A massive investigative journalism organization that is primarily funded by the U.S. State Department has been revealed to have played a role in the first impeachment of President-elect Donald Trump, the Substack Drop Site News, reported on Tuesday.
The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) is a consortium of news outlets that includes The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and The Times.
The organization cites on its website that the organization's work has contributed to over $10 billion in fines and seized assets; 430 official investigations; 251 civil society reactions; 820 governmental actions; 135 resignations; and terminations; 736 indictments, arrests, and sentences; and 125 corporate actions.
Yet one of the organization's cited takedowns was that of Trump. Its reports were used four times in the whistleblower complaint regarding Trump's 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump asked Zelenskyy to work with Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr to look into Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
Days before the call, Trump froze nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine. Trump has insisted he did nothing wrong and has denied that any request for help was tied to the aid freeze.
Drop Site reported based on its investigation of the organization that not only was it created with funding from the U.S. State Department but it remains a majority backer with 52% of the funds spent between 2014 and 2023 coming from the U.S. government. The organization released a statement saying that while detractors may think it's "a bad idea" to have government funding investigative journalism, the founders say "it's worth it."
"What is true is that OCCRP has accepted funding from USG. We understand that reasonable people may believe that's a bad idea, especially since it is not the norm in journalism in the United States (although government support of journalism is not uncommon in Europe and elsewhere).
"This was thoroughly discussed years ago when OCCRP was founded. The Board at that time — which included several of us who remain on the Board and whose personal reputations as journalists and executives are impeccable — decided that it was worth the tradeoff for the investigative journalism OCCRP could produce with this financial support," the organization's board said in a statement.
A high-level editor in Latin America who has worked with the organization told Drop Site that it's almost impossible not to touch the U.S. government's money in some way and said "almost every major philanthropic funder has partnered with them on some initiative."
"The truth is, we don't know how deep the influence goes in some newsrooms," the editor added.
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.