Dallas’ Mina Chang, a Trump official, used fake magazine cover to tout nonprofit work, NBC News finds

A Trump administration official from Dallas used a fake Time magazine cover to show off her nonprofit’s work and embellished other aspects of her education and accomplishments, according to an NBC News investigation.

Mina Chang, 35, was appointed the deputy assistant secretary in the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations in April. She stepped down from her Dallas-based nonprofit group, Linking the World, after receiving the appointment, according to a news release on the group’s website.

The NBC investigation said Chang “invented a role” on a United Nations panel and “exaggerated the scope of her nonprofit’s work.” The investigation found that Chang brought a Time magazine cover to an interview about her nonprofit group in 2017, using it as an example of her work.

“Here you are on Time magazine, congratulations!” the interviewer on the Houston Community College-produced program Global Outlook says. “Tell me about this cover and how this came to be.”

“We started using drone technology in disaster response, and so that was when the whole talk of how is technology being used to save lives in disaster response scenarios … and I suppose I brought some attention to that,” Chang replies.

A Time spokeswoman told NBC the cover was fake. Last summer, the magazine had asked Trump properties to take down fake magazine covers depicting President Donald Trump.

Her State Department biography page describes her as an “alumna of the Harvard Business School,” though NBC reported Chang did not earn a degree from the school.

A spokesman told NBC the school grants “alumni status" to anyone who attends one of the school’s education programs. Chang took a seven-week course there in 2016, NBC reported.

NBC said Chang was in consideration for “an even bigger government job ... until Congress started asking questions about her résumé.” Congressional records show that her nomination was withdrawn in September for assistant administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Chang had been a speaker at a Women’s Leadership Symposium in 2017 hosted by D Magazine, editor Tim Rogers wrote Tuesday.

“She won’t be invited back,” Rogers wrote in a brief post with the headline “Mina Chang’s Pants Are on Fire.”

A 2014 profile about Chang in the Dallas Observer reported that she was an international pop singer before becoming chief executive of her nonprofit, recording albums in Korean and English. At the time, she told the Observer she was undergoing chemotherapy after she had received a diagnosis of brain cancer.