Investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger says that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the CIA and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) helped orchestrate President Trump’s 2019 impeachment.

In an interview on Fox News, Shellenberger recounted how the impeachment case was brought about based on the word of a CIA analyst, left over from the Obama administration, who claimed to have heard from White House staff that Trump had pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, in a phone call, to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.

Shellenberger said that a memo written by that analyst, which served as the basis for Trump’s impeachment, relied heavily on a report done by the OCCRP organization, was funded by USAID using taxpayer dollars.

According to Shellenberger, the OCCRP, which was created as an extension of the State Department and USAID, received tens of millions of dollars in funding which were used to attempt regime change abroad and here at home.

Shellenberger described the OCCRP’s efforts, saying, “It was a kind of public facing part you know, regime change operation like CIA, but not covert, more overt — They were doing this sort of thing abroad, creating a predicate essentially for Trump’s impeachment.”

OCCRP has claimed to have journalistic independence, yet does not operate like a normal investigative journalism organization in that it’s goals appear to include interfering in foreign political matters, including elections, aimed at regime change according to Shellenberger.

If Shellenberger is connecting the dots correctly, it would help to explain why the Democrats are so desperate to protect USAID from further fiscal scrutiny and accountability at the hands of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team members.

If a major organ of the U.S. government was using taxpayer money to try to make the case that a sitting president should be impeached, that would be highly illegal and possibly treasonous.