In a stunning exposé released on his Substack, investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger sheds light on the covert operations by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that aided the impeachment effort against President Trump in 2019. According to Shellenberger, a nexus between USAID-funded research and a whistleblower from the CIA sparked the impeachment.
The whistleblower, who was a CIA analyst appointed during the Obama era and claimed that President Donald Trump coerced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into probing Joe Biden and his son Hunter by leveraging military aid, is Eric Ciaramella.
Ciaramella was NOT on Trump’s July 25 phone call with Zelensky, yet he filed a whistleblower complaint based on hearsay from a ‘source’—The Gateway Pundit reported that his primary ‘source’ was Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman.
Investigative reporters suggests that Ciaramella relied heavily on reports by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). The OCCRP has claimed to be a nonpartisan group has been found to operate under the financial and operational oversight of USAID. That fact was recently confirmed by a USAID official in an interview.
Shellenberger wrote in his Substack:
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.
VISIT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNELIn 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.”
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.
