Editor’s note: This week, we’re reprinting some of our best stories from the past year. This piece, originally published in November, details the Biden administration’s apparent unwillingness to protect one European nation from the predations of another.

In the final months of 2022, President Joe Biden was dealing with one foreign policy crisis after another.

The crisis dominating headlines and requiring the administration’s immediate attention that year was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But there was another conflict brewing, around 200 miles south of Russia’s border.

In December 2022, Azerbaijan set up environmental protests as a false flag to illegally block the Lachin Corridor, the only road connecting Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, a region inside of Azerbaijan that had been the home of ethnic Armenians for thousands of years. In the months that followed, the Azerbaijani regime in Baku ramped up its attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, as Armenian soldiers and civilians were killed in intense fighting.

Azerbaijan also cut off electricity and prevented food and aid from reaching the region, forcing around 120,000 ethnic Armenians to flee the place they had called home since the 7th century B.C.

One senior Biden administration official appeared to be the ideal person to address the growing humanitarian crisis in Nagorno-Karabakh and come to the aid of Armenians. Samantha Power, Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), spent decades raising awareness for human rights issues, including highlighting the violence that Armenians have faced for decades. Power, a longtime journalist, gained more notoriety after publishing a book titled “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” in which she highlighted the Armenian genocide, among other genocides that she argues the U.S. government failed to stop.

“She was not your average Biden administration official,” Democratic political strategist Eric Hacopian told The Daily Wire. “Because she has this halo over her head about human rights.”

Her human rights activism and writing landed Power a coveted post in the Obama administration when she was tapped to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Power had thrown her support behind Obama’s 2008 campaign, arguing that he had an “unshakable conscientiousness about human rights on the issue of genocide prevention.” Power also highlighted then-candidate Obama’s support for recognizing the Armenian genocide and “his willingness as president to commemorate it and certainly to call a spade a spade and to speak truth about it.” That recognition never came under Obama, something for which Power apologized.

Power then became one of the most influential people within the Biden administration when it came to human rights, especially with Armenia. Then the conflict with Azerbaijan exploded.

Azerbaijan’s attacks in late 2022 and 2023 were not a surprise: President Ilham Aliyev’s regime had long hinted that it would push to take control of the region. Professor Nerses Kopalyan told The Daily Wire that the Biden administration’s “inaction” on preparing for such an attack was “shocking.”

“The fact that the United States’ foreign policy establishment was privy to this information, their general inaction was quite shocking purely from the lens of humanitarianism, considering the fact that Samantha Power and the entire wing in the foreign policy structures in the Biden administration had for such a long time been very vocal and a strong proponent of humanitarian issues,” Kopalyan said.

“When it came time to walk the walk, Samantha Power and that branch of the Biden administration basically disappeared,” Kopalyan added. “So we realized that it was all talk and no action, and the blockade continued until the ethnic cleansing.”

Between November 2022 and September 2023, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken held three rounds of peace talks with Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the Biden administration claiming that the talks “yielded results.” But whatever was discussed during the meetings was not enough to stop Azerbaijan from proceeding with its plan to uproot over 100,000 Armenians from their home. Top Biden officials also signaled that the administration would not tolerate the ethnic cleansing of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh, a line that the Aliyev regime crossed without any consequences.

Internally, some officials in the Biden administration urged the White House to draw a red line for Azerbaijan, according to a former government official with knowledge of the situation who spoke to The Daily Wire on the condition of anonymity.

“We were certainly pushing for more fortitude on the part of the White House and the State Department in making it clear to Aliyev that there would be consequences for moving militarily on Nagorno-Karabakh,” the official said. “Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.”

The source said that in the months prior to Azerbaijan’s offensive, “there was a sense” in the Biden administration that Baku would move militarily on Nagorno-Karabakh, adding that “there was outreach from Washington to Baku at a high level to dissuade that kind of action.”

“But that messaging was not married up with real consequences,” the former official added.

Despite Power’s apparent sympathy for the Armenian position, many Armenians believe that she left them out to dry. In the weeks and months leading up to Azerbaijan’s blockade, Power did not visit Armenia or make any major statements on aiding the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Hacopian, who is also an Armenian political commentator, told The Daily Wire that Power and USAID were “entirely insincere” in their efforts “early on in the process” before Azerbaijan launched its major offensive.

“They were never working to get aid into that region during the illegal Azerbaijani blockade,” Hacopian said. “They simply wanted to deal with the effects of the ethnic cleansing.”

He added that it was obvious that the Biden administration wanted to take a hands-off approach to the conflict, and that Power was “not willing to take a stand.”

“She, essentially, cynically went along for the ride, not saying a word,” Hacopian said. “And the moment the ethnic cleansing started, she showed up.”

“She’s wildly reviled here because of that,” he added.

Some of that disdain for Power was captured on camera after she arrived in Armenia in September 2023. During a press conference near the Azerbaijan border, Power was heckled in Armenia by someone who shouted, “Sanction Azerbaijan or go back to your country. You don’t care. Stop the lies.”

Power did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this piece.

The former Biden official who spoke to The Daily Wire on the condition of anonymity said that once Azerbaijan had forced the Armenians out of Nagorno-Karabakh, discussions in the administration were “less about how do we punish Azerbaijan right now and more about what do we do to support Armenia in this moment.”

“We could’ve walked and chewed gum at the same time, but we didn’t,” the official said. “But I do think there was an effort to try to show up for Armenia.”

Editor’s note: This week, we’re reprinting some of our best stories from the past year. This piece, originally published in May, won Luke Rosiak the 2025 Dao Prize For Excellence In Journalism. It is reprinted here in its entirety along with a note from Daily Wire editor-in-chief Brent Scher, added to mark Rosiak’s Dao victory.

***

Earlier this year, we decided to put Luke Rosiak on full-time DOGE coverage. But his work on government efficiency started more than a decade ago. Luke was mentored by the late Tom Coburn, the senator who famously put out an annual “Wastebook” documenting government stupidity. None of the stupidity, however, ever got cut.

“For years, us waste-watchers saw that nothing got better under either party,” Luke said back in February. “We thought we had to accept it.”

But then DOGE came along, led by a confrontational billionaire empowered to take action as soon as he was alerted of government waste. The goal was never for Luke to cover what Elon Musk and DOGE were doing, any reporter could do that, but rather to spotlight as much waste, fraud, and abuse as he could while the government cared.

He’s done that, far more thoroughly than we could have imagined. He locked his investigative prowess in on waste and abuse of the federal food stamp program, figured out what was going on inside the African Development Foundation, where they shuttered the doors to keep DOGE from entering, and told the world the story of how the wokest office at the White House really made DOGE possible. Elon was following — and literally responding with “Deleted” to Luke’s reporting on X.

This week Luke was recognized for his work spotlighting with the prestigious Dao Prize, awarded to “recognize excellence in investigative journalism.” It was for his work on the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which thanks to reporting like Luke’s, no longer exists.

This piece was originally published on March 19, 2025, but we’re sharing the award-winning journalism again today. — Brent Scher

—

One of the seven small federal agencies that President Donald Trump ordered downsized or eliminated on Friday was rife with corruption, with its employees hiring friends and relatives, commissioning paintings of themselves, and using government credit cards to indulge in constant luxuries.

The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) occupied a nine-story office tower on D.C.’s K Street for only 60 employees, many of whom actually worked from home, prior to the pandemic. Its managers had luxury suites with full bathrooms; one manager would often be “in the shower” when she was needed, while another used her bathroom as a cigarette lounge. FMCS recorded its director as being on a years-long business trip to D.C. so he could have all of his meals and living expenses covered by taxpayers, simply for showing up to the office.

FMCS is a 230-employee agency that exists to serve as a voluntary mediator between unions and businesses. As an “independent agency,” its director nominally reports to the president, but the agency is so small that in effect, there is no oversight at all — and it showed, becoming a real-life caricature of all the excesses that the Department of Government Efficiency has alleged take place in government.

This reporter spent a year investigating the agency a decade ago, and I found egregious and self-serving violations of hiring, pay, contracting, and purchase card rules. One thing I could not discover is why the agency actually existed, other than to provide luxurious lifestyles for its employees. Endless junkets to resort destinations, which employees openly used to facilitate personal vacations, were justified as building awareness of the agency in the hopes that someone would actually want to use its voluntary services.

FMCS seemed, quite clearly, to exist for the benefit of those on its payroll, and not much else. One employee told me: “Let me give you the honest truth: A lot of FMCS employees don’t do a hell of a lot, including myself. Personally, the reason that I’ve stayed is that I just don’t feel like working that hard, plus the location on K Street is great, plus we all have these oversized offices with windows, plus management doesn’t seem to care if we stay out at lunch a long time. Can you blame me?”

“Recreation and reception fund.”

Top FMCS official George Cohen used a “recreation and reception fund” to order champagne and $200 coasters for his office, and to purchase artwork painted by his wife. The tiny agency commissioned paintings of its top employees — as one employee told me, “like they were reigning kings or something…I’ve never seen anything like it before.” It spent $2,402 retouching the portrait of someone who briefly held the top job in an acting capacity.

FMCS employees “unblocked” their government credit cards to turn off typical abuse protections, then used them to apparently fund personal expenses and simply bill anything they’d like to the government. One employee leased a BMW; another (IT director James Donnen) billed the government for his wife’s cell phone, cable TV at both his home and his vacation home, and even his subscription to USA Today.

Employee Dan W. Funkhouser used his FMCS card to rent a storage unit near his home in rural Virginia, two hours from the office he supposedly worked at, which was used to store personal possessions such as a photo album of his dog, Buster. Funkhouser also spent $18,000 at a jewelry store near his house, and “destroyed all purchase card records upon leaving the agency,” an audit said.

When Charles Burton retired from FMCS, he incorporated an LLC to which another FMCS employee paid $85,000 using his purchase card, listing it as a “Call Center Service,” even though the company had neither a website nor a working phone.

When an accountant, Carol Booth, blew the whistle on financial abuses to the General Services Administration, which manages purchase cards and contracting, Cohen forced her to send an email (which he wrote under her name) rescinding her statement.

Like something out of “The Office,” the employees spent an inordinate amount of time and money congratulating one another for being employed there and engaging in “work” that really amounted to pampering themselves.

One purchase was for $30,000 on trinkets marking employees’ anniversaries. The agency’s office was absurdly oversized, but it refused to move. It hired a consultant for a “Hallway Improvement Project” to decorate. It had an in-house gym for employees, and purchased a $1,000 TV for the gym, a $3,867 ice-maker, and a $560 stereo.

The expenses that were actually business-related were hardly better. It paid, for example, $895 “for Suzanne Nichter’s enrollment in the English Essentials: A Grammar Refresher course” and $735 “for Lakisha Steward to attend Listening and Memory Skills Development Course.”

All expenses paid lifestyle

FMCS used federal jobs as a spigot of cash for friends and relatives. Allison Beck, a former union lawyer who became a top FMCS official, employed her sister-in-law as a “special assistant,” and an inspector general found evidence that she tried to create a high-level job for a friend.

FMCS employees allegedly steered contracts to friends, allowing them to write the “statement of work” that would be used to choose the contract winner — resulting in, of course, their own selection. Such “trainers” were paid $1,500 per day per person to train FMCS’s staff, plus $163 an hour for travel. When a low-level employee eventually said the extra travel pay ran afoul of federal rules, a contractor made clear he viewed it as an entitlement, huffing: “Work we have successfully performed for the agency for more than a decade — at great personal sacrifice, I should add — will be taken away unless we comply in an unquestioning manner with your edict.”

Scot Beckenbaugh, a top agency official, was paid $174,000 a year, but that wasn’t enough: He had his “duty station” listed as Iowa so that he could have all of his living expenses and food paid for in D.C., where he lived and worked, as if he was on a six-year-long business trip. When an employee raised the issue to an agency lawyer, the lawyer told him he “should not raise these issues … it would open a can of worms.”

FMCS hired a former mail carrier who lived in Pennsylvania, Lu-Ann Glaser, for a high-level, D.C.-based job, and agreed to pay for her to stay in a hotel for half of every month — even though it would have been easy to find someone better qualified who didn’t need to be put up in a hotel to simply do her job.

Paul Voight, a human resources official, was listed as living in D.C. even though he actually lived in Wisconsin, in order to fraudulently obtain higher cost-of-living pay. Voight’s boss was Artur Pearlstein, who left the agency to become a law professor, and was then re-hired after his academic career imploded in a plagiarism scandal. His first move in his new job was terminating an independent investigation into FMCS staff abusing taxpayer funds for personal gain.

Cohen, for his part, steered work to his previous employer, despite signing ethics forms saying he would not.

Constant junkets

Many of the agency’s top employees lived outside of the typical Washington, D.C., commuting area, and only stopped in the area occasionally, in an era before telework was routine. Its CFO, Fran Leonard, would come to the office twice a week but leave by 2:00 p.m.

The agency had, inexplicably, an office in Honolulu.

It funded constant travel of its employees to exotic locales, on the pretext that it was drumming up business for the federal agency — an admission that there was little demand for the agency’s existence.

In one month, Beck traveled to Italy and Switzerland, where she conducted a business meeting — over video chat. Then she went to Tunisia and an island off the coast of Georgia. She flew first class and forced the agency to reimburse her for mileage when she drove to her vacation home in Maine.

The agency had three full-time media relations staffers, none of whom would speak to me, almost certainly one of the only reporters to ever call.

Cash grants for insiders

The agency’s existence is predicated on the idea that it is an impartial mediator, biased neither towards labor nor management. But its staff largely comes from a union background, and it gave out grants to promote union membership. But it was too incompetent to do much ideological damage; its employees’ comfort always came before helping unions.

Anyone could request cash grants from the agency, with the only requirement that they mention some nexus with unions, however tortured. It doled out a seemingly random assortment of giveaways to private businesses, perhaps because they were the only ones who knew the grants existed.

It gave $63,000 to a hospital that went bankrupt; $51,000 to a childcare company to help it pay government licensing fees; and $57,000 to a company to “strengthen of culture of continuous improvement to drive us to world class excellence!”

What surprised me most about my FMCS investigation was what happened afterward: nothing. An inspector general made a referral to the FBI, but there were no prosecutions. Instead, President Barack Obama nominated a chief subject of the investigation to the top job.

A decade later, Trump has done what even the agency’s own employees said should happen: shut it down.