The King Snake of USAID Spending

Written by Chriss W. Street

It is hard to choose the most pernicious spending in USAID’s $50 billion annual budget, but the ‘Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’ that partners with the CIA’s Transparency International and the Soros’ Open Society Foundations to retaliate against countries and entities it deems hostile to the Deep State initiatives may be the king snake.

The OCCRP non-government-organization (NGO) describes itself as: “one of the largest investigative journalism organizations in the world, headquartered in Amsterdam and with staff across six continents. We are a mission-driven nonprofit newsroom that partners with other media outlets to publish stories that lead to real-world action.”

With 200 member staff that partners with over 50 independent media outlets worldwide, OCCRP dominated the EPPY Awards from Editor & Publisher that recognize excellence in digital journalism, with First Place Prizes last year. But it is alsolabeled: “The Biggest, Most Corrupt News Organization You Have Never Heard of.”

The U.S. Agency for International Development was launched by the Kennedy administration as an independent federal agency to deliver civilian foreign aid and development assistance. It gained voter popularity from newscast of its trucks responding to third-world natural disasters and conflicts with food and medical supplies.

But with no oversight and globally contracting with thousands of opaque NGOs, USAID served as a Deep State’s slush fund to buy new friends and destabilize old enemies.

USAID’s invisibility ended in April 2006 when medical doctor and freshman Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) forced officials to admit to corrupt spending, including one of USAID’s charityinitiatives functioning as a front for a child prostitution ring in India.

With the intense public uproar over the USAID direct spending, Illinois Democrat Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) and Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain (Az.) co-sponsored, and Republican President George W. Bush signed, Coburn’s Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act. The legislation led to the creation of the USASpending.gov that makes most federal spending detail accessible on the internet.

FFATA data access spurred the launch of Wikileaks in October 2006 as an investigative journalist network to help whistleblowers gather evidence of corruption and criminality. The info would then be distributed to main-stream-media organizations for publication.

By March 2008, the U.S. military issued a finding that Wikileaks was a “potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security and information security threat to the U.S. Army.” The U.S. State Department directed award of a major USAID grant to an NGO start-up that promised to build a global consortium of friendly investigative journalist NGO named ‘Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.’

Wikileaks in early 2010 published a leaked helicopter gun-camera video of a potential American war crime in Iraq called “Collateral Murder.” The shocking tape was quickly followedby exposes titled the ‘Afghan War Logs’ and the ‘Iraq War Logs.’ Wikileaks in November 2010 published thousands of internal U.S. State Department messages that revealed massive amounts of bribery and other corruption in Tunisia, called ‘Cablegate.’

The Wikileaks revelations stirred up outrage across the Middle East that sparked street rebellions in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Sudan, Djibouti, Mauritania, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and Western Sahara under the slogan, “The people want to bring down the Regime.”

Wikileaks’ editor Julian Assange became the U.S. State Department’s 2010 Public Enemy #1 when The Huffington Post in asked Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a comment on a Wikileaks revelations about potentially corrupt USAID spending in Italy.

Shortly thereafter, two Swedish women reported Assange for having non-consensual sex. With local police launching an investigation and facing an arrest warrant for rape, Assange fled Sweden for Britain and life in the Ecuador embassy through late 2019.

OCCRP seamlessly overtook Wikileaks’ leadership to become the dominant clearing house for investigative journalism. But rather funding investigations of questionable U.S. activity, OCCRP supported global corruption investigations of American targets, like the Panama Papers, and off-shore tax scams, like Pandora Papers.

President Barack Obama whose grandmother and mother worked for USAID entities, drastically increased the agency’s activities. As part of the 2015 adoption of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, USAID was charged with leading $100 billion investment and marketing the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

During the decade from 2014 and 2023, the U.S. federalgovernment provided at least $47 million, or 52%, of the $90million in OCCRP funding. Other major contributors included NATO allies Britain and France, plus NGO’s like Soros’ Open Society.

Trump winning the 2016 presidential election shocked the Deep State. Congress responded during the lame-duck session before Trump took office in January 2017, by passing a $250 million disinformation fund: “to build the capacity of civil society, media, and other nongovernmental organizations countering the influence and propaganda of the Russian Federation to combat corruption, prioritize access to truthful information.”

OCCRP leveraged its clout as a founding partner of the Global Anti-Corruption Consortium that aimed to trigger criminal investigations or sanctions proceedings based on OCCRP's articles. GACC also received $10.8 million directly from USAID, an unknown amount from CIA-backed Transparency International, and even larger contributors from Open Society Foundations, Taiwan, and United Kingdom.

Swiss-based NGO Advisor ranked ‘Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’ as 69^th in the world among the top 500 non-governmental organizations in 2017.

OCCRP kept a low profile during the Trump first administration. But President Biden following his 2020 election appointed the former Obama administration’s UN Ambassador Samantha Power as USAID Administrator.

Power cranked up funding for members of the OCCRP consortium. The Internews Network NGO that since 2011 had been receiving about $50 million per year from USAID, saw itsannual funding spike to over $115 million by 2023.

At January 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Internews Network President Jeanne Bourgault spoke in support ofUSAID’s formal “advertiser outreach” policy to pressure corporate advertisers to create disinformation exclusion lists and redirect online budgets to only support approved news sources. Bourgault later in reference to Elon Musk commented, “we’ve always had pollution in the information environment.”

The Deep State has poured billions of dollars of tax-payer cash into combatting so-called misinformation and disinformation by targeting conservative media worldwide—all under the mask of “saving democracy.”

According to a USAID fact sheet, which has since been taken offline, the federal agency admitted in 2023 to “direct” spending $268,376,000 in training and support for 6,200 journalists, assisted 707 non-state news outlets, and supported 279 media-sector civil society organizations dedicated to strengthening independent media.

President Trump 47 and the DOGE are now digging hard to discover all of the “dark payments” through other government institutions, NGO’s and dummy-corporations.