You’ve probably noticed that Democrats are having a huge hissy fit over the dismantling of USAID. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is set to shut down on Friday, with most employees furloughed as it merges into the State Department. This drastic move follows an investigation led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which revealed extensive corruption, waste, and fraud within the agency that essentially turned it into a slush fund for leftist causes.
One of those causes appears to have been the impeachment of Donald Trump.
How, you ask? Well, independent journalists Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag have discovered that USAID appears to have directed funds to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which played a pivotal role in the whistleblower complaint that ignited the Trump-Ukraine scandal.
Despite OCCRP's attempts to assert its autonomy, statements from USAID officials and reports from ProPublica indicate a significant connection between the agency and the OCCRP.
“In the complaint, the whistleblower claimed to have heard from White House staff that Trump had, on a phone call, directed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden,” reports Shellenberger and Gutentag on the Public Substack. “The whistleblower who triggered the impeachment was a CIA analyst who was first brought into the White House by the Obama administration."
Reporting by Drop Site News last year revealed that the CIA analyst relied on reporting by a supposedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which appears to have effectively operated as an arm of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which President Trump has just shut down. The CIA whistleblower complaint cited a long report by OCCRP four times.
In a 2024 documentary by Germany’s public broadcaster NDR examining OCCRP's reliance on the U.S. government, a USAID official confirmed that the agency oversees the approval of OCCRP's annual work plan and key personnel hires. NDR conducted this investigation in collaboration with several media organizations, including Mediapart, Il Fatto Quotidiano, Reporters United, and Drop Site News.
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However, on the same day Drop Site News published its findings, Mediapart reported that NDR had censored the broadcast following pressure from Drew Sullivan, OCCRP's co-founder and head. Sullivan allegedly made false accusations against the NDR journalists involved in the investigation, leading to the censorship of the report. On December 16, Ryan Grim of Drop Site shared a link to the 26-minute documentary on X about a censorship scandal involving NDR. Grim criticized NDR’s defense, which claimed it never suppressed a report on OCCRP and State Department funding, asserting that many journalists knew this was false and that new evidence has been leaked.
The journalistic collaboration revealed that OCCRP’s original funding came from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of the State Department, and quotes a USAID official who says, “Drew’s just nervous about being linked with law enforcement,” referring to Sullivan. “If people who are going to give you information think you’re just a cop, maybe it’s a problem.”
OCCRP does not operate like a normal investigative journalism organization in that its goals appear to include interfering in foreign political matters, including elections, aimed at regime change. Sullivan told NDR that his organization had “probably been responsible for five or six countries changing over from one government to another government… and getting prime ministers indicted or thrown out.”
As such, it appears that CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad. The difference is that it is highly illegal and even treasonous for CIA, USAID, and its contractors and intermediaries, known as “cut-outs,” to interfere in US politics this way.
USAID has clearly proven to be the most prolific left-wing slush fund in history. They've funneled tens of millions of dollars to the Democrat-media complex and other radical left-wing causes, domestically and worldwide, without congressional oversight.
But it keeps getting worse: USAID and OCCRP attempted to conceal their connections to each other. According to Public, OCCRP threatened to file a lawsuit against Public after inquiries were initially made. But the truth has been exposed: the content produced by OCCRP was weaponized against Donald Trump back in 2019, sparking his first impeachment.
Congratulations, folks, our taxpayer dollars helped fund it.
The House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump on December 18, 2019, after a White House whistleblower went public with evidence that Trump abused his powers by withholding military aid to Ukraine in order to dig up dirt on his rival, Joe Biden.
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 5, 2025
In the complaint,… pic.twitter.com/rZ6gTazw5v
No wonder Democrats are so angry USAID is being exposed.
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