A former administration appointee who served as ambassador to Jamaica is sounding the alarm about President Donald Trump’s choice to become the United States’ next top envoy to the Caribbean nation.

“Kari Lake is not the person for Jamaica,” former U.S. Ambassador Donald Tapia, who served in Jamaica from 2019-21, told the Miami Herald.

Tapia made headlines this week when he spoke out about Lake’s appointment in an interview with Kingston-based Nationwide Radio’s Cliff Hughes Online. He said he feared Lake could damage Jamaica’s relationship with Washington and is not to be trusted.

Lake was nominated in May and the vote on her confirmation appears to be pending in the Senate. Her name was not among the nominations submitted by the Clerk of the Senate for voting

Elaborating on his concerns with the Herald, Tapia, 88, brought up the controversy involving Arizona Republican Party Chairman Jeff DeWitt, who resigned in January 2024 after he was heard on a leaked audio asking Lake, then gearing up for a U.S. Senate run, to name her price to stay out of politics. In his resignation letter, DeWitt accused Lake’s team of forcing his resignation by giving him an ultimatum to resign, or having more recordings leaked.

“She’s proven she is not to be trusted when she recorded the chairman of the Republican Party,” Tapia said, adding that Lake at the time worked for DeWitt and was earning $200,000.

“You can’t trust somebody that’s going to record your conversation when it’s a private conversation between you and the party, without notifying the party that you’re recording them,” he said. “The ethical problem is she cannot be trusted.”

But that is not the only controversy Lake – a former TV news anchor who was known for walking around with a microphone as she met with supporters during her two failed statewide campaigns in Arizona – has faced.

Appointed by Trump as the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent company of the Voice of America, her leadership has been one of the more controversial stewardships in the administration.

After overseeing the layoffs of more than 1,000 journalists and staffers at the U.S. Agency for Global Media and the Voice of America, Lake was told by a federal judge in March she had no authority to do so.

“Lake satisfies the requirements of neither the statute nor the Constitution,” U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote in his ruling. He declared all of Lake’s actions over the past year to be null and void.

In a response to NPR after the judge’s ruling, Lake said she planned to appeal and defended her leadership, which included appointing herself as chief executive officer.

“The American people gave President Trump a mandate to cut bloated bureaucracy, eliminate waste and restore accountability to government,” she wrote to NPR. “An activist judge is trying to stand in the way of those efforts..”

Tapia said Lake overstepped her role.

“She had no authority to do that, and now it’s costing the federal government, somewhere in a few million dollars because of the cancellation for some contracts that took place under her rein,” he said.

“Why Donald Trump has embraced her is a question mark to the people of Arizona,” added Tapia, who lives in the state. “And a question mark to even the diplomatic corps that I know. They were shocked that with her losing two races in Arizona and being pulled back from Radio Free Europe, to turn around and be nominated to Jamaica.”

Tapia, a Trump supporter, helped financed the president’s inauguration during his first term. In the Herald interview he expanded his criticism to Trump’s foreign policy, arguing that he has alienated allies with his tariffs.

While some critics may think he dislikes Trump, Tapia said, that is not the case. But he is having trouble with some of the president’s decisions, he said. “In the first four years, he was the man for the job; we do know now that he doesn’t listen to his advisers. He gets rids of advisers who do not listen to him.”

Other critics

Tapia is not the only former U.S. ambassador to Jamaica to express concerns about Lake’s appointment. Retired Ambassador Luis Moreno, a critic of the Trump administration and its foreign policies, suggested Lake was given a diplomatic post after her failures at home.

“They had to park her someplace,” said the former career diplomat, citing her two defeats, her claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Trump and her stewardship of the global news outfits. “She has been a loud supporter of President Trump’s disinformation campaign on the elections, and she just made a mess in Voice of America and overseas broadcasting.”

The cuts, he said, weakened American foreign policy. “She destroyed some of the most important weapons we had as far as communicating our point of view overseas. It’s been a real tragic mess.”

Jamaica is among the United States’ closest partners in the Caribbean. Even as the Trump administration’s policies have strained relations within the 15-member Caribbean Community bloc known as CARICOM, Jamaica Prime Minister Andrew Holness has largely sought to maintain a pragmatic approach to Washington.

Moreno believes Holness and his team will continue that approach and limit any damage Lake could do.

“She’s not a substantive person. She’s not really a policy person,” said Moreno, who served in Jamaica from 2014-17. “It’s what we would call a lightweight appointment. I would expect lightweight efforts on her part, and what can I say? The Jamaican government will have to work with her because she’s an ambassador.