It’s been an awfully sudden fall for senior Trump official Mina Chang, whose State Department page has just crashed and burned. (Background here.)
Those of us fortunate enough to have studied her original self-creation recall paragraph upon paragraph touting her Ivy League credentials, her fearless compassionate forays into the world’s worst places, and more valor medals than Field Marshal Zhukov.
So what if it was all staged?
Chang had portrayed [a] 2015 trip to Afghanistan as a humanitarian mission for her nonprofit, but a defense contractor footed the bill and no aid was delivered, according to documents from the company and a former employee.
After the Afghanistan trip, Chang posted photos of herself meeting a group of Afghan women in a room. In a video posted on her charity’s website, she refers to the photo and says the Afghan women are “in hiding” at a secret location.
“This is in Afghanistan, I am sitting with women in our program, they are living in hiding. I can only say they are right outside of the Kabul area,” Chang said in an interview posted on her nonprofit’s website.
But the women were not part of any program run by her charity, Linking the World. They were wives of local employees of the defense contractor that paid for her trip…
I’ll say this for her: The woman has balls unto the breach. Having been exposed as – in the words of Fielding Mellish’s jury – incredibly guilty, she lashes out, in a statement, at all of her enemies (she shares this enemies list, and of course the Fake It Til You Make It M.O., with her president). When you finish reading Hoda Muthana’s tell-all (see post below this one), you can turn to the book I’m sure Chang will write about the lurid upbringing that turned her into a liar.