Trump suffers unanimous court defeat over illegal firing of VOA chief

Kari Lake and former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with supporters at a "Save America" rally at Country Thunder Arizona in Florence, Arizona. Image via Gage Skidmore.

An appeals court panel has ruled that Kari Lake, the former agency headtapped by President Donald Trump, acted illegally in firing Michael Abramowitz from his post as Voice of America director, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said Tuesday.

In its ruling, the three-judge panel gave Abramowitz a legal win by upholding the August 2025 decision of U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. The unanimous vote came from Judges Sri Srinivasan and Cornelia Pillard, both put in place by President Barack Obama, and Florence Y. Pan, an appointee of President Joe Biden.

Abramowitz was let go by Lake in August 2025 when he would not agree to her ultimatum to either take a demotion to a lower-level position in North Carolina or be fired. He called the termination “illegal.” As The Washington Post reports, Abramowitz had already filed suit against the government overLake’s attempts to tear down the international broadcaster, which was founded in 1942 to push back against Nazi propaganda, and sought to have his firing set right.

Lamberth, a Reagan appointee who had a running feud with Lake andonce threatened to hold her in contempt, concurred with Abramowitz that the dismissal was unlawful. In an opinion issued in August 2025, the judge granted a motion for partial summary judgment and put a permanent injunction on Abramowitz’s removal. Lamberth determined that only the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, a Senate-confirmed entity that Trump did away with at the start of his second term, was empowered to fire the VOA director.

Writing in a published opinion, Pillard described the protections at hand as “a durable barrier against any breach of the firewall protecting the journalistic integrity of Voice of America and the affiliate networks,” rather than standard employment law.

In a statement, Abramowitz said he is “gratified” and wants to return to work. “My lawyers and I are carefully studying the decision to determine next steps,” he said. “But there is no longer any reason for the government to prevent me from doing the job for which I was legally installed on a bipartisan basis more than two years ago.”

The case is the most recent in a string of failures for the Trump administration in its effort to dismantle Voice of America. The organization has been bled dry under Trump and Lake, with its broadcasting capacity much reduced andhundreds of staff put on paid administrative leave for a year and a half. Back in March, Lamberthnullified many of Lake’s actions after finding she was running the U.S. Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent agency, in an illegal fashion. Trump then put forward State Department official Sarah B. Rogers as a formal nominee to also serve as CEO of the agency, but the Senate has yet to confirm her.

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