... .. On Aug. 28, Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee who has served on the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., since 1987, ruled that removing Michael Abramowitz as director of VOA "would be plainly contrary to law." That's because Congress responded to efforts during the first Trump administration to compromise the independence of VOA by establishing that the firing of the news outlet's director requires a majority vote of a six-member bipartisan panel called the International Broadcasting Advisory Board. The secretary of state serves as a seventh ex officio board member. The IBAB could not possibly have provided this approval in Abramowitz's case, Lamberth noted, because in January, Trump fired all six of its regular members and didn't name replacements. Lamberth declined to indulge the administration's strategy of legal distraction.