'Wildly Out Of Context': Former White House Disinformation Board Head Denies Bias: Report
May 19 2022, Published 2:09 p.m. ET
Nina Jankowicz is denying that she had pro-Democrat bias and said she received death threat nearly every day in three weeks working there, according to a report.
Jankowicz made the comments to MSNBC "All In" host Chris Hayes hours after she announced her resignation as the head of Biden Administration's disinformation board, according to the New York Post. The Biden Administration chose to "pause" the board.
“To say that I am just a partisan actor was wildly out of context,” Jankowicz said, “and then beyond that, it wasn’t just these mischaracterizations of my work, but it was death threats against my family.
“Over the last three weeks I have had maybe one or two days [where] I didn’t report a violent threat, something like, ‘We’re coming for you and your family, ‘You and your family should be sent to Russia to be killed,'” she added
Conservatives and libertarians had been critical of the board since its creation last month. Some liberals also criticized it, comparing it to Ministry of Truth from George Orwell’s novel “1984," the New York Post reports.
Complaints about the board intensified when it was revealed that Jankowicz had pushed the since-debunked notion that then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was linked to a Russian Bank, according to the New York Post. She also doubted the Post's reporting about Hunter Biden's laptop, calling it a "Trump campaign product."
The New York Post reports that she also said "Republicans and other disinformers" had "seized on" critical race theory in schools, and she suggested that verified Twitter users should be able to edit others' tweets if they think they are misleading.
Jankowicz also drew eyebrows during a TikTok signing clip in February in which she changed the lyrics to “Mary Poppins” song “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” to be about fake news, the New York Post reports.
“When Rudy Giuliani shared bad intel from Ukraine/Or when TikTok influencers say COVID can’t cause pain/They’re laundering disinfo and we really should take note/And not support their lies with our wallet, voice or vote,” she sang.
After the news Wednesday that the board had been paused, Biden's press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said “the board has never convened” and insisting that “neither Nina Jankowicz nor the board have anything to do with the censorship or with removing content from anywhere," according to the New York Post.
“We did not have an involvement in this at all,” Jean-Pierre added when asked if West Wing officials had played any role in the pause.
Upon leaving, Jankowicz said "mischaracterizations of the Board" became a distraction from the true work it did. She said she would return to the public sphere, The New York Post reports.
“That’s not something that is American, that is not how we should be acting when we have disagreements about policy in this country,” she told MSNBC. “I think we need to learn how to be adults in the room, and I don’t have time for that childishness.”