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.”
[…]
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. […]
— Read More: townhall.com
