A senior official at the State Department exaggerated and even outright fabricated several facets of her professional and educational background, including a fake TIME Magazine cover of herself.
An investigation by NBC News found that Mina Chang, who serves as the department’s deputy assistant secretary for the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at a six-figure salary, has been embellishing her experience as a humanitarian leader by inflating her nonprofit’s accomplishments and making up a role at a U.N. panel on her nonprofit’s website (which went dark several hours after NBC News’ report came out).
Despite Chang’s claims that her nonprofit, Linking the World, has operated and built schools “in places like Afghanistan, Myanmar, Haiti, Kenya,” tax filings uncovered by NBC News show no indication that the nonprofit (with a budget of less than $300,000) has such a wide scope.
She also exaggerated her educational background in her bio on the State Department’s site with claims that she is an “alumna of Harvard Business School” (she doesn’t have a Harvard degree; she merely attended a program at the school for less than two months in 2016) and a “graduate” of the United States Army War College National Security Seminar (a four-day program).
To top it all off, she’s also touted a fake TIME Magazine cover to bolster her image (sound familiar?)
Chang presented the cover during a televised interview at Houston Community College, claiming she had been featured because she “brought some attention” to “technology being used to save lives in disaster response scenarios.”
However, the cover is “not authentic,” Time magazine spokesperson Kristin Matzen told NBC News.
The White House and the State Department did not respond to TPM’s request for comment.
