USAID Gave $472 Million to "Internews Network" NGO

Wikileaks publishes report on half a billion bucks going to a secretive news agency most American have never heard of.

Our Founding Fathers understood the extreme hazard of allowing the state to create and disburse public funds without budget and oversight restraints. The inevitable outcome is that the men who hold state power will give money to their friends—that is, to influential persons and organizations who will, in turn, support and even augment the power of those who hold office.

In recent years it has often occurred to me that the U.S. government is now scarcely distinguishable from a giant racket that creates trillions of dollars out of thin air and gives it to a vast array of shady interests—pharmaceutical companies and Ukrainian oligarchs being notable recent examples. This corrupt enterprise has been accompanied by a relative paucity of resources for endeavors such as fire prevention in Maui and LA Counties and air traffic control at Washington Reagan.

Now comes the news—reported by Wikipedia—that USAID has funneled almost half a billion dollars to a dodgy international news network that most Americans have doubtless never heard of. As Wikileaks tweeted on Friday night:

USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, "Internews Network" (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and "training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives. The operation claims “offices” in over 30 countries, including main offices in US, London, Paris and regional HQs in Kiev, Bangkok and Nairobi. It is headed up by Jeanne Bourgault, who pays herself $451k a year. Bourgault worked out of the US embassy in Moscow during the early 1990s, where she was in charge of a $250m budget, and in other revolts or conflicts at critical times, before formally rotating out of six years at USAID to IN. Bourgault’s IN bio and those of its other key people and board members have been recently scrubbed from its website but remain accessible at http://archive.org.

Records show the board being co-chaired by Democrat securocrat Richard J. Kessler and Simone Otus Coxe, wife of NVIDIA billionaire Trench Coxe, both major Democratic donors. In 2023, supported by Hillary Clinton, Bourgault launched a $10m IN fund at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI). The IN page showing a picture of Bourgault at the CGI has also been deleted. IN has at least six captive subsidiaries under unrelated names including one based out of the Cayman Islands. Since 2008, when electronic records begin, more than 95% of IN's budget has been supplied by the US government (thread follows).

Click on image below to see original Tweet: