EXCLUSIVE: State Department Sued After Failing To Produce Documents On Hiring Of DEI Chief

A national security nonprofit is suing to obtain information about the State Department’s hiring of far-left activist Zakiya Carr Johnson as Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer.

The Center to Advance Security in America (CASA), “a nonpartisan organization dedicated to improving the safety and security of the American people,” filed the lawsuit after first submitting a Freedom of Information Act request to the State Department, requesting communications related to Johnson’s hiring.

“The hiring of Zakiya Carr Johnson as the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at the State Department deserves maximum transparency due to Ms. Johnson’s past extreme progressive advocacy and repugnant comments regarding America being a systemically racist country,” CASA Director James Fitzpatrick told The Daily Wire. “The Center to Advance Security in America filed a FOIA request for communications and records related to her hiring, and after waiting over 140 days, we were forced to file this lawsuit.”

The request, which was sent on April 23rd, sought communications between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other officials concerning Johnson’s hiring. Now, the suit from CASA seeks to compel the State Department to produce all non-exempt records in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act.

“To date, CASA has received neither a further response nor any other further communication from DOS,” the suit explains. “Through DOS’s failure to make a determination within the time period required by law, CASA has constructively exhausted its administrative remedies and seeks immediate judicial review.”

Johnson’s hiring sparked uproar as radical statements from her past began to resurface. Johnson embraced far-left Critical Race Theory and claimed that American society is “often riddled with racism, patriarchy and exclusion,” The Daily Wire reported in April.

“These are chinks in the armor of traditional leadership that refuse to reconcile with a colonizing past, or recognize that time has run out for experimentation and tweaking of a failed historic model,” Johnson stated in a now-deleted article, also adding, “we cannot have equity without dismantling structural racism, patriarchy and heterosexism.”

Johnson is the co-author of a guide called “Feminist Leaders for Feminist Goals,” a how-to playbook for feminists to usurp “a culture of male and/or white dominance” in organizations.

Johnson’s hiring is part of a wide-reaching plan to embed the far-left diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda throughout the State Department. The State Department has spent at least $77 million taxpayer dollars on DEI efforts in just two years, The Daily Wire exclusively reported in March. The department has also pushed transgenderism across the globe, employing former activist Jessica Stern as its “Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons.” Stern has visited at least 22 countries across all six habitable continents, even attending a “transgender visibility” march in Brazil.

Former president Donald Trump has said he would gut the federal bureaucracy through executive orders if elected.

“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the President of the United States,” Trump said at a rally, touting the plan. “The deep state must be brought to heel.”