Ann Applebaum
Appearances
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People Need to be Prosecuted
nor was it $50,000 in condoms. But no, there have been clearly false statements about payments to Politico, about payments to Chelsea Clinton, about condoms from Gaza. There has also been a...
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kind of smear campaign conducted against USAID, which has been the United States' premier institution both for distributing humanitarian aid around the world, helping the poorest people on the planet, has also been really important to the promotion of democracy in parts of the world that the US has cared about. It's been a really important tool of American foreign policy.
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And Musk has sometimes leaked things and sometimes revealed things that were well known. I mean, most of the information about USAID spending has been available on government websites forever. If you wanted to know something about it, you could have found out last year.
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But the goal of doing this seems to have been to traumatize the people who work for USAID and also to traumatize people who work for other government institutions. I mean, everybody saw what happened, right? USAID was from one day to the next destroyed. This is a congressionally created institution and Congress had no voice in destroying it.
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And its members were smeared and its goals were distorted. And now everybody who works for any other part of the federal government knows that the same thing could happen to them.
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So the purpose of doing that right at the beginning, particularly something like foreign aid, which is maybe less well understood than it should be among most Americans, the purpose of doing that was to frighten other people and to make other people in other parts of the government aware that at any moment they could be the targets of that kind of campaign too.