The Trump administration is skullduggerish AF.
Last year, they honored a journalist from Finland and then took that shit back after learning that she’d posted some harsh words about the great white leader of whiteness on social media. Then, they lied about taking the honor back.
According to the Washington Post, apparently journalistic honors are only good if the journalist never says anything bad about the president. Because Jessikka Aro has two eyes that allowed her to see all of the fuckshit the Trump administration continuously does on a regular basis, she talked shit on social media, and why did she do that? U.S. officials reportedly got worried about the tweets being a bad look for the president, and to avoid any more public embarrassment for this bucket-naked-ass administration, they took the award back.
Aro was selected for the State Department’s International Women of Courage Awards for her reporting on Russian propaganda activities, which is funny because, obvious. Aro’s work exposed Russian troll factories which surely didn’t help the president get elected. But whatever.
She was told that Trump’s administration loved her and had even offered her flight options when State Department interns learned that she was sneak dissing on social media.
In one tweet, she noted that “Trump constantly labels journalists as ‘enemy’ and ‘fake news,’” the State Department’s internal watchdog report found, according to the Post. In another, she was excited to learn that Trump and his boo Russian President Vladimir Putin were meeting in Helsinki where “Finnish people can protest them both. Sweet.”
From the Post:
According to meeting notes obtained by the Inspector General, senior U.S. officials argued that Aro’s invitation should be withdrawn, including the acting director of the Office of Global Women’s Issues. The director’s concerns included the possibility that the “media could highlight the tweets and Facebook posts during the ceremony,” which could cause “potential embarrassment to the Department, particularly given the involvement of the Secretary and the First Lady [Melania Trump].”
After the State Department withdrew Aro’s invitation and the story became public in a report by Foreign Policy, the department’s press office told reporters that Aro had been “incorrectly notified” that “she’d been selected as a finalist. This was an error. This was a mistake.”
The department also told Congress that Aro “ultimately was not selected to receive the award, due to the highly competitive selection of candidates.”
But the IG ultimately found that the decision to give her the award was not a mistake and was included in a memo approved by Pompeo.
It also noted that the decision to withdraw the award was due to the discovery of the social media posts despite public claims otherwise. “Every person Office of Inspector General interviewed in connection with this matter acknowledged” that had her social media posts not been flagged, “Ms. Aro would have received the IWOC Award,” the report said.
For the TL;DR crowd, basically, the Trump administration was on their usual fuckshit.
“Secretary Pompeo should have honored a courageous journalist willing to stand up to Kremlin propaganda. Instead, his department sought to stifle dissent to avoid upsetting a president who, day after day, tries to take pages out of Putin’s playbook,” Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee told the Post. “The State Department owes Ms. Aro an apology.”