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 have influenced the impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump in 2019.
According to Shellenberger, a nexus between USAID-funded research and a whistleblower from the CIA sparked the impeachment.
The foundation of the impeachment, as per the House of Representatives on December 18, 2019, was a whistleblower’s accusation stating President Trump misused his presidential powers.
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.
Further digging by Shellenberger and associated investigative reporters suggests that Ciaramella relied heavily on reports by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
This organization, though marketed as independent, has been found to operate under the financial and operational oversight of USAID—a fact confirmed by a USAID official in a recently unearthed documentary produced by German broadcaster NDR.
Further complicating the scenario is the discovery of OCCRP’s initial funding sources which include the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs.
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.