Bolivia threw USAID out of the country in 2013 for running covert operations against its own government.
America couldn't do the same thing – because the target this time was Donald Trump.
And now that the receipts are public, AOC and Chuck Schumer are doing everything they can to make sure you never connect those dots.
The Obama CIA Holdover Who Triggered Trumps Impeachment
The 2019 impeachment hoax against Donald Trump started with a CIA analyst – an Obama White House leftover – who filed a whistleblower complaint claiming Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the Bidens.
The complaint cited one report four times.
That report came from an organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project – OCCRP – that most Americans have never heard of.
OCCRP would not exist without USAID.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger took all of it to Congress in February 2025 and put it on the record before the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
USAID built OCCRP from scratch – rerouting a State Department narcotics grant to create an organization it then controlled, approving senior hires and signing off on the work plan every year.
OCCRP's own co-founder told German television his outfit had "probably been responsible for five or six countries changing over from one government to another government – and getting prime ministers indicted or thrown out."
That's not journalism. That's regime change with a press badge.
How USAID Ran a Deep State Regime Change Operation Inside America
USAID's record abroad is well documented. In Cuba, USAID disguised a political destabilization program as an HIV outreach effort. They funneled resources into Venezuelan opposition groups.
Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene laid out the Syria numbers directly in a House oversight hearing: USAID pumped over $15 billion into the Syrian civil war over a decade to topple Bashar al-Assad, with financial trails documented in congressional budget records.
Bolivia expelled USAID in 2013 for meddling in domestic politics.
America couldn't do the same – because the operation was running here.
Rep. Thomas Massie pressed Shellenberger on it directly at a House Judiciary Committee hearing in February 2025: "Isn't it borderline treason when the taxpayer – when organizations entrusted with protecting our country are now undermining our own government?"
In his Senate testimony, Shellenberger had already answered that question. What the CIA, USAID, and their middlemen did to interfere in U.S. politics, he wrote, is "highly illegal and even treasonous."
That conclusion is on the record in a United States congressional hearing room. The media buried it.
Democrats Defended Every Dollar of This
Zelensky himself said Trump never pressured him. The Senate declined to convict. Not a single Republican voted for impeachment in the House – it was a pure partisan operation from start to finish.
Knowing how it was built changes everything.
Democrats raced to USAID's defense when Trump shut it down.
AOC declared a "five alarm fire." Senior USAID executives compared DOGE's review to a "mafia-like takeover." Not one of them explained why a development agency needed to control the hiring of a journalism organization that toppled governments.
Now you know why AOC, Schumer, and Chris Murphy fought so hard to protect USAID.
They weren't protecting foreign aid programs. They were protecting the machine that tried to remove a president your vote elected – funded with your tax dollars, run through middlemen most Americans had never heard of, built on the same template they used to flip governments in Venezuela and Syria.
Shellenberger sat down with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation this week and raised a question the mainstream press refuses to ask: what if Trump shut USAID down because he knew exactly what it did to him?
First he corrected something most Americans get wrong about the agency.
"You have to remember that our intelligence agencies are foreign policy establishment, of which USAID is a big part," Shellenberger told Cuomo. "It's not really an economic development agency. I think people misunderstand that part. It's really about soft power. It's about establishing the power of the states in an aggressive way, including in regime change."
USAID was never a charity. It was a power projection tool – and when the people running it decided Trump was the problem, they turned those tools inward.
An agency caught running domestic political operations against a sitting president – building the foundation for his impeachment – gave Trump every reason to not just reform it but obliterate it.
Democrats called the shutdown unconstitutional. They never once asked why a foreign aid agency needed to control the hiring of a journalism group that toppled governments. They never explained why they fought so hard and so fast the moment Trump moved against it.
Now the answer is public.
Sources:
- Michael Shellenberger, "USAID Censorship and Disinformation Operations Aimed at the American People," Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, February 13, 2025.
- "Shellenberger: USAID-Funded and Controlled Organization Participated In Russiagate Hoax," RealClearPolitics, February 14, 2025.
- "Journalist Called to Testify on CIA-Funded Trump Impeachment," Anadolu Agency, February 14, 2025.
- "Hearing Wrap Up: America-First Foreign Aid Protects U.S. Interests at Home and Abroad," House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, February 28, 2025.
- "Did USAID Use Taxpayer Funds to Help Finance Trumps 2019 Impeachment?" American Greatness, April 25, 2025.
- "USAID and CIA Regime-Change Operation on American Soil, Allegedly Tried to Overthrow Trump," LifeZette, April 1, 2026.
