One of Trump’s most puzzling decisions last year was shutting down the Voice of America. It had 360 million listeners every week around the world and was widely respected as a source of news, not propaganda.

Trump put Kari Lake in charge of VOA’s parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, will appeal the decision. Her assignment was to close down VOA and turn whatever remained open into a Trump propaganda machine. Lake is an election denier and failed candidate from Arizona.

Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, said that she was serving illegally because she had never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate and voided her decisions.

Some 1,000 journalists and staff are expected to return to their jobs if she loses on appeal.

The shutdown of VOA was the first salvo in Trump’s ongoing efforts to gain control of the media.

The New York Times reported:

In his ruling, Judge Lamberth called Mr. Trump’s decision to have Ms. Lake lead the global media agency without Senate confirmation or appropriate procedures required for an acting head “violence to the statutory and constitutional scheme.”

The judge found that Ms. Lake’s appointment violated the law that determines who can serve as an acting head of an agency whose permanent leader would require Senate confirmation. The law, the Vacancies Act, requires that an acting head must be the second senior officer of an agency, be appointed by the president with the Senate’s consent or be a senior officer who had been at the agency before a vacancy arose.

Judge Lamberth found that Ms. Lake did not satisfy those conditions.

Ms. Lake claimed that she had not assumed the official title of the acting chief executive of the media agency, but rather, that the authority of its chief executive position had been delegated to her. That allowed her to exercise sweeping power over layoffs, funding cuts and contract terminations at the news agency, she said.

But the judge rejected her argument, writing that “allowing the president to circumvent Congress’s carefully crafted limitations” through delegations would violate the spirit of the Constitution.