The George Soros and US State Department-funded OCCRP (Organized Crime and Reporting Project) are once again biting at conservative Americans supporting Donald Trump’s election campaign. If you’ve never heard of the OCCRP before, you’re in for a lesson on how hit-piece information operations affect your own life and livelihood.
This official-sounding group claims independence but with State Department funding, their effort has to be in line with US State Department strategic communications goals. And they have the US State Department logo on their website for their efforts.
This week’s victim, Hollywood documentary producer and Trump supporter Igor Lopatonok is being siphoned through the OCCRP’s Russian Asset Tracker just like Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and Paul Manafort were.
Is the US State Department supposed to protect American citizens or pay for George Soros’s persecution of them? Or better yet, partner with them. R
What makes Soros work groups like the OCCRP dangerous is the backing and networking the Soros and State Department ties give them. Because of Soros, their reports are carried mainstream to fit the narrative building of the day and ruin the reputations, work, and ability to raise funds for NGOs, all based on political and social bias, not facts or evidence.
“A study by the Media Research Center Business links George Soros to influential media figures in the U. S. and abroad and is a prime example of this, revealing connections with 54 prominent individuals as highlighted by authors Joseph Vazquez and Dan Schneider.”A study by the Media Research Center Business links George Soros to influential media figures in the U. S. and abroad and is a prime example of this, revealing connections with 54 prominent individuals as highlighted by authors Joseph Vazquez and Dan Schneider.
According to media reports, Soros allegedly spent hundreds of millions of U. S. dollars on bribes to establish his own “network of media ties” to manipulate public opinion.”
The study revealed that between 2016 and 2020, Soros donated at least $131 million to influence 253 media groups, including the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the Aspen Institute, The Marshall Project, and ProPublica. Vazquez and Schneider stated, “This network of media ties allows Soros to hold significant influence over the stories covered by the media, how they cover those stories, and the stories they choose not to cover.”
At the same time, Soros-funded groups are in court arguing free speech is not protected…well, not your freedom of speech at any rate. If you argue against his narrative, it may soon be a crime.
At the opposite end of the pole, the OCCRP started a legal fund for their work group because of the enormous number of lawsuits (46 and counting) against them for their style of “reportage.”
This allows Soros’s allies to keep the group viable. In a recent case brought against them in Maryland by an NGO, the OCCRP, caught in lies by their communications resorted to saying the article was protected as free speech. It was opinion.
This is a far cry from their article which espoused “the facts.” Even though they were presented with evidence-based facts, it didn’t fit the narrative they already built.
This makes the work easier for editor Mathew Doig who built his career on “scandal of the week” journalism based on innuendo, supposition, and a willingness to ignore the facts when they bit him on the toe. This seems to follow in line with OCCRP chief editor, Miranda Patrucic’s editorial style.
Remember the anonymous CIA official’s complaint alleging President Donald Trump of exploiting his presidential authority to seek foreign intervention in the 2020 election?
“The whistleblower’s complaint references a report from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, which has ties to billionaire George Soros.
It is very convenient for the OCCRP that a major funder, i.e., the US State Department which was building narratives, working against President Donald Trump and his associates, was there to clarify their reporting so it could be used in Pelosi’s attempt to unseat then-President Trump.
The complaint’s Footnote 4 cites a report from OCCRP claiming that Mr. Giuliani’s associates visited Kyiv in May 2019, meeting with Ukrainian officials.
Footnote 9 mentions AG Barr starting a probe into Russia investigation origins. Giuliani’s associates reportedly collaborated with Ukrainian officials for this inquiry per the OCCRP report.
Footnote 10 points to sources confirming Giuliani’s meetings with Lutsenko and Shokin. Again, referencing the OCCRP report.
Footnote 11 reads: “I do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced above.”
The OCCRP played a critical role in the House impeachment hearings. Even though the information was false, it provided Pelosi and Schiff grounds to try Donald Trump in media on opinion instead of evidence.
The OCCRP report, which is repeatedly referenced, is a joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News. It is based on interviews, court records, and business records in the United States and Ukraine.”
BuzzFeed also infamously first published the full anti-Trump Steele dossier, which alleged unsubstantiated collusion between Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia.
The dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee and was produced by the Fusion GPS opposition research firm. The OCCRP supports the dossier findings.
The OCCRP and BuzzFeed “joint investigation” led to both organizations publishing similar lengthy pieces on July 22. The articles claimed that Giuliani was trying to leverage connections to persuade Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political rivals.
However, the whistleblower’s document only mentions the relatively obscure OCCRP and does not mention BuzzFeed, which has faced criticism for its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.
The Heritage Foundation-The OCCRP’s financial statements—publicly available on its website, here, here, and here—verify (1) the degree to which this outlet is funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations, and (2) that the State Department is also a funder.
And now, this group bearing the imprimatur of the U.S. government—literally, on its website—is being used to target Republicans in Congress and conservative think tanks like The Heritage Foundation who have dared to question the nexus between Soros and the U.S. government.
The OCCRP is a partner with the State Department’s USAGM RFE/RL. This solidifies the group as a strategic communications Info ops outlet for the Secretary of State.
Another property of the State Department’s USAGM is the Interpreter Mag which houses Propornot on their servers. Propornot kicked off the season of the fact checker and brought the opening round of social media and media bans in the US in November 2016. The original list was a who’s who of progressive outlets that didn’t support Hillary Clinton during the election.
On January 1, 2016, the Interpreter and Propornot became a special project of RFE/RL and under the oversight of the BBG (USAGM). The Secretary of State had a seat on the board of the BBG until December 2016.
Paul Manafort’s case is another example. The OCCRP once again refused to vet sources loyal to Soros, the State Department, and the DNC to back this story. If they had, they’d have found out Serhiy Leshchenko’s motivation to publish the “black ledger” was to destroy candidate Trump’s election prospects and throw the election.
According to the Financial Times, “the prospect of Mr. Trump, who has praised Ukraine’s arch-enemy Vladimir Putin, becoming leader of the country’s biggest ally has spurred not just Mr. Leshchenko but Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a US election.”
and
According to one version, the director of NABU Artem Sytnik handed him the book, as he was in collusion with representatives of the Democratic Party. By coincidence, almost immediately after the publication of the “black bookkeeping”, the former people’s deputy was able to buy luxury housing in the center of Kiev worth 300 thousand dollars.
So, where did Leshchenko get the “black book” from which he toppled Paul Manafort?
Recovery of the Secret Ledger
“Mustafa Nayyem (originator of the Euro-Maidan coup in 2014) stated that he was with members of the Right Sector (because he was a member) when they entered Viktor Pshonka’s luxurious mansion. Right Sector recovered numerous GPU files from Pshonka’s mansion after members of the Yanukovych government fled into exile in Russia.
These files included the secret bookkeeping of Viktor Yanukovych and the Party of Regions’ Black Ledger or Barn Book. It implicated numerous individuals in improper payments from pro-Kremlin and pro-Vladimir Putin sources, including Paul Manafort. The book contained handwritten records of 22 payments to Manafort over five years.”
The ledger itself was fabricated by Right Sector groups Ukraine Cyber Alliance and Cyber Hunta who worked Ukraine’s information operations under Strategic Communications Labs supervision.
Nayyem and Serhiy Leshchenko worked together at Ukrainska Pravda and were close friends. The relationship to the Right Sector group is never mentioned in the media because the Right Sector has murdered thousands of Ukrainians since 2014.
The OCCRP relies on murderers and ultra-nationalists for its stellar reporting. But, hey, as long as it works for Democrats and George Soros, what could be wrong with it?
Adani Group and the OCCRP
With this headline, major news around the world jumped into the smear of Adani Group which is one of India’s largest employers. The company came under investigation for fraud because of the report and that’s where it gets interesting.
The attack came ahead of Indian elections and a merger Adani was working on. The OCCRP picked up and focused on the story in mid-summer through the rest of the year with headlines leading to a new round of investigations for financial misconduct.
Headlines around the world picked up on the OCCRP stories. The story itself isn’t shoddy journalism. It can’t be anything except an attack on Adani Group. The headlines, the number of articles asserting “facts and evidence”, and the length they went to with enough unnamed sources to make even Seymour Hersh wince, make it clear the OCCRP and their partners were on a mission that had nothing to do with investigative journalism.
According to the OCCRP, “It became one of the largest economic scandals in the history of modern India: The Adani Group, a massive conglomerate with interests in everything from airports to television stations, was accused of brazen stock manipulation.
The allegation, leveled this January by a New York-based short seller, caused Adani stock to plummet, triggered protests, and prompted an investigation by India’s Supreme Court.
But the expert committee convened by the court was unable to get to the bottom of the scandal, which has serious political implications because of the group’s widely perceived closeness to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and its central role in his plan for developing the country.”
The OCCRP pushed the story into media paving the way for a second investigation for fraud against the Adani Group and destroying the company.
“The US government recently stated that the allegations of corporate fraud made by short-seller Hindenburg Research against billionaire and Adani Group Chairman Gautam Adani were deemed irrelevant and did not influence the US decision to grant up to $553 million for a Sri Lankan terminal, according to a senior US official.
A report by Bloomberg News highlighted that the allegations from US-based Hindenburg Research were a focal point during the due diligence investigation conducted by the International Development Finance Corp., or DFC, on the conglomerate.
The report stated that DFC was satisfied that the accusations in the short-seller’s report, which claimed that Adani was perpetrating “the largest con in corporate history,” did not apply to Adani Ports Special Economic Zone Ltd., the subsidiary leading the Sri Lankan project.”
The US government is justifying a story by calling it a report and adjusting foreign policy before a case is made to take it to court based on suppositions by State Department partner groups.
The Adani Group also questioned the timing of the Hindenburg Research report, stating that “the report’s publication timing clearly reveals a deliberate, malicious intent to tarnish the Adani Group’s reputation with the primary goal of harming the upcoming Follow-on Public Offering from Adani Enterprises, the largest FPO ever in India.”
According to Reuters, “the Adani group’s listed companies lost more than $100 billion in market value earlier this year after U.S.-based Hindenburg Research raised several governance concerns in January and suggested the group had made improper use of tax havens.”
One year and $150 billion dollars in losses later, Adani Group was validated in court which ended the investigation against them.
NEW DELHI, Jan 3 (Reuters) – India’s Supreme Court on Wednesday said the Adani Group does not need to face more investigations beyond the current scrutiny of the market regulator, a major relief for the conglomerate hit hard by a U.S. short-seller’s allegations of wrongdoing.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has been probing the Adani group, led by billionaire Gautam Adani, after Hindenburg Research in January 2023 alleged improper use of tax havens and stock manipulation by the group.
The Supreme Court, which was ruling on cases brought by public interest litigants seeking a special investigation team to probe the matter, said “the facts of this case do not warrant” such a change, even though the court had the powers to transfer the investigation.
If this was the biggest fraud and manipulation case in corporate history, it would warrant a special investigations team. It’s the facts brought by the OCCRP and Hindenburg that don’t warrant that kind of attention.
Adani lost over $150 billion over this so far with no charges filed. I think, I suppose, I believe, we believe, someone said, some told someone who told us, and we guess, are enough in today’s woke world to do this.
So, who are these people?
OCCRP editor Mathew Doig has a long history in publications. In an article exposing his methodology, Reporters Exposed had this to say-
MATT DOIG BLAMED FOR NEWSDAY’S CRASH AND IMMINENT DEMISE
“Insiders at Cablevision privately blame Investigations Editor Matthew Doig for the decline of the paper. Doig joined the Long Island paper in May of 2012 and the wheels came off the publication almost immediately. One source, a top Cablevision executive, said that Matt probably had good intentions, but his execution has been devastating to the paper. He overestimated the public’s dislike for law enforcement and quite frankly underestimated the intellect of the readers.
Doig’s team, led by Tanya Lopez, Will Van Sant, Gus Garcia Roberts, and the self-proclaimed “Gotcha Reporter,” Sandra Peddie, collectively threw out their journalistic ethics and created a series of one-sided and openly biased slam pieces. The result was a historic free fall in circulation, readership, and most importantly for the struggling daily, ad and sales revenues. Cablevision has reported losses of more than $100 million per year since Matt Doig’s hiring.
A “scandal-a-week” means that government agencies such as the U.S. Attorney, NY Attorney General, and the Nassau and Suffolk Counties need to at least look at Newsday’s targeted stories. Even Doig’s harshest critics won’t suggest that corrupt politicians, unscrupulous business practices and even rouge law enforcement officials shouldn’t be taken to task. The issue at hand is that Doig’s methods call for extreme exaggeration and puffery in order to justify his extraordinary spending and to give the illusion of a crime being committed without actually saying it (that would be libel.)”
The OCCRP, thanks to its Soros and State connections, gets its reports widely published and partners with media groups like the Guardian, Buzzfeed, Internews, Der Spiegel, etc. without regard to how factual their findings are.
The “scandal of the week” tempo Doig likes keeps the stories lively and the facts bare on stories that affect you.
OCCRP editor-in-chief Miranda Patrucic is even worse. During what was an obvious hit interview with the “NAZARBAYEV FUND” PRIVATE FUND where she tried to skew questions so the answers would fit the OCCRP narrative that the fund is a corrupt vehicle to launder the wealth of Kazakhstan’s former President when he has no access to the funding and cannot gain access to its funding.
Despite being shown proof through evidence and law repeatedly, Patrucic ignored the facts and published her narrative anyway. For a fund set up solely to support two universities, this could be devastating for their reputation as well as donor base.
“According to the OCCRP, they recently received funding for Reporter’s Shield, a project years in the making to provide protection for investigative reporting and defend news outlets against SLAPP lawsuits, or Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation — civil claims intended to silence criticism, punish the news outlet and cost them time and money. Sullivan said the OCCRP is currently fighting more than 40 SLAPP lawsuits.”
Much like other woke platforms in the 2020’s, OCCRP doesn’t believe willfully lying about a “scandal of the week” victim should have consequences.
If their journalism was hard-hitting and factual, why is it, according to the Maryland court documents listed above, they devolved their argument down to “opinion?”
“Four media outlets in the UK and the US are facing libel claims after publishing investigative reports into allegations about the assets of a fund named after the former Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev.”Four media outlets in the UK and the US are facing libel claims after publishing investigative reports into allegations about the assets of a fund named after the former Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), openDemocracy, and the Telegraph received several “pre-action” letters between May and August claiming their reporting was inaccurate and caused financial losses to a UK-registered company.
The claim against TBIJ, openDemocracy, and the Telegraph has been brought on behalf of Jusan Technologies, a company registered at Companies House in the UK, and the Nazarbayev Fund Private Fund. The fund is also suing the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) in the US, with a claim for compensatory damages of more than $75,000 (£68,000) and punitive damages.
The articles complained of having been reporting on allegations of financial links between Jusan, the Nazarbayev fund, and Nazarbayev and his family. Lawyers for Jusan and the fund said the allegations were incorrect and defamatory.”
In what appears to be their latest smear piece, Patrucic, Doig and company are once again relying on speculation, hearsay, and false narratives against documentary producer Igor Lopatonok for films such as Ukraine on Fire and Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, both with Hollywood legend, Oliver Stone.
Their goal seems to be resurrecting the Trump-Russia scandal that became a joke for lack of proof during the 2024 election season by going after influential Trump 2024 supporters.
Their sources, once again, fall under the category of disgruntled former employee, and a Soros activist who wants to overthrow the Kazakhstan government.
In August 2022, one of their sources, Mikhail Kozachkov, a journalist from Kazakhstan, doxed producer Igor Lopatonok online. This is illegal in Kazakhstan.
Kozachkov was arrested by police in late 2022 for alleged links to organized crime. According to Kazakh sources, he wrote smear campaigns on the victims of hostile takeovers by a criminal gang and paid $111,000 for his effort.
This makes sense against the backdrop of doxing movie producers and working with the OCCRP in any context. Kozachkov is also under investigation for acquiring and disseminating state secrets.
Could this be a reliable source or witness for any journalist? That’s the question.
The second source for the OCCRP is a disgruntled employee of Global 3 Pictures, the production company headed by Igor Lopatonok.
Vadim Gasanov started directing documentaries in the late 2000s. Gasanov is a Russian screenwriter/director who started working for Global 3 Pictures in 2019 at the end of the project “Revealing Ukraine.”
He wasn’t allowed on the set during Kremlin interviews for security reasons. Notably, he served 13 years of a 20-year sentence for murder and got an early release.
According to Global 3 Picture sources, emotionally, he was all over the road. He was happy for the work, but angry he couldn’t take the spotlight at the film premiere.
On a second project, “Qazaq: History of the Golden Man”, Vadim was invited to press conferences and interviews but was angry about not being on stage when the film won awards, and again, taking the spotlight.
Having seen the questions Miranda Patrucic put together for her interview with Igor Lopatonok, she is once again trying to resurrect her story of Nursultan Nazarbayev raiding the Nazarbayev Fund Private Fund for his personal use, which Patrucic and her OCCRP attorneys backed out on when the Fund took them to court.
This isn’t journalism. These are hit-for-hire information ops pieces designed to ruin the victims so they can no longer function or work in their field.
The George Soros and US State Department media effort and machine need to be shut down. Just the idea Soros minions get US tax dollars to attack Americans should gall you.
The fact the Obama-Clinton-Biden State Department is still giving its stamp of approval to attacks on your freedom and taking your livelihood away should enrage you.
