The embarrassing saga of the Biden administration’s Disinformation Governance Board has come to an unceremonious end. It shows once again how incompetent President Joe Biden and his staff truly are.
The Department of Homeland Security said on Monday that it isn’t ready to “provide recommendations on the Department’s most effective approach to disinformation threats” but that it has “concluded that there is no need for a Disinformation Governance Board.” In other words, the Biden administration tried to create this board without determining whether it was necessary.
It was the first in a series of mistakes. The second was naming Nina Jankowicz as the board’s executive director. Jankowicz was a “disinformation fellow” at the Wilson Center. That was supposed to mean she was an expert in recognizing and combating disinformation, but it meant something closer to the opposite. Jankowicz repeatedly spread disinformation about the Steele dossier, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and Iran’s attempts to undermine President Donald Trump during the 2020 election, among other things. Jankowicz only saw “disinformation” in stories that hurt Democrats. She was happy to spread disinformation when it hurt Republicans.
The backlash over a government agency creating a disinformation board run by a liberal promulgator of disinformation was swift, and the Biden administration meekly defended the project before shelving it. To hear Jankowicz tell it, the board itself was brought down by disinformation. In other words, this board, so critical to national security, was designed to combat disinformation, and the first “disinformation campaign” against it managed to shut it down.
The Disinformation Governance Board was a debacle worthy of Biden’s presidency — a failure by any standard you choose. It was a clear public relations disaster for the Biden administration. Jankowicz claims that disinformation was able to shut it down within two months of its announcement, and DHS now claims that it was never even necessary in the first place.
Biden has botched nearly every issue put in front of him during this presidency, but none better represents his administration’s failure than the disinformation board and its failure to launch. No one wanted it but a small group of liberal activists. Biden went ahead with it anyway, and he put an incompetent partisan in charge of it. As a result, the board crashed and burned in just two months.
This was Biden’s train wreck from start to finish.
