Nina Jankowicz, who was set to lead a board inside the federal Department of Homeland Security dealing with issues related to disinformation before she left and plans for the board were abandoned amid deceptive attacks from the Right, is hoping to bring a lawsuit against Fox News for its role in spreading lies about her.
As in other situations involving lies propagated in part through the nation’s leading conservative media source, Jankowicz has faced threats to her personal safety since becoming the subject of this widespread deception. The role she would have held was characterized, in short, as some kind of censorship effort, connecting to the persistent idea among certain Republicans that there is some kind of conspiracy to silence them, whether on social media or elsewhere. In reality, Jankowicz’s board apparently wouldn’t have even directly handled comments from Americans that Republicans claimed or just insinuated would get swept up in some censorship regime. It was instead advisory in nature.
Jankowicz is raising money online — through a page on GoFundMe — in support of the litigation she continues hoping to bring against Fox, alongside other related costs. Among other expenses she listed, a discussion she posted on her GoFundMe page notes she’s even been subpoenaed by the House committee infamously led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) dealing with claims of the so-called weaponization of the federal government. What that description means in practice is a lot of focus on investigations and government actions that Trump and his Republican allies simply don’t like.
At the Judiciary panel level, under which the anti-weaponization committee is operating, Jordan has been relentlessly targeting Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg in connection to his criminal investigation of Trump, and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has helped spotlight statements from the Ohio Congressman casting the Republicans’ actions as supportive of Trump’s ambitions for re-election.
“In defamation cases like these, the scales of justice very much favor the industrial-scale liars,” Jankowicz wrote on the fundraising page this month. “Fox knows this, and knows that in defaming someone like me, they’re very unlikely to be held accountable, because it is so difficult and so costly for individuals to do so. I am pursuing this suit because I believe it’s the right thing to do. I do not believe that powerful media companies should be able to violate the law by repeatedly targeting individual Americans with false statements of fact to the point where their safety and security is in question for the rest of their lives.”
