OCCRP Under Attack

“OCCRP is largely funded by the United States. That’s why it serves American interests and why its reporting targets Washington’s enemies.”

Autocrats or corrupt officials exposed by OCCRP’s reporting find it easier to blame the United States than explaining away our latest findings. Recasting independent journalism as a state-sponsored attack is one way of blunting its impact.

The power of this reframing is that it invokes legitimate historical grievances against American influence or Western imperialism. This lends the trope emotional weight even when it’s factually baseless, helping it spread well beyond those with a direct interest in discrediting us.

It’s true that, until 2025, OCCRP received funding from the United States, including USAID, the U.S. government’s now-defunct foreign aid agency. As with any other grant, this money had no influence on the content of our journalism. Our USAID contracts guaranteed OCCRP “sole control” over editorial processes and ensured we could publish “without consideration to USG recommendations.” 

The proof is in our reporting, which has never shied away from topics that might strike a nerve in Washington or other Western capitals. OCCRP has exposed Pentagon arms deliveries to Syrian rebels, unearthed dubious U.S. government contractors, traced President Trump’s efforts to find dirt on his enemies, and published entire projects that are highly critical of U.S. drug and migration policy. We’ve covered corruption in Ukraine, revealed President Zelensky’s offshore holdings, and exposed Israeli spyware. 

More broadly, our reporting has made sharp critiques of the international financial system: We’ve investigated the role of private equity in the implosion of a U.S. hospital chain, covered London as an epicenter of money laundering, and exposed the oligarchs and drug lords that park their money in Swiss banks.

There’s no denying that our network frequently covers regimes that see themselves as America’s adversaries. It’s simply a fact of life that many of these countries are governed by autocrats and are extremely corrupt — natural terrain for investigative journalism.

The geography of our work also reflects the geography of our origins. OCCRP was born in the Balkans, beginning with newsrooms in the former Yugoslavia before expanding to Russia and Eastern Europe. Some of our oldest and most experienced members are in this region. Since Russia is both fantastically corrupt and an increasingly aggressive presence in this part of the world, it’s no surprise that the country features heavily in our reporting.

We’ve since expanded to the Middle East, North and South America, Africa, and the Pacific. As we’ve done for nearly two decades, we’ll keep exposing crime and corruption wherever we find it.

This misleading narrative is especially dangerous for our colleagues in authoritarian countries because it creates a pretext for state persecution on the grounds of national security.

To name just a few examples, the Russian government forced journalists who received funding from abroad to publicly declare themselves “foreign agents,” and then banned them outright. Azerbaijan has imprisoned many journalists for receiving foreign support, often under generic smuggling or illegal business charges. And in Hungary, Viktor Orban’s government has created a Sovereignty Protection Office to investigate and harass outlets with foreign donors.

These repressive campaigns are accompanied by recitation of the “U.S. agent” trope in state and pro-state media — a powerful way of isolating vulnerable journalists from their own societies. And this happens even in nominally democratic countries. In Serbia, pro-government tabloids often lead the charge in painting our local partner KRIK as a tool of Western powers. In India, the ruling party, the BJP, has accused the U.S. “deep state” of trying to destabilize the government after an OCCRP investigation into a conglomerate linked to the prime minister.

The same trope is also promoted by various figures in the English-speaking world. Anti-establishment journalist Glenn Greenwald has described OCCRP reporters as “shills” pushing “NATO propaganda,” and right-wing commentator Michael Shellenberger submitted testimony to the U.S. Congress claiming that OCCRP was “controlled” by USAID.

In 2024, a group of media outlets, including the U.S.-based Drop Site and the French MediaPart, published an article insinuating that OCCRP was acting in the interests of the American government and that its USAID funding had “strings attached.” The publication was promoted by influential, widely-followed X accounts like Wikileaks. (Our editor-in-chief issued a detailed response to that story; a separate investigation into the claims and counterclaims was published by journalist and academic Mark Lee Hunter.)

In these cases, the problem is not just co-signing a misleading narrative that justifies repression. Painting public media funding as inherently nefarious is also an attack on the notion of professional journalism as a public good.

“OCCRP has not disclosed its U.S. government funding or the strings attached to that funding, such as allowing officials to approve senior personnel.”

This trope is often invoked by anti-establishment media figures. Finding nothing of substance to criticize in OCCRP’s reporting, they seek to impugn our work by accusing us of violating journalistic ethics. Invoking the U.S. government as the ultimate enemy makes the argument more attractive to adherents of anti-establishment worldviews on both left and right.

This claim is straightforwardly false. OCCRP has always been transparent about its funding. As an American non-profit, we’re required to file public disclosures listing our revenue sources, expenses, and even executive salaries. We also include financial statements in annual reports published on our website. In both places, our U.S. funding has always been indicated down to the dollar.

The USAID grants did not come with any strings attached. The claim that the U.S. government had influence on OCCRP staffing stems from a misunderstanding of a common contracting procedure.

A small number of OCCRP’s grants have included language requiring agreement with USAID on replacing “key personnel.” In U.S. government parlance, this refers to a staff member who ensures that the donated money is appropriately spent — an administrative, not an editorial role. The contracts stated that, if we replaced that position, we had to find a replacement USAID agreed was equally qualified. This requirement applied to only a few grants, involved no editorial stakes, and has never been invoked.

An associated claim is that accepting U.S. government money made it impossible for OCCRP to report on the United States. This assertion often rests on a misinterpretation of an interview given by our publisher, Drew Sullivan. It is true that the terms of some grants do not allow OCCRP to use public money from a country to cover that same country. This simply means drawing on other funding for that reporting. All journalists working for OCCRP understand that they are free to report on whatever governments, policies, or corporate interests they want.

This trope gained new currency in December 2024 after a group of media outlets, including the U.S.-based Drop Site and the French MediaPart, published an investigation asserting that OCCRP had hidden the extent of its U.S. funding. (Our editor-in-chief issued a detailed response to that story; a separate investigation into the claims and counterclaims was published by journalist and academic Mark Lee Hunter.)

This material was picked up by state and pro-state media in a range of countries, from Malta to Serbia and Azerbaijan. Right-wing outlets on both sides of the Atlantic also reprinted the allegations, often substantially exaggerating them.

The goal of these assertions is to marginalize investigative journalists by impugning their ethics and independence. They reflect, at best, a gross misunderstanding of the realities of publicly-supported journalism. In an editorial alongside its publication, MediaPart wrote that OCCRP “placed itself in a situation of structural dependency upon the U.S. government.” The merits of that claim are easily judged: After the Trump administration gutted USAID in early 2025, OCCRP stopped receiving U.S. funding entirely. Despite having to lay off dozens of employees, our output has remained as frequent and geographically diverse as ever.

“OCCRP is funded by George Soros. That’s why they advance his agenda of promoting globalist values, encouraging foreign migration, and destabilizing sovereign governments.”

George Soros is a frequently-demonized figure; invoking his name ties journalists to a series of conspiracy theories with decades-long pedigrees. Framing independent reporting as a foreign plot is one way of discrediting its findings.

It’s true that OCCRP has received money from Open Society Foundations (OSF), the philanthropic organization founded by George Soros. We have never hidden this; OSF is publicly listed in our annual reports and on our supporters page.

OSF supports projects that, in their view, strengthen democratic governance and accountability. Their grants to OCCRP represent an investment in investigative journalism as part of a healthy civil society.

Such journalism, of course, is only valuable when it is truly independent. While we share OSF’s vision of a just and democratically-governed world, this doesn’t mean that we agree with them (or any donor) on everything, or that we would ever allow them to compromise our independence. No donor, no matter how large or small, has any influence on the content of OCCRP’s stories, or determines which topics we cover.

We assess potential stories along several lines: Do they uncover wrongdoing, break new ground, matter to citizens, and serve the public interest? The political views of our donors — which, in any case, are varied — play no role in this decision. Just like in a traditional newspaper, there is a strict “firewall” between staff who handle the donations and those who produce the journalism.

It is not unreasonable to ask whether accepting grants from certain donors can erode an outlet’s independence. We welcome the healthy ongoing debate about future funding models of non-profit journalism, and respect that different people may reach different conclusions.

But even a cursory glance over OCCRP’s decades-long record of reporting shows that we expose wrongdoing across the political spectrum, including Venezuela’s leftist Maduro regime; Putin’s autocracy in Russia; oligarchs, banks, and corporations; and the “apolitical” class of enablers who enable crime and corruption around the world.

You’d be hard-pressed to find an authoritarian leader who hasn’t invoked the specter of George Soros. Many OSF grantees work to safeguard human rights and empower citizens. Their initiatives are an inherent challenge to any autocratic regime, which wants above all to maintain its monopoly on political power.

The Russian government banned OSF in 2015, accusing Soros of “threatening Russia’s constitutional order.” State-controlled media routinely frame Soros-funded organizations, including independent journalists, as “foreign agents.” Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev has repeatedly accused Soros-funded organizations of trying to destabilize the country, a line used to justify crackdowns on dissidents and journalists. And after a series of 2013 protests against the erosion of freedoms in Turkey, President Erdogan accused “the famous Hungarian Jew Soros” of being behind them.

In other contexts, Soros is cast as a cultural menace seeking to impose foreign values. In Hungary, Viktor Orban has accused him of leading a “transnational empire” that seeks to dilute the country’s Christian identity.  Pro-regime media regularly follow with vicious campaigns of slander and denunciation, and OCCRP’s local members often find themselves in the crosshairs.

Anti-Soros rhetoric has also found fertile ground in the democratic world, particularly among right-wing populists. In the United States, Donald Trump and figures in his MAGA movement have frequently and falsely claimed that Soros funds migrant caravans, pays political protestors, and installs "radical" district attorneys to undermine the country.

There’s no question that any billionaire’s philanthropic activity deserves scrutiny, and Soros is certainly a man with political convictions. But demonizing independent journalists for accepting grants from a liberal donor is not accountability — it’s an attempt to silence scrutiny by attacking the source instead of engaging with the evidence. The “Soros puppet” trope does more than smear individual newsrooms. It normalizes conspiracy thinking, excuses barely veiled antisemitism, and provides a pretext for governments to persecute critical media outlets.

“OCCRP is part of the anti-Trump ‘deep state.’ Its reporters worked hand-in-glove with U.S. intelligence and foreign aid bureaucrats to manufacture a pretext for Donald Trump’s first impeachment. The proof is that a CIA whistleblower cited an OCCRP story in the impeachment complaint.”

Accusations of a “deep state” plot offer a simple, emotionally satisfying story to supporters of Donald Trump and other populist politicians. Instead of engaging with the substance of our reporting, they can claim that any uncomfortable findings were orchestrated by a hidden alliance of bureaucrats, spies, and foreign-funded journalists.

This framing also turns our work into a convenient weapon in broader political battles. The narrative becomes less about OCCRP and more about using us to attack long-standing domestic enemies — USAID, the civil service, intelligence agencies, or anyone perceived as part of a hostile “deep state.” Anger that might otherwise land on the politicians and operatives named in our stories is instead channeled toward institutions that the speaker wants to delegitimize.

The OCCRP story at the center of these claims was a routine piece of investigative reporting, produced in partnership with BuzzFeed News and published in July 2019. It began not as an effort to scrutinize explosive allegations being pushed by conservative commentators about Joe Biden’s role in Ukraine. When those claims fell apart under basic reporting, the story followed the evidence instead, tracing how Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was being fed distorted narratives by Ukrainian prosecutors and businessmen.

Months later, a CIA whistleblower cited the investigation in a footnote to a complaint that helped spark Trump’s first impeachment. That citation did not reflect any coordination with OCCRP or its reporters. As our lead reporter on the story has explained, he had no contact with the whistleblower, learned of the citation only after it became public, and assumes the official found the piece the same way everyone else did: by reading it online. The story made only a modest splash when it was published, and even now none of its critics dispute its factual accuracy.

The “deep state” narrative leans heavily on the fact that OCCRP has received grants from USAID. But like all OCCRP donors, USAID is obligated to stay out of editorial work and has no say over which stories are pursued, how they are reported, or what they conclude. In reality, then, there is no hidden operation — a journalist in Ukraine dug into a politically sensitive topic, followed the evidence, and published a story.

This trope has been pushed largely by U.S.-based commentators and political actors on the populist right. In early 2025, a former State Department official, Mike Benz, claimed that USAID had paid “$20 million to hit piece journalists” at OCCRP to help impeach Trump. His post was amplified by Elon Musk and then woven into a longer “deep state” narrative by figures such as Michael Shellenberger, who called the reporting “highly illegal and even treasonous.”

None of these critics, or the right-wing media outlets that amplified their claims, have identified a single factual error in the Giuliani story. Instead, they attack its existence, portraying ordinary investigative work as if it were a covert intelligence operation. In practice, they are less interested in OCCRP itself than in using the story as ammunition against domestic targets they already oppose.

The consequences extend well beyond one newsroom. When influential figures, including prominent voices in the MAGA movement, describe investigative reporting as treason, they normalize the idea that journalism is illegitimate if it uncovers politically inconvenient facts. Those claims ricochet across social networks, misleading thousands of people within hours.

They are then laundered into political respectability: Shellenberger has repeated his assertions in Congressional testimony, giving lawmakers a distorted account of basic facts. This rhetoric provides cover for efforts to defund public-interest institutions and erode free speech. It is also eagerly adopted by authoritarian governments, which have long accused independent media of being tools of foreign intelligence or agents of regime change.

“EU agencies are secretly paying OCCRP, turning this network of journalists into agents of Brussels. The funding is a payoff for manipulating European elections and promoting globalist narratives, with the goal of sidelining parties that defend national sovereignty against the EU mainstream.”

The trope plugs easily into well-worn narratives. For populist movements across the continent, the threat of “unelected Eurocrats” trying to gain control over sovereign countries has long been a winning message. Casting OCCRP’s work as just another instrument of that plot is a way of redirecting attention from our journalistic findings and slotting them into a familiar story about betrayal by distant elites.

That framing travels easily between European and U.S. audiences, and frequent references to Donald Trump’s battle against George Soros and the “deep state” reflect the growing alliance between populist forces on both sides of the Atlantic.

The European Union has no ability to influence OCCRP’s work. EU rules for journalism support require grant recipients to uphold editorial independence, while OCCRP’s policies bar donors from shaping or vetoing specific investigations.

Any assertions otherwise are transparently false. The weakness of this trope is easily seen in its latest deployment, triggered in the summer of 2025 by a far-right politician and republished by sympathetic media across Europe.

The affair began after Petr Bystron, a member of the European Parliament from Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, submitted two official questions demanding to know whether the European Commission had supported OCCRP, which he described as a “globalist propaganda network.” The Commission responded that, since 2020, OCCRP had received €604,269 in EU funds for a project that provides tools and training for investigative journalism.

Bystron trumpeted this answer as “the biggest media scandal in post-war history,” alleging that OCCRP had published “negative information about EU-critical politicians, unchecked and completely uncritically.” His framing was then picked up by a range of right-wing, alternative, and Euroskeptic outlets, who aired his arguments with little scrutiny, often implying or directly asserting that the funding was a reward for manipulating the 2024 European elections.

None of these publications, nor Bystron himself, were able to tie the grant to any specific piece of OCCRP output. They could not do so: The grant — which in fact had been made public prior to Bystron’s questions — pays for capacity-building, not for editorial campaigns on specific topics.

The “election manipulation” allegation rests on a series of articles that had nothing to do with OCCRP. The stories, published in the spring of 2024 by several Central European outlets, exposed a pro-Russian influence operation that had allegedly funneled covert payments to right-wing European politicians, including Bystron. The affair was first reported by the Czech Deník N, and additional stories were then published by mainstream outlets across the continent like Der Spiegel, Le Monde, and Politico Europe. None are members of the OCCRP network, though some have partnered with OCCRP on previous projects.

It is not unreasonable to ask whether accepting government grants can erode an outlet’s independence. This is a live debate in the journalistic community, and reasonable people may disagree. As concerns OCCRP, the allegation that EU funding had curtailed critical reporting runs into a basic evidentiary problem: Our track record includes major projects that expose corruption and crime in EU member states, Western banks and companies, and EU programs.

The Azerbaijani Laundromat exposed a $2.9 billion slush fund moving through European shell companies and banks, including Denmark’s largest, and showed how it was used to pay off influential figures in European institutions. During the coronavirus pandemic, we collected data about over €20 billion in contracts and tenders across Europe, finding that many of the largest deals were direct awards with little competition and documenting weak transparency in Commission-run procurement. And in the Bad Practice project, we focused on problems with an EU-level cooperation tool whose failures allow doctors who have lost their licenses to practice in other countries.

If OCCRP were simply a tool for Brussels bureaucrats to consolidate control, it would make little sense to repeatedly publish work that embarrasses EU governments, European corporate champions, and Western enablers alongside everyone else.

The latest round of this trope was triggered by Petr Bystron, a member of the European Parliament from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party who is under investigation in Germany on suspicion of taking cash and cryptocurrency from the operator of the pro-Russian website Voice of Europe. 

His parliamentary immunity has been lifted multiple times: first by the Bundestag in 2024, to allow searches in a bribery and money-laundering probe tied to Voice of Europe, and then twice by the European Parliament in 2025, in separate cases involving both the alleged bribery scheme and his dissemination of Nazi imagery online. Bystron denies all wrongdoing, calling the proceedings a politically motivated “defamation campaign,” and has responded by attacking OCCRP and other independent outlets as tools of foreign powers.

In Europe, his allegations have been amplified by Hungarian outlets aligned with the Orban government, such as Magyar Nemzet and Mandiner, and Euroskeptic and anti-establishment outlets in various countries — Hlavné Správy (Slovakia), Parlamentní Listy (Czechia), Exxpress (Austria), the Brussels Signal (Belgium), NachDenkSeiten (Germany), L’Opinione (Italy), and others — many of which have a record of amplifying pro-Kremlin narratives.

The European story has also been picked up in the United States, where far-right and conspiratorial platforms like The Gateway Pundit and Infowars have grafted it onto narratives about Donald Trump’s battle against George Soros and the “deep state.”

These publications mislead audiences about how EU media support really works and undermine trust in independent investigative journalism precisely in the areas where oversight is most needed. They can also serve as a pretext for state action. In Hungary, the government’s Sovereignty Protection Office has published a report portraying OCCRP as an “international political pressure network” and as “new mercenaries of the European Commission,” referring specifically to the NEXT-IJ grant.

The same document singles out OCCRP’s Hungarian partners as part of a transatlantic structure that allegedly threatens the country’s sovereignty. These outlets have been individually questioned, and legislation under consideration in parliament threatens to give the Sovereignty Protection Office the power to officially designate them as threats.

“OCCRP is trying to overthrow sovereign governments under the cover of anti-corruption reporting. Its stories are part of a ‘hybrid war’ designed to remove leaders who don’t toe a pro-Western line.”

This trope plays directly on fears of chaos and outside interference. Many societies have recent experience of mass protests, coups, or civil conflict. Rulers worried about losing power can tap into those anxieties by claiming that any critical reporting is just the first step in a foreign-backed plot to topple them and destroy the nation.

Framing journalism as a tool for “color revolutions” is an instrument of control. When corruption revelations about specific officials are portrayed as an attack on the nation, journalists and critics can be branded as traitors — and then treated as such.

OCCRP has no mandate or desire to “trigger revolutions” or “bring down regimes.” We are journalists: We do not organize protests, coordinate with political parties, or tell citizens whom to vote for. Our work begins and ends with gathering verifiable facts, testing them against documentation and on-the-record sources, and publishing what we can prove. What happens afterward is decided by courts, parliaments, and voters.

It is true that our investigations have sometimes had major political consequences. When powerful people are shown, with documents and testimony, to have abused their office or looted public funds, people often respond. Cabinets are reshuffled, ministers resign, laws are tightened, and sometimes governments fall. That is exactly how political accountability is supposed to work.

Critics of OCCRP often seize on this impact and strip it of context, taking public remarks about the real-world impact of investigative reporting and twisting them into a confession of regime-change intent. In reality, there is a clear line between exposing facts and advocating for a particular political outcome. OCCRP does not endorse parties or candidates, does not campaign for or against specific governments, and does not engage in activism.

The Global Anti-Corruption Consortium (GACC) is a joint project led by OCCRP and Transparency International to ensure that independently produced reporting on corruption can, where appropriate, be taken up by activists who decide for themselves whether to press for sanctions, criminal investigations, or policy reforms. None of this turns OCCRP into an activist or “regime change” organization: our role in GACC is to investigate and publish verifiable facts, while decisions about advocacy and legal follow-up are made by separate actors.

In short, the “color revolution” framing reverses cause and effect. OCCRP does not destabilize countries. Corruption, impunity, and abuse of power do. Honest reporting on those problems may inspire public debate and political change. But that’s a feature of accountable government, not evidence of a conspiracy.

Versions of this trope appear wherever powerful actors feel threatened by independent investigations. In Russia, senior officials have spent years warning that foreign-funded NGOs and journalists are the spearhead of Western-backed “color revolutions.” Kremlin rhetoric about “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations” is routinely used to justify restrictive laws against NGOs and media that receive international support, including OCCRP network members and partners.

In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s government has pushed new “sovereignty protection” measures and threatened sanctions against media and NGOs with foreign funding, framing them as vehicles for outside interference. OCCRP’s Hungarian partners are routinely described in pro-government media as part of a foreign network intent on weakening national sovereignty — a softer, bureaucratic way of saying they are agents of “color revolution.”

These narratives are amplified by right-wing and alternative outlets across Europe and in the United States. Commentators and politicians hostile to OCCRP seize on the real-world impact of our work, including the fact that some of our stories have contributed to ministers resigning or governments losing power, and recast it as proof of a coordinated regime-change project. This becomes part of a broader tale about “globalist” networks engineering uprisings and toppling leaders.

This trope shifts journalism out of the realm of public debate and into the realm of national security. If investigative reporting can be dismissed as a plot to overthrow regimes, governments have a ready-made excuse to surveil, harass, and prosecute reporters and their sources as threats to the state. Laws aimed at “foreign agents,” “sovereignty protection,” or “extremism” are then sold to the public as necessary defenses. The result is a more dangerous environment for journalists, fewer checks on corruption, and a public that sees independent reporting only as a weapon wielded by cynical actors.