An embarrassing interview has exposed rifts at the National Endowment for Democracy
The biggest public relations fiasco in the history of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has resulted in two senior officials ending up fired and a “civil war” of sorts between the old neoconservative cadres and the new “woke” management, according to documents obtained by The Grayzone.
The fiasco in question was the phone call between the NED vice-president for communications Leslie Aun and the Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Alex Rubinstein, which the independent outlet published in May 2023. Aun initiated the call to address Rubinstein’s description of the Endowment as a “CIA cutout,” but ended up saying “I don’t know” a lot instead.
On Tuesday, the Grayzone published several emails between Michael Allen – who used to be the editor of the NED’s ‘Democracy Digest’ blog – and the Endowment’s founding president Carl Gershman, revealing that the fallout from the call’s publication may have cost Aun and Allen their jobs.
“Amateur hour – hugely embarrassing!” Allen emailed Gershman and NED VP for government relations, David Lowe, a day after the recording was posted on YouTube. “I specifically counseled against her talking to these people.”
Lowe described Aun’s performance as “breathtakingly ignorant” and “too painful to listen to.” Both he and Gershman, who retired in 2021, appeared to disparage the new NED president Damon Wilson for hiring her.
Gershman described the call as a “disastrous screwup” and described Aun as “obviously clueless,” a “moron,” and a “clueless wonder” whose hiring was an “egregious error” reflecting Wilson’s focus on media and image.
In messages to Gershman and Lowe, Allen blamed NED communications director, Christine Bednarz, who reportedly encouraged Aun to talk to the Grayzone. Allen also blamed Bednarz for instituting mandatory “diversity, equity and inclusion” training and berating him about his “white male privilege.”
In one email, Allen complained about the DEI training agenda including “microaggressions” and the “ideological, not historical” 1619 Project, noting that Bednarz had berated him for not using pronouns on his business cards and email signature.
In a June 5, 2023 email to Gershman, Allen complained about the communications team focusing on the “more urgent matter of NED’s LGBTQIA+ agenda” rather than the Grayzone fallout.
Another point of conflict arose after the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, with Allen complaining that several NED staffers “promoted and attended the pro-Palestinian march organized by ANSWER” and that the NED president still backed Black Lives Matter on Facebook even after they “enthusiastically celebrated the Hamas massacres.”
At one point, Gershman asked if Bednarz harbored some kind of personal resentment for her Israeli ex-husband, or if she was “just a woke flake,” to which Allen replied: “The latter, combined with a certain megalomania and defensive resentment over the Grayzone fiasco.”
Allen ended up getting fired on December 12. In an email to Gershman and Lowe in February, he claimed his firing was in part due to “marginalization prompted by the Grayzone affair, arguably the biggest PR fiasco in NED’s history.”
Aun was fired at some point as well and paid a substantial settlement for “sex discrimination,” according to the documents obtained by the Grayzone. Her online biographies make no mention of her work at NED.
The Endowment was founded by Gershman and Alan Weinstein in 1983, after the CIA suggested the creation of such an organization to then-President Ronald Reagan. “What we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA,” Weinstein admitted to the Washington Post in 1991. Rubinstein had mentioned the CIA connection in passing, in an April 2023 article about the controversial outfit Bellingcat getting NED funding.
