This is way bigger than the Politico scandal.
U.S. taxpayers have been funding an obscure news agency called Internews Network for years.
Internews is funded heavily by the U.S. government, primarily through USAID. There are 467 grants for Internews totaling a whopping $476.4 MILLION on the USASpending.gov website.
These massive figures track with Internews' Form 990s, where it discloses tens of millions of dollars in government grants every year.
What is Internews? The organization claims to be an "international nonprofit" that supports "independent media" in emerging democracies and uses media as a tool to reduce conflict.
A government supporting "independent media" is obviously a contradiction in terms so something else must be going on here.
The National Endowment for Democracy, founded in 1983 by Ronald Reagan to promote "democracy" worldwide, but since hijacked by globalists and leftists, has also given significantly to Internews through its Center for International Media.
NED was briefly defunded in 1993 by Republicans, but currently its budget is estimated to be a massive $330 million a year. Trump had proposed slashing NED's funding in 2018.
Internews is listed as a recipient of NED's contributions. For example, the NED's media initiatives through CIMA was at least $18.7 million in 2015 and Internews was one of the listed recipients.
NED has been strongly associated with engineering "colored revolutions" around the globe, and by extension, so is Internews. They are both involved in nearly ever hotspot on the planet: Venezuela, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Cambodia, Afghanistan... the list goes on and on.
Who used to sit on the Board of Directors for National Endowment for Democracy? None other than Victoria Nuland, who was the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2021 to 2024.
Who ran USAID from 2021 to 2025, which funded Internews? Samantha Power.
If you look at Internews Agency's board you realize these are not your average "journalists."
Jeanne Bourgault has been leading Internews as President and CEO since 2019, according to its official website. She joined the organization in 2001 and has been instrumental in expanding its programs to over 100 countries, focusing on supporting local media and ensuring access to "trustworthy information." Before her tenure at Internews, Bourgault worked with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), including a three-year assignment at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
Meera Selva currently serves as the Chief Executive for Europe at Internews. She previously directed the Journalist Fellowship Program at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, again from the website.
Jodie Ginsberg served as the Chief Executive of Internews Europe from 2019 until 2022. Prior to this role, she was the CEO of Index on Censorship, a London-based freedom of expression organization. Ginsberg began her career as a journalist with Reuters, the website notes.
Get the picture?
This is, of course, nothing new. The U.S. government’s funding of media operations and so-called journalists across the world has a long history.
During the mid-’70s, in the aftermath of Watergate, two congressional investigations – the Church and Pike committees, after Sen. Frank Church and Rep. Otis Pike – uncovered covert U.S. government operations in foreign countries.
They confirmed that that the CIA funded journalists (both foreign and American) and the U.S. government was subsidizing foreign print media, radio and television outlets – something the Soviets were also doing.
The CIA also ran Project Mockingbird, a covert operation to influence and manipulate journalists and to disseminate propaganda and control public perception.
Declassified documents and investigative reports suggest that the CIA has long engaged in media manipulation, particularly during the Cold War era.
As former CIA Director William Colby once put it, "The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
The CIA appears to have reorganized after having been exposed by the Church Committee in 1975. Those media manipulation operations seem to have been redirected through the State Department and USAID.
It is high time for another "Church Committee" to expose the U.S. government's attack on free speech and independent media in the United States and throughout the world.
