June 25, 2021
An internal investigation at the Voice of America (VOA) has dismissed all allegations used by the Trump Administration to dismiss Setareh Derakhshesh as head of VOA’s Persian News Network.
The allegations were all dismissed April 15, her lawyers announced.
Earlier, on February 18, the Biden Administration had hired her back and restored her as head of the Persian News Network, but then immediately named her to a new position as special assistant to the VOA director and put her in charge of reviewing programming all across the VOA and all its 47 languages.
Her lawyers said one of the charges against her was that she lied about earning a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris. The investigation ruled that charge “not substantiated.”
She was also charged with violating VOA contracting rules by awarding $1 million in sole source contracts to comedian Max Amini, who it said was a relative of Derakhshesh. Her lawyers said the investigation found that a) Amini and Derakhshesh are not related and had not even met before he got a VOA contract, b) the only sole-source contract she issued to Amini was for $81,000 and c) “all procedures were followed in connection with the sole source contract.”
One of her lawyers, David Seide, of the Government Accountability Project, stated in a press release that the actions taken against Derakhshesh under the Trump Administration were “politically motivated and a gross waste of government resources.”
The Trump Administration was reacting to many years of charges and allegations that VOA Persian was run as a network supporting the Islamic Republic, a charge many Republicans in Congress had aired for years.
Democrats who looked into the allegations over the years did not give them credence. But President Trump named Michael Pack to head the organization and he quickly began a housecleaning. On January 20, President Biden’s first day in office, Pack was sacked.
Derakhshesh will remain in her new job looking at programming across all VOA language services. On May 6, VOA named Leili Soltani, who had been acting head of VOA Persian since Pack targeted Derakhshesh, to the full time post. Derakhshesh had held the post from 2014 until this past January.
