“OCCRP’s Work is Not Political,” said the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project last week, apparently in response to our story about its involvement in the 2019 impeachment of President Donald Trump. “OCCRP has recently become the target of a conspiracy theory suggesting that we worked with one of our donors, USAID, to undermine President Donald Trump during his first administration. This is simply untrue, and it’s not how OCCRP operates.”
But the allegations in our report, that USAID effectively created and oversees OCCRP, are true. Senior managers at USAID and the co-founder of OCCRP confirmed that USAID must sign off on the hiring of key OCCRP personnel and its annual work plan. OCCRP created a central piece of evidence in a CIA analyst’s whistleblower complaint that resulted in the House of Representatives voting to impeach President Donald Trump in December 2019. OCCRP admits all of this in its response: “Here are the facts: One of our storieswas cited in a 2019 whistleblower complaint filed against President Donald Trump. The complaint then sparked his first impeachment.”
OCCRP defended itself against accusations that it was part of a conspiracy. “That story, like all stories we do, was reported without our donors’ knowledge or input. OCCRP had no contact with the whistleblower, and was unaware of the complaint until after it was reported by U.S. domestic media.” In an email to Public, OCCRP’s Editor in Chief noted that OCCRP published an article about how Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, “had received millions from a reputed organized crime associate” as evidence that OCCRP has no political bias.
But neither we nor any other media outlet claimed that OCCRP had the direct input of USAID for its story, nor that it had any contact with the whistleblower. It’s not clear that such communication would even be needed for USAID and OCCRP to participate in a scheme to develop evidence against Trump for a supposedly impeachable offense.
As for OCCRP’s article about Hunter Biden’s business partner, it repeatedly stressed that Hunter Biden was not involved. “While the younger Biden had previously been involved with RSTP [Rosemont Seneca Technology Partners],” OCCRP wrote, “there is no evidence that he played a role in the mbloom [startup fund] deal.” OCCRP went on to say that it had confirmed Biden’s lack of involvement after reviewing “financial records.” It did not specify how it obtained those records.
And despite the extensive evidence of influence peddling by the Bidens in countries routinely covered by OCCRP, including Ukraine, the organization does not appear to have thoroughly investigated them.
OCCRP describes itself as a cost-effective arm of the US government’s anti-corruption efforts, writing that “our stories have helped return more than $11 billion to public coffers through seizures and fines” and that “OCCRP has brought in at least ten times more money to the U.S. government than it has received in grants.”
But if it’s an arm of the US government, it’s one that was weaponized against Trump. A new investigation by Public shows that OCCRP played a significant role in developing the narrative that Trump and his associates had ties to Russian banking and Russian money laundering, as well as other undisclosed conflicts of interest with Russia.
USAID, OCCRP, and the Trump-Russia Conspiracy Theory
