Michael Shellenberger: USAID and the CIA Funded Trump's First Impeachment

"Regime change at home."

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. 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. 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.

The OCCRP report alleged that two Soviet-born Florida businessmen were "key hidden actors behind a plan" by Trump to investigate the Bidens. According to the story, those two businessmen connected Giuliani to two former Ukrainian prosecutors. The OCCRP story was crucial to the House Democrats' impeachment claim, which is that Trump dispatched Giuliani as part of a coordinated effort to pressure a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, which is why the whistleblower cited it four times.

In a 2024 documentary that German television broadcaster NDR made about OCCRP's dependence on the US government, a USAID official confirmed that USAID approves OCCRP's "annual work plan" and approves new hires of "key personnel." NDR initiated and carried out the investigation with French investigative news organization Mediapart, Italian new group Il Fatto Quotidiano, Reporters United in Greece, and Drop Site News in the United States.

However, according to a Mediapart story published the same day as the Drop Site News article, NDR censored the broadcast "after US journalist Drew Sullivan, the co-founder and head of the OCCRP, placed pressure on the NDR management and made false accusations against the broadcaster's journalists involved in the project."

On December 16, Drop Site's Ryan Grim posted a link on X to the 26-minute-long documentary. "NDR, Germany's public broadcaster, is facing a censorship scandal and has defended itself by saying it never killed a news report about OCCRP and its State Department funding -- b/c no report was ever produced to kill," said Grim. "That was absurd -- and dozens, maybe hundreds, of journalists knew it to be false, and now of course, someone has leaked it."

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.
OCCRP claims they're an "independent" "news" organization, and says that any claims to the contrary are "defamatory." Same lying and bullying tactics they used to get the German report censored.

But OCCRP's agreement with USAID says that USAID has the power to approve or veto OCCRP's hiring decsions.

On the website Patrucic links to, a screenshot from OCCRP's own agreement with USAID states, "Requests for approval of new Key Personnel shall include (a) written justification; and (b) CV curriculum vitae in English... Key personnel positions, candidates and changes to such personnel will require concurrence from the AOR [Agreement Officer's Representative] and approval from the AO [Agreement Officer]."

OCCRP claims on its website that USAID's oversight of OCCRP is not what it appears to be. "This represents a serious misunderstanding of a common procurement procedure. This person or persons, referred to as the grant's 'key personnel,' ensures that the money we get is spent appropriately and that the work gets done. This is not an editorial role, but a logistical one."

But there is nothing in the agreement that suggests USAID's approval of OCCRP's work plan and senior staff are unimportant to the editorial content produced by OCCRP.

Indeed, USAID's Shannon McGuire emphasizes, in the NDR documentary, that USAID controlled OCCRP through what is known as a "substantial involvement clause."

...

Sullivan confirmed this. " Under cooperative agreements, which we don't like to take," he said, "they have a say on who the people are, but they can veto somebody."

Patrucic told Public, "I am the editor-in-chief of OCCRP and was appointed during a USAID grant, but my CV was never sent to USAID and no approval was sought or received. OCCRP is governed only by its board of directors and no one else."

But a second USAID official, Mike Henning, confirmed to the NDR filmmakers that USAID approval is not just for "logistical" or "administrative" functions.

"A cooperative agreement has more strings attached," said Henning, "than a grant... Some of the strings that are attached in a cooperative agreement are approval of key personnel, approval of an annual work plan, approval of sub grants of a certain amount above a certain amount."

USAID, he added, would have to approve "the editor in chief or who's the CEO, who's the, you know, managing editor."

...

Samantha Power, then head of USAID, said in November 2021 that OCCRP was a "major partner" of the US government. Under its Strengthening Transparency and Accountability through Investigative Reporting (STAIR) program, USAID allocated $20 million to OCCRP from September 2022 to September 2027 to support investigative journalism in Europe and Eurasia. One of the reporters on the Giuliani story was based in Ukraine. Although OCCRP claims to assign grants retrospectively, it appears that a USAID STAIR grant may have funded the story.

Steve Engleberg, managing editor of the investigative journalism nonprofit, ProPublica, said that OCCRP's relationship with the U.S. government undermines OCCRP's claim to independence.

Shellenberger's "Public" substack is very much worth the $5 per month.

Mike Benz reports on USAID being the central organizer and main motor of the censorship propaganda effort against the American people, paying often-foreign governments and NGOs to label American speech as "disinformation," so that other USAID-funded groups could then ban conservatives from ever getting any advertising money.

Among other things.

He points out that, in 2019, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an article complaining that government censorship had gone too far. He was rebuffed by USAID-sponsored entities who organized and funded a fake astroturf campaign to drain FaceBook of advertising revenue. FaceBook's stock capitalization dropped by $60 billion over a few days, and that was enough to get Zuckerberg to comply.

He notes that Elon Musk, as "a triple-digit billionaire," is better able to resist this "whole of society" economic coercion (organized and funded by the US government) than double-digit billionaires like Zuckerberg.

And what about the rest of us? What about people barely getting by due to USAID's crushing advertising boycotts against us?

posted by Ace at 02:11 PM

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