Michael Shellenberger’s Latest Viral Conspiracy Theory Is As Idiotic As It Is Irresponsible

It’s almost too dumb to explain, but I’ll try

Regular readers of this newsletter will know that I have recently been quite critical of Michael Shellenberger, the founding editor of the popular Substack-hosted publication Public, for publishing extremely inflammatory false and unproven claims, and for reacting in a less-than-encouraging manner after I asked him fairly basic questions about his reporting process.

For example, shortly before the election I wrote about how Shellenberger had declared that not only had NBC breached FCC regulations by having Kamala Harris briefly appear on Saturday Night Live, but that it had done so so severely that the entire network should be yanked off the air entirely — all despite a complete lack of clarity over whether NBC had even violated any rules. Along the way, he posited an insanely unlikely conspiracy theory involving NBC employees attempting an emergency intervention in the (noncompetitive) Virginia Senate gubernatorial race by rushing Tim Kaine up to New York City to appear on the show as well. Okay.

Almost immediately after writing about that incident, I was tipped off to another one. It turned out that in an earlier article he had co-authored with his frequent collaborator, Alex Gutentag, Shellenberger had made the sort of mistake you can only really make if you have no fact-checking standards whatsoever. As I put it in my headline, he had “Mixed Up Two Guys With Sorta Similar Names And Falsely Told His Readers — And Congress — One Of Them Might Be A Spy As A Result.” Specifically, Shellenberger and Gutentag “confused Imran Ahmed, the founder of [the Center for Countering Digital Hate], with Imran Ahmad Khan, a disgraced former Conservative MP who was convicted of sexually assaulting a minor.” Based on the striking similarity between their own language and language from the Wikipedia page for Khan, it appears Shellenberger and Gutentag not only cribbed from Wikipedia but cribbed from the wrong page. (I found this to be a useful window into their reporting process.)

Shellenberger has carved out a niche as one of the most successful “heterodox” thinkers speaking truth to the all-powerful liberal establishment. His project, as he presents it, is to investigate the institutions that rule our lives behind the scenes — the NGOs, politicians, and intelligence organizations that enjoy unearned and entrenched power at the expense of the average American. And the more he investigates, the more truly jarring miscarriages of justice he finds, which only stokes the market for his own very successful brand.

To his credit, Shellenberger has been open about the role resentment has played in his shift away from the left and toward what can only be described as staunchly pro–Donald Trump politics, noting in a celebratory article he and Gutentag posted shortly after the election that he (alongside others) felt “stigmatized and ostracized” by a decade of woke excess.

But resentment and journalism are not natural allies. Being a good journalist means, to the extent possible, creating some emotional distance between yourself and the subject you’re covering — especially if it’s a subject that elicits a strong reaction in you.

I don’t want to psychoanalyze Shellenberger. I can’t say for sure that the jarringly low quality and deeply unfair nature of his recent output can be explained by the resentment he feels toward “liberal elites,” “the deep state,” and so on. Another possibility is that he is audience-captured, meaning he recognizes — even if only subconsciously — that publishing conspiratorial stories that impugn Donald Trump’s enemies satisfies his existing audience and brings in new paid subscribers. And of course it can be a combination of these factors: We’re all human, and we’re generally biased in favor of believing claims about the world that are socially or politically or professionally helpful. (I’m certainly not exempt.)

Whatever’s going on, Shellenberger is now completely off the rails. One remarkable example occurred last month — a truly laughable conspiracy theory that deserves unpacking, if only to further expose how untrustworthy Shellenberger and his publication have become, and how little he cares about the potential that his irresponsible work could harm innocent people, including other journalists.

***

Back in 2019, President Trump was impeached on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Here were the charges, as laid out in the Articles of Impeachment:

Using the powers of his high office, President Trump solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States Presidential election. He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that included soliciting the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage. President Trump also sought to pressure the Government of Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning official United States Government acts of significant value to Ukraine on its public announcement of the investigations. President Trump engaged in this scheme or course of conduct for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit. In so doing, President Trump used the powers of the Presidency in a manner that compromised the national security of the United States and undermined the integrity of the United States democratic process. He thus ignored and injured the interests of the Nation.

. . .

The House of Representatives has engaged in an impeachment inquiry focused on President Trump’s corrupt solicitation of the Government of Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 United States Presidential election. As part of this impeachment inquiry, the Committees undertaking the investigation served subpoenas seeking documents and testimony deemed vital to the inquiry from various Executive Branch agencies and offices, and current and former officials.

In response, without lawful cause or excuse, President Trump directed Executive Branch agencies, offices, and officials not to comply with those subpoenas. President Trump thus interposed the powers of the Presidency against the lawful subpoenas of the House of Representatives, and assumed to himself functions and judgments necessary to the exercise of the “sole Power of Impeachment” vested by the Constitution in the House of Representatives

The Articles passed the House, where they required only a majority vote, but to no one’s surprise, failed to garner the two-thirds vote required in the Senate to actually remove Trump from office.

Trump survived this impeachment attempt, as well as the post-January-6th one. And now he’s back — he won the 2024 election, fair and square. My point here isn’t to relitigate the first impeachment, except to point out that the fact pattern is extremely well-understood and well-documented. When it comes to the basic timeline, there just isn’t much dispute about what happened.

All of which makes the accusation leveled by Shellenberger and Gutentag last month quite shocking: Trump was impeached not because of corrupt actions he took to attempt to boost his reelection odds, and then to prevent Congress from investigating those actions, but because of — you guessed it — a deep-state conspiracy.

“Both USAID And The CIA Were Behind The Impeachment Of Trump in 2019” (paywalled) thundered the headline of an article they published on February 5. It’s a gobsmacking claim, and the article under it spins a complex, intrigue-laden yarn involving a journalism outlet called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP.

What this all boils down to, really, is treason:

[I]t appears that CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad. The difference is that it is highly illegal and even treasonous for CIA [sic], USAID, and its contractors and intermediaries, known as “cut-outs,” to interfere in US politics this way.

Given the legal definition of treason, Shellenberger and Gutentag are suggesting that the individuals involved in this conspiracy should be, at a minimum, sentenced to five years in prison and fined $10,000, or at maximum executed. These are, to say the least, stiff penalties.

In light of the seriousness of the charges, you would think that the authors would present an airtight case. Instead, their article is a bizarre, incoherent game of guilt by association. It reveals — again — that Shellenberger is much more interested in virality than he is in the truth, and that if he has to hurt innocent individuals to boost his own profile, so be it.

***

First, an extremely important disclosure: I have a friend who works at OCCRP. I even visited one of their offices once. Naturally, that introduces the possibility of bias, and you should keep that in mind as you read what follows. The point of this sort of disclosure is for you to have enough information to decide for yourself whether my argument is trustworthy. Hopefully you will think it is.

OCCRP is a well-respected outlet that covers corruption around the world. While its focus is usually international, it has also collaborated with American and British publications like the The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Boston Globe. Here is how it describes itself on its website:

OCCRP is one of the largest investigative journalism organizations in the world, headquartered in Amsterdam and with staff across six continents. We are a mission-driven nonprofit newsroom that partners with other media outlets to publish stories that lead to real-world action. At the same time, our media development arm helps investigative outlets around the world succeed and serve the public.

Founded by veteran investigative reporters Drew Sullivan and Paul Radu in 2007, OCCRP began in Eastern Europe with a handful of partners and has grown into a major force in collaborative investigative journalism, upholding the highest standards for public interest reporting.

Among its highlights are truly consequential global investigations of subjects like The Panama Papers, leaked documents detailing the shady and opaque financial dealings of some of the world’s most powerful individuals.

You’ll also see that OCCRP receives funding from major NGOs and world governments. On its Supporters page, the organization explains that “The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is a 501(C)(3) organization. We are incredibly grateful to the following institutional donors that make our work possible.” The donors include institutions like the Ford Foundation and something called “The European Union” (sounds made up, to be honest). OCCRP also receives funding from the United States government: the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of State are both listed. This isn’t and has never been a secret; OCCRP has always listed its funders in its annual reports, including in the earliest one available online, from 2018 — see page 20 of that document.

As you surely know by now, Donald Trump’s administration is in the process of attempting to dismantle USAID. Trump and Elon Musk have decided, in part on the basis of conspiracy theories that would make Michael Shellenberger blush, that it is basically a terrorist and/or Marxist and/or otherwise bad organization, and that it has to go. I’m not going to rehash my own views on the administration’s attempts to take a chainsaw to the U.S. government here, since that’s not what this piece is about. (Though I should reiterate my disclosure from the last time I wrote about all this: Like most people who went to public policy school and/or who have connections to DC journalism, I’ve known people in and around USAID.)

For our purposes, what matters is that around the time Trump and Musk were working themselves into their full anti-USAID lather, Shellenberger and Gutentag dropped their bombshell accusing it of being part of a Deep State effort to kneecap Trump in 2019.

Here’s Shellenberger touting his work on Jesse Watters’ show on Fox News the same day it was published. There’s no ambiguity — Shellenberger makes it clear that he believes he has exposed an absolutely explosive conspiracy.

Watters: You have this new piece on Substack that the USAID and the CIA helped orchestrate Trump’s impeachment?

Shellenberger [nodding along and then shaking his head at the insanity of it all]: Yeah, I mean, Jesse, it’s a crazy story.

If true, this would represent a world-historical scandal — one which would require a serious investigation, as well as possible arrests and prosecutions. (I reached out to both Shellenberger via email and Gutentag via Substack message and didn’t hear back.)

So let’s try to better understand how Shellenberger and Gutentag connect the dots. Here is their argument:

1. Trump’s first impeachment began with a September 2019 complaint by a CIA whistleblower alleging highly improper behavior on the part of Trump, particularly in a phone call with the then–newly elected president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The whistleblower repeatedly mentions Rudy Giuliani, noting that he had both gone to Ukraine to pressure Zelenksyy’s government to investigate the Bidens and the origins of the Russia investigations on Trump’s behalf, and that he had dispatched fixers there to assist him in this work as well.

The whistleblower cited an article about two of the fixers headlined “Meet the Florida Duo Helping Giuliani Investigate for Trump in Ukraine,” which had been published by OCCRP and BuzzFeed News (in partnership) on July 22nd. That piece, co-authored by Aubrey Belford and Veronika Melkozerova, provided more specifics about the identities and activities of the two men. As the authors wrote:

At the center of Giuliani’s back-channel diplomacy are the two businessmen, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who Giuliani has publicly identified as his clients.

Until now, the men have escaped detailed scrutiny. But a joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine, has uncovered new information that raises questions about their influence on U.S. political figures.

2. OCCRP, as noted above, receives funding from the U.S. government through USAID. (This is part of a broader strategy in which the U.S. government has funded what it would describe as anti-corruption and pro-democracy watchdog journalism around the world. For obvious reasons, some people find government funding of newsrooms controversial — more on which in a bit — but it’s a long-standing practice that has never been a secret, and which is now imperiled.)

3. So, in summary, the whistleblower was a CIA employee, his report cited an OCCRP article, and OCCRP receives USAID funding. Therefore, “Both USAID And The CIA Were Behind The Impeachment Of Trump in 2019.” Or, as Jesse Watters put it as Shellenberger nodded along, they helped to “orchestrate” it.

4. That’s it. That’s Shellenberger and Gutentag’s entire argument.

Jesse, I can hear you saying. There’s no way Shellenberger and Gutentag could possibly publish such a stupid argument. Please stop strawmanning them.

No, that’s really it: It’s really that stupid. (Here’s a response by one of the authors of the OCCRP article about the Florida duo, Aubrey Belford, providing some further background; ironically, his path to writing that story started when he was investigating Hunter Biden!)

Now, to be fair, it’s easy to miss the sheer stupidity on display here because Shellenberger and Gutentag lard their article with a lot of other aspersions about OCCRP and USAID that don’t actually come close to proving their claims. Specifically, they reference an ongoing controversy involving other media outlets that have accused OCCRP of insufficient independence from the U.S. government. Here it’s useful to read the excerpt of Shellenberger and Gutentag’s story where they combine their own accusations with the broader controversy over OCCRP:

Reporting by Drop Site News last year revealed that the CIA analyst relied on reporting by a supposedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which appears to have effectively operated as an arm of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) [Editorial note: This is wildly overstated], which President Trump has just shut down. The CIA whistleblower complaint cited a long report by OCCRP four times.

The OCCRP report alleged that two Soviet-born Florida businessmen were “key hidden actors behind a plan” by Trump to investigate the Bidens. According to the story, those two businessmen connected Giuliani to two former Ukrainian prosecutors. The OCCRP story was crucial to the House Democrats’ impeachment claim, which is that Trump dispatched Giuliani as part of a coordinated effort to pressure a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, which is why the whistleblower cited it four times.

In a 2024 documentary that German television broadcaster NDR made about OCCRP’s dependence on the US government, a USAID official confirmed that USAID approves OCCRP’s “annual work plan” and approves new hires of “key personnel.” NDR initiated and carried out the investigation with French investigative news organization Mediapart, Italian new [sic] group Il Fatto Quotidiano, Reporters United in Greece, and Drop Site News in the United States.

However, according to a Mediapart story published the same day as the Drop Site News article, NDR censored the broadcast “after US journalist Drew Sullivan, the co-founder and head of the OCCRP, placed pressure on the NDR management and made false accusations against the broadcaster’s journalists involved in the project.”

On December 16, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim posted a link on X to the 26-minute-long documentary. “NDR, Germany’s public broadcaster, is facing a censorship scandal and has defended itself by saying it never killed a news report about OCCRP and its State Department funding — b/c no report was ever produced to kill,” said Grim. “That was absurd — and dozens, maybe hundreds, of journalists knew it to be false, and now of course, someone has leaked it.”

I don’t want to get too deep into all of this because it’s 1) complicated; 2) even if everything the critics said was true, it wouldn’t come close to proving that USAID and OCCRP (and the CIA!) orchestrated the plot to impeach Donald Trump anyway; and 3) at least some of the other outlets’ claims probably aren’t true, given a letter published by OCCRP which convincingly accuses Mediapart of publishing major errors.

But I do want to talk a little bit about how Shellenberger and Gutentag set this up, because there are some absolutely wild leaps of logic and exaggerations here. Even the claim that “Reporting by Drop Site News last year revealed that the CIA analyst relied on reporting by” OCCRP is quite odd. What was there for anyone to “reveal,” given that that whistleblower document was first published more than five years ago? But if it was just “revealed” last year, that gives readers the sense of newly uncovered, hidden knowledge.

Part of the problem with Shellenberger and Gutentag’s attempts to tie all this to the Drop Site article is that if you look at that article, you’ll see that the authors — Grim, Ștefan Cândea, and Nikolas Leontopoulos — reference the whistleblower complaint in the context of pointing out that OCCRP does seem to at least sometimes operate in a manner which suggests genuine independence from its U.S. funders.

The work of OCCRP, often in collaboration with other newsrooms around the world, has been deeply impressive journalistically and at times they have done reporting at odds with U.S. national interests, including a look at how the Pentagon was relying on dodgy arms merchants to arm Syrian rebels. María Teresa Ronderos, director of the Latin American Centre for Investigative Reporting, said in an email that she “never felt that there were topics, issues or places that were restricted” when working with OCCRP. “Moreover, we have collaborated with them in stories that were particularly critical about US drug policies (series An Addictive War), or about US migration policies (Migrants from Another World) and they never expressed having a problem with this.” OCCRP’s reporting on Rudy Giuliani’s political work in Ukraine was cited four times in the whistleblower letter that led to President Donald Trump’s impeachment.

The Syrian rebels story was published early in the Trump administration and concerned a program started under the Obama administration, while the migration policy stories were published during the Biden administration. In other words, OCCRP doesn’t seem shy about publishing stories raising uncomfortable questions about U.S. policies and politicians, regardless of which party has more power at the moment. The whole point of this paragraph is that Grim and his colleagues, while criticizing OCCRP and claiming that its ties to the U.S. government are too tight, are granting that it does appear to generate some valuable independent work, and that it isn’t shy about training its sights on investigations of powerful U.S. figures and institutions. In this context, the Giuliani story fits neatly into OCCRP’s past work, meaning there’s nothing inherently unusual here — let alone any reason to suspect deep-state chicanery.

Now, Shellenberger and Gutentag’s entire conspiracy theory relies on the claim that the “CIA analyst relied on” OCCRP’s reporting about Giuliani. That grants them an entryway to

CIA → OCCRP → USAID = conspiracy theory

“The OCCRP story was crucial to the House Democrats’ impeachment claim,” they write, “which is that Trump dispatched Giuliani as part of a coordinated effort to pressure a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, which is why the whistleblower cited it four times.”

This is completely and utterly idiotic. The claim that “Trump dispatched Giuliani as part of a coordinated effort to pressure” Ukraine comes in large part from the fact that. . . Giuliani himself said on the record that he was going to Ukraine to push the government to investigate the Biden family and the origins of the Russia investigation. As Kenneth P. Vogel reported in the Times in the spring of 2019, in an article headlined “Rudy Giuliani Plans Ukraine Trip to Push for Inquiries That Could Help Trump,” “Mr. Giuliani’s plans create the remarkable scene of a lawyer for the president of the United States pressing a foreign government to pursue investigations that Mr. Trump’s allies hope could help him in his re-election campaign.” It’s hard to express just how bizarrely out in the open all of this was, and how much was already known about the basic contours of the scandal at the time the OCCRP story was published.

The whistleblower himself notes Giuliani’s brazenness: “In his multitude of public statements leading up to and in the wake of the publication of [the Times] article, Mr. Giuliani confirmed that he was focused on encouraging Ukrainian authorities to pursue investigations into alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged wrongdoing by the Biden family.”

Then there’s a footnote that points to this useful summary of Giuliani’s own statements:

See, for example, Mr. Giuliani’s appearance on Fox News on 6 April and his tweets on 23 April and 10 May. In his interview with The New York Times, Mr. Giuliani stated that the President “basically knows what I’m doing, sure, as his lawyer.” Mr. Giuliani also stated: “We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do. . . There’s nothing illegal about it. . . Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

In short, there is no sense in which OCCRP’s reporting was “crucial” to the Democrats’ impeachment efforts, given how much was already known about Giuliani’s activities, thanks in part to damning statements made by the man himself. The same logic applies to the whistleblower complaint, which leans almost entirely on the author’s own conversations with fellow government officials in possession of firsthand knowledge of the unfolding scandal. Here is a selection of illustrative excerpts:

In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals. The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.

. . .

Over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.

. . .

Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder of the call to advance his personal interests. Namely, he sought to pressure the Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection bid.

. . .

The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed by what had transpired in the phone call. They told me that there was already a “discussion ongoing” with White House lawyers about how to treat the call because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain.

. . .

In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials that senior White House officials had intervened to “lock down” all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced — as is customary — by the White House Situation Room. This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call.

. . .

I also learned from multiple U.S. officials that, on or about 2 August, Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Madrid to meet with one of President Zelenskyy’s advisers, Andriy Yermak. The U.S. officials characterized this meeting, which was not reported publicly at the time, as a “direct follow-up” to the President’s call with Mr. Zelenskyy about the “cases” they had discussed.

Now, Shellenberger and Gutentag are correct that the whistleblower cited the OCCRP report four times. But it’s supplementary to his claims, as we can see by looking at all four footnotes and the text that leads into them:

1. “Separately, multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelenskyy advisers, including Chief of Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov.”
   
   FOOTNOTE: “In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019, and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelenskyy adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.”

2. “In several public comments, Mr. [Yuriy] Lutsenko [Ukraine’s chief prosecutor, a Trump ally, and someone who had publicly accused the Biden family of corruption] also stated that he wished to communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters.”
   
   FOOTNOTE: “In May, Attorney General Barr announced that he was initiating a probe into the ‘origins’ of the Russia investigation. According to the above-referenced OCCRP report (22 July), two associates of Mr. Giuliani claimed to be working with Ukrainian officials to uncover information that would become part of this inquiry. In an interview with Fox News on 8 August, Mr. Giuliani claimed that Mr. John Durham, whom Attorney General Barr designated to lead this probe, was ‘spending a lot of time in Europe’ because he was ‘investigating Ukraine.’ I do not know the extent to which, if at all, Mr. Giuliani is directly coordinating his efforts on Ukraine with Attorney General Barr or Mr. Durham.”

3. “It was also publicly reported that Mr. Giuliani had met on at least two occasions with Mr. Lutsenko: once in New York in late January and again in Warsaw in mid-February. In addition, it was publicly reported that Mr. Giuliani had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani.”
   
   FOOTNOTE: “See, for example, the above-referenced articles in Bloomberg (16 May) and OCCRP (22 July).” [Link added by me.]

4. “Around the same time, I also learned from a U.S. official that ‘associates’ of Mr. Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team.”
   
   FOOTNOTE: “I do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced above.”

I’m not usually in the business of making predictions about alternate universes, but in light of all this, it seems quite obvious that if the OCCRP story didn’t exist but all the other facts in this case were the same, this whistleblower complaint and subsequent impeachment both would have both still occurred. The story provided details about Giuliani’s efforts on behalf of Trump, but those efforts themselves were already well-known, and it was Trump’s phone call — and unexplained suspension of security aid to Ukraine — that set off the internal five-alarm fire that would subsequently lead to his impeachment.

From the complaint:

On 18 July, an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) official informed Departments and Agencies that the President “earlier that month” had issued instructions to suspend all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine. Neither OMB nor the NSC staff knew why this instruction had been issued. During interagency meetings on 23 July and 26 July, OMB officials again stated explicitly that the instruction to suspend this assistance had come directly from the President, but they still were unaware of a policy rationale. As of early August, I heard from U.S. officials that some Ukrainian officials were aware that U.S. aid might be in jeopardy, but I do not know how or when they learned of it.

(The Trump administration argued that the aid cutoff occurred for reasons unrelated to Trump and Giuliani’s machinations, but as Vogel and Andrew E. Kramer wrote in the Times in the fall of 2019, this is not a credible claim in light of the available evidence.)

There is absolutely nothing to the explosive claim leveled by Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag that Trump’s impeachment was the result of a CIA/USAID conspiracy theory. In fact, it would be hard to come up with a presidential scandal in which more of the facts were right out in the open. Whatever one thinks of Trump and the efforts to impeach him, he was undoubtedly impeached in 2019 simply because of stuff he did.

***

Unfortunately, Shellenberger gets endlessly rewarded for publishing this sort of nonsense. I mean that both in the sense that he gets paid by a large and increasingly addled audience (Public has “Over 215,000 subscribers,” according to Substack), and in the sense that it brings him acclaim from powerful people. It’s not just that he gets interviewed by Jesse Watters on Fox News or Chris Cuomo on NewsNation: He’s now formed a depressing symbiotic relationship with GOP members of Congress whose appetite for this sort of fare is endless. They know that Shellenberger has an endless number of stories about liberal and Democratic deviance, and he is eager to share them with as wide an audience as possible.

Those who read my piece about Shellenberger’s false espionage accusation will recall that the charge made it into the Congressional record; Shellenberger was invited to appear before the so-called House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, and his claim was included in the packet of written testimony he submitted (after I reached out to him, he said he would correct the record, and he did add corrections to the online article).

A week after publishing his OCCRP article with Gutentag last month, he was back in Washington for two separate hearings. On February 12, he testified at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the “Censorship Industrial Complex” — a favorite subject of his — and the next day, he testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs on “Eliminating Waste By The Foreign Aid Bureaucracy.” Naturally, he used both hearings to push his impeachment conspiracy theory.

In a normal, well-functioning journalistic and political landscape, Shellenberger wouldn’t have this much influence. But unfortunately, there are no longer any guardrails whatsoever. Shellenberger’s the boss; there’s no higher-up editor to point out the flaws in his work or to suggest reworking a piece before he hits “publish.” And there are now a depressing number of members of Congress who are either genuine conspiracy theorists themselves, or who are happy to use conspiracy-addled ‘experts’ like Shellenberger to promote their own ends. Everyone involved has strayed from basic norms of intellectual honesty — it’s a very dark situation.

***

Setting aside whatever political differences we may have, I wish Shellenberger and Gutentag would keep in mind that there are real-life human beings at the other end of their giant megaphone. If they had simply written an evenhanded, fact-based article about the dispute over OCCRP’s funding, that would have been totally fine. It’s reasonable to debate whether and to what extent the U.S. government should fund these efforts — or at least it’s within the realm of sane, mainstream discourse. But debating government funding of international media outlets is very different from what Shellenberger and Gutentag did, which is spew out an absolutely nonsensical conspiracy theory that impugned an entire news organization on the basis of childlike reasoning and an apparent complete obliviousness of the timeline of the first Trump impeachment.

Shellenberger and Gutentag want their readers to think the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is some sort of shadowy, mysterious organization. It isn’t. It is an established, respected media outlet which employs real-life journalists. Those journalists — including, yes, my friend — do work that can sometimes be difficult and even dangerous. Frequently they investigate individuals and organizations with massive amounts of money and power and with secrets they desperately want to hide.

Even on the best days, this is not an easy task. For a major outlet like Public to implicate another major outlet in an underhanded attempt at illegal regime change should require exceptionally careful reporting and bulletproof evidence. Shellenberger and Gutentag bring neither — they continue, in their ongoing take-no-prisoners war against the liberal establishment, to just throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. And unfortunately for anyone who cares about journalistic decency, they have found a successful business model.

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Questions? Comments? Offers of strings-attached government funding for this newsletter? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com, on Twitter at @jessesingal, or on Bluesky at jessesingal.com. Image: UNITED STATES - FEBRUARY 12: Michael Shellenberger, a Twitter Files journalist, recites the Pledge of Allegiance during the House Judiciary Committee hearing titled "The Censorship-Industrial Complex," in Rayburn building on Wednesday, February 12, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)