February 8, 2025 – Wikileaks drops bombshells about USAID and secret NGO “Internews Network”

In Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), Email/Dossier/Govt Corruption Investigations, Featured Timeline Entries by Katie Weddington

Revelations about USAID funding media outlets like Politico and the BBC made for compelling news this week, but those reports have now been dwarfed by a blockbuster revelation through Wikileaks.

USAID has paid nearly half-a-billion dollars to “Internews Network,” a secretive government-funded NGO that spreads propaganda and controls the media narrative across the globe.

(Read more: JD Rucker/Substack, 2/08/2025)  (Archive)

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 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)