it, getting our government back in line to where we're not spending like drunken sailors, we're not completely in debt," she insisted. "We've got to get this debt under control, Steve, or we won't have a country anymore."
"We are either bankrupt or on the verge of bankruptcy, and we have to start cutting."
Six Voice of America journalists have sued Lake alleging that the effort to shut down the agency was unconstitutional.
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