USAID is no more. What’s left of the desiccated corpse of this agency has been absorbed into the State Department, with most of its workers laid off and its overseas missions shut down. The veneer of aid work has been obliterated, thanks to the work of President Donald J. Trump and DOGE, which uncovered a litany of wasteful spending. It was a primary driver of favors and pork for the political class. The gravy train derailed, and the vehicle for moving slush funds was deactivated. That’s why the Left freaked out about the end of USAID.
The agency also played a part in the impeachment of Trump, subsidizing and being a quasi-lord protector at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which is supposed to be independent but was anything but when you review the dynamics. USAID approved its staff hires and action plan, and OCCRP was cited numerous times in a CIA whistleblower’s complaint that launched the Ukraine quid pro quo circus. So, it’s not too shocking that USAID was also involved in the Russian collusion delusion. Public’s Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag once again dove into this sordid world of (supposed) NGO activity and government funding: they found that OCCRP pushed the Trump-Russian bank/money laundering myth. It’s a lengthy piece, folks:
In 2017 and 2018, reports suggested that Trump properties were used for money laundering by Russian financial criminals and Russian state entities. Trump’s entanglements with Russian oligarchs, Democrats and political commentators argued, had made him “Putin’s puppet.”
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The first effort to frame Trump as corrupted by Russians was in the summer and fall of 2016. In early August, a Defense Department contractor at Georgia Tech and another “researcher” claimed to have found a connection between the Trump organization and a Russian bank, Alfa Bank. A Hillary Clinton attorney, Michael Sussmann, then brought the supposed evidence of a connection to the FBI in September 2016. The Alfa Bank allegations proved to be baseless and emails revealed they were motivated by anti-Trump sentiment.
Concurrent with this effort, in August 2016, OCCRP investigations made their way into the U.S. Justice Department. It was then that Nellie Ohr, an employee at Fusion GPS, the political consulting firm that the Hillary Clinton campaign had hired for opposition research, sent articles about Russia to her husband, Bruce Ohr, at the Department of Justice. Several referenced OCCRP reports related to Russian money laundering and corruption.
Nellie Ohr had previously worked as a CIA contractor from 2008 to 2014. John Durham’s 2023 report found that Nellie’s work for Fusion GPS influenced the Steele dossier’s key claims about collusion. Bruce Ohr had passed his wife’s findings to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane team investigating Trump. This created “circular reporting,” in which Nellie’s work both informed the Steele dossier and the FBI investigation used to corroborate its claims.
But OCCRP’s influence on the Trump-Russia collusion hoax extended well beyond Nellie Ohr’s emails. On March 20, 2017, OCCRP revived a series it had published years earlier on Russian money laundering to suggest some involvement with a Trump golf course, which the Associated Press and other outlets picked up. OCCRP claimed that companies “unwittingly took part” in Russian money laundering, including Total Golf Construction Inc., which renovated Trump’s golf course in the Grenadines.
The 2017 series involved records of over 75,000 financial transfers, and OCCRP worked with dozens of media outlets to release particular bits of information. OCCRP’s editor Paul Radu stated that the investigation was prompted when “law enforcement” became frustrated over Russian government inaction, suggesting that “law enforcement” may have been behind the leak to OCCRP.
“OCCRP assembled a team of reporters from 32 countries on three continents to track down the money and produce ‘The Russian Laundromat Exposed’ investigative series,” explained Radu. OCCRP’s partnership with international outlets established an appearance of global consensus around the story. With so much international participation, the series, and its selective allegations, became fact.
“We’re proud to expose truths that empower people to decide their own futures, but we do not advocate for any specific political outcome or government,” said OCCRP in its response to our story. “not in the U.S. and not anywhere.”
The evidence suggests otherwise. In contrast to OCCRP’s dismissal of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, who we now know brought in tens of millions of dollars to the Biden family by selling access to his father, including to the Chinese government, the timing and volume of OCCRP’s laundromat series appeared aimed at supporting the media narrative of Russian collusion and election interference.
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This OCCRP report was published when congressional Democrats wanted investigations into Trump’s financials. The waters were chummed, and the media went off. Shellenberger and Gutentag noted that the Guardian’s story about a bank lending Trump $300 million with ties to Russian money laundering was the pebble that set off this conspiracy theory-laden fiasco. None of which is true:
But there was never anything that tied Trump to Russian criminals other than the fact that they shared the same bank. After OCCRP fed this narrative to the Guardian, the New York Times and many other major news media wrote story after story suggesting a conspiracy between Trump, Deutsche Bank, and Russian criminals – all without evidence.
Seven paragraphs into a September 2017 New York Times article, the three authors noted, “Although Deutsche Bank recently landed in legal trouble for laundering money for Russian entities — paying more than $600 million in penalties to New York and British regulators — there is no indication of a Russian connection to Mr. Trump’s loans or accounts at Deutsche Bank, people briefed on the matter said.”
Consistently, journalists wrote articles with assumptions, remote connections, and loose sets of facts to insinuate that Trump was criminally guilty of something.
“The scandal-hit bank that loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to Donald Trump has conducted a close international examination of the US president’s personal bank account to gauge whether there are any suspicious connections to Russia, the Guardian has learned,” wrote one Guardian report. Readers had to wait until the fourth paragraph to learn that “The internal review found no evidence of any Russia link…”
That was common for this story: purported bombshell developments that fizzled because there was no solid evidence of collusion. Yet, the anti-Trump activist army had many avenues to feed the fake news beast, which eventually led to it becoming an international bonanza:
In November 2017, OCCRP collaborated with the Washington, D.C.-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) on the “Paradise Papers,” a selectively released trove of 13.4 million records that revealed the offshore interests of over 120 politicians worldwide. ICIJ, another ostensibly independent organization, receives funding from the US State Department.
One “Paradise Papers” story showed offshore ties between Russia and Trump’s commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross. “In the aftermath of the election, investigations by Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice have explored potential business ties between Russia and members of President Trump’s administration,” noted OCCRP. “While several of Trump’s campaign and business associates have come under scrutiny, until now no business connections have been reported between senior Trump administration officials and members of Putin’s family or inner circle.”
The German journalists who previously published the “Panama Papers” with ICIJ and OCCRP, Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, contributed to the Ross story. Earlier that year, in January 2017, Obermayer and Obermaier wrote an article in the Guardian that called for investigating Trump, writing, “Donald Trump alone has his hands in hundreds of companies, so it is impossible for one news outlet alone to investigate this properly. But it is not impossible if there’s a collaborative investigation.”
The collaboration, they argued, should be international. “Another project could be to investigate his ties to Russia and his past with Russia, which also is very promising, even if you don’t believe a single word of the Trump dossier Buzzfeed made public,” they wrote. “Unknown conflicts of interests in both fields can turn out to be a huge danger to the national security of the US.”
In addition to the Paradise Papers, OCCRP collaborated on a September 2017 documentary with Dutch public television called “The Dubious Friends of Donald Trump,” about the links between former Trump business associate Felix Sater and Kazakh money laundering.
A connected OCCRP story, published in June 2018, alleged a “complex offshore trail” connecting the purchase of three Trump SoHo tower apartments to a Kazakhstan fraud and money laundering case. Although not the first to report on the purchase of Trump’s SoHo property by a money laundering network, OCCRP claimed to directly link illicit funds from Kazakhstan to the condo purchases, thereby suggesting potential criminal implications for Trump and his business.
All this reporting, from a purportedly neutral anti-corruption organization, helped seed and legitimize the narrative that Trump had financial ties to Russia and had thus colluded with Putin to steal the 2016 election.
So, don’t buy the ‘people will die everywhere…forever’ propaganda about USAID. It was a covert operation meant to keep the political class wealthy and its interests protected. And not that you couldn’t connect the dots already, but USAID was the point of the lance in that effort, especially when it came to providing political cover at home and abroad:
USAID and the State Department appear to have created a vast network to co-opt the international press. These agencies funneled $472.6 million to Internews over the last 17 years. As of 2023, Internews operated out of 30 countries and had reached over 778 million people. The organization trained over 9,000 journalists and nearly 4,300 media outlets worldwide.
Jeanne Bourgault, Internews’ CEO, advocated for exclusion lists on social media “to combat disinformation” of disfavored views at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in 2024. The WEF then issued a report naming “misinformation” as the number one “Global Risk.”
Through these methods, USAID specifically, and the US deep state in general, have used taxpayer money not only for censorship, but also for propaganda, agenda setting, and information control around the world.
It gets worse. More must be fleshed out over the Internews Network, an actual $500 million state media project.
USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over…
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) February 8, 2025
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