On December 18, 2019, the US House of Representatives had accused President Donald Trump of abusing his powers. Earlier, a whistleblower from the White House had publicly presented evidence that Trump had delayed military aid to Ukraine to pressure President Volodymyr Zelensky into helping him with compromising material on his rival, Joe Biden. The whistleblower claimed to have overheard White House officials discussing Trump’s instructions to Zelensky to work with Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was investigating corruption allegations against Joe and Hunter Biden at the time.
According to an investigation by US journalist Michael Shellenberger, the whistleblower who triggered the impeachment process was a CIA analyst who was brought to the White House from the previous Obama administration. Reports by the Internet site Drop Site News from the previous year revealed that the CIA analyst had relied on information from an allegedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). It has since been established that OCCRP functioned as an arm of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which was closed by President Trump in one of his first actions in his second term.
The whistleblower’s complaint, which was previously the subject of four detailed OCCRP reports, claimed that two Soviet-born businessmen living in Florida were the “key, hidden actors behind a plan” by Trump to investigate the Biden family’s business in Ukraine for corruption. A further OCCRP/USAID report claimed that these two businessmen had established the connection between Trump’s lawyer Giuliani and two former Ukrainian prosecutors.
OCCRP stories were the decisive basis for the Democratic Party’s accusation of abuse of power in the House of Representatives. The accusation relies on the claim that Trump sent Giuliani to exert pressure on a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Passages from the whistleblower’s complaint were cited four times.
Shellenberger reports that in a documentary film by the German public broadcaster NDR, a USAID official confirmed that USAID approved the annual work plan of OCCRP and new hires. According to Shellenberger, NDR initiated the research and collaborated with the investigative news organization Mediapart, the Italian news group Il Fatto Quotidiano, “Reporters United” in Greece and Drop Site News in the US.
However, NDR censored the story on the day the Drop Site News article was published, after US journalist Drew Sullivan, co-founder and head of OCCRP, applied pressure on the NDR management and made false accusations against the journalists involved in the project, as reported by Mediapart.
On December 16, Ryan Grim of Drop Site News published a link to the 26-minute documentary film with the comment: “The German public broadcaster NDR is facing a censorship scandal and has stated that it never stopped a news report about OCCRP and its funding by the US State Department – because no such report was ever produced. . That’s absurd” Grim said, “because dozens, maybe hundreds of journalists knew it was false and now someone has leaked the film, of course.