Did the CIA and USAID collude to remove an elected US president in 2019? Both have a reputation for involving themselves in 'regime change' abroad, but Michael Shellenberger puts forth an argument that they created the evidence used by Democrats to impeach Donald Trump in December of that year, ostensibly for his effort to expose Biden Inc corruption in Ukraine.

Shellenberger, one of the journalists who exposed government censorship in the Twitter Files, went public with a video as well as a report on his site, Public. However, Shellenberger falls short in connecting the vital dots:

The House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump on December 18, 2019, after a White House whistleblower went public with evidence that Trump abused his powers by withholding military aid to Ukraine in order to dig up dirt on his rival, Joe Biden.

In the complaint,… pic.twitter.com/rZ6gTazw5v

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 5, 2025

Did Shellenberger find a smoking gun? Not quite, but he certainly discovered some circumstantial evidence. Here's the gist of the argument in text form:

The whistleblower who triggered the impeachment was a CIA analyst who was first brought into the White House by the Obama administration.

Reporting by Drop Site News last year revealed that the CIA analyst relied on reporting by a supposedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which appears to have effectively operated as an arm of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which President Trump has just shut down. The CIA whistleblower complaint cited a long report by OCCRP four times.

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.

There's a piece missing here. The question is whether the OCCRP report was false or manipulated. It might have been, but Shellenberger stops short of that claim. He leaves it as an implication based on USAID funding and partial control of OCCRP, along with the records of USAID and CIA in pursuing regime changes through soft means. Instead, he then skips to an effort by OCCRP to shut down other journalists' efforts to uncover potential OCCRP corruption:

In 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.

The NDR documentary never aired, although NDR saw enough to cut off cooperation with OCCRP after their investigation, according to Drop Site's Ryan Grim. OCCRP chief Drew Sullivan convinced NDR not to air it, which created a censorship scandal in Germany last year. Grim eventually published a link to it on Twitter after the film itself leaked. OCCRP insists that the claim of political interference in the US is false, as is the claim that USAID and/or the CIA has editorial control over OCCRP's operations. 

Shellenberger relies heavily on Grim's reporting at Drop Site on OCCRP to reach his conclusion:

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.

That's pretty vague, and Shellenberger doesn't really offer much that isn't apparent on its face. At least in the reporting that Grim did with NDR, the focus was almost entirely on USAID's funding of OCCRP and potential manipulation of it, not about the Trump impeachment. Grim's December report only mentions the Trump impeachment once, without any suggestion of it being a USAID-directed corrupt act. In fact, Grim cites it as an example of OCCRP's "impressive" independence:

The work of OCCRP, often in collaboration with other newsrooms around the world, has been deeply impressive journalistically and at times they have done reporting at odds with U.S. national interests, including a look at how the Pentagon was relying on dodgy arms merchants to arm Syrian rebels. María Teresa Ronderos, director of the Latin American Centre for Investigative Reporting, said in an email that she “never felt that there were topics, issues or places that were restricted” when working with OCCRP. “Moreover, we have collaborated with them in stories that were particularly critical about US drug policies (series An Addictive War), or about US migration policies (Migrants from Another World) and they never expressed having a problem with this.” OCCRP’s reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s political work in Ukraine was cited four times in the whistleblower letter that led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment.

It's not as though Grim is particularly fond of USAID either. On Monday, Grim took a look at the Trump administration's moves on foreign policy and suggested that it intends to "unwind and reorient [the] American empire." Grim references USAID 18 times in this analysis, most with negative connotations, and occasionally accepting the premise that it's basically an intelligence front of the American bureaucracy that's been out of control for too long:

But Musk’s anti-imperialist argument is more than just one emoji. On X, El Salvador’s strongman president Nayib Bukele—did you know he’s Palestinian, by the way?—lambasted USAID. “While marketed as support for development, democracy, and human rights, the majority of these funds are funneled into opposition groups, NGOs with political agendas, and destabilizing movements,” Bukele wrote. “At best, maybe 10% of the money reaches real projects that help people in need (there are such cases), but the rest is used to fuel dissent, finance protests, and undermine administrations that refuse to align with the globalist agenda.”

I’m the furthest thing from an admirer of the bitcoin bro Bukele, but there’s not much to disagree with in his assessment. (While some of what USAID does is worthy and important, and gutting it will cost lives, the good work it does doesn’t have to live inside an agency whose actual mission is to wield power in the domestic politics of our allies and adversaries alike. It can go on. And, in fact, to the extent the programs are funded and directed by Congress, it is required by law that they do go on.)

My former colleague Glenn Greenwald shared Bukele’s post and added: “USAID, like the National Endowment for Democracy, are well-documented CIA fronts that are designed to manipulate other countries' internal politics for the benefits of DC elites and nobody else in the US. Both agencies have wrought destruction and can't die soon enough.” Musk replied, “They’re not even good at it.”

Grim clearly isn't terribly disturbed by the disappearance of USAID. He correctly notes that Congress can simply direct funds to those efforts they deem essential, which is what should have happened rather than provide an unaccountable bureaucracy $50 billion. However, nowhere does Grim state that USAID had targeted Trump with a dirty trick or false reporting, which certainly would have bolstered his argument. In fact, Grim references a November report from Drop Site linking USAID to the controversial voiding of the Romanian election, a point that would have been made stronger with any evidence of interference in the 2020 election via the 2019 impeachment in the US.

Basically, what we have here from Shellenberger is a very good reason to cut off USAID funding to any journalistic enterprise without public accountability back to Congress or the president. The risk of political manipulation is too great, and at least in other places appears to have come to fruition, if not necessarily through OCCRP (which doesn't even get a mention in the story on Romania). It's not even clear that the whistleblower in the 2019 impeachment offered false information. At best, Shellenberger's account gives us plenty of warning that the tools used by American intelligence and bureaucracies abroad could come back to bite us as well, so this is a good time to put an end to them -- or at least bring them out into the sunlight.