US Pres. Donald Trump has lambasted USAID for absurd foreign expenditures.
But Trump has omitted perhaps the most scandalous operation: in Ukraine, the US funded groups which defamed the US Vice President, members of Congress, and US journalists as “foreign propagandists,” while training Ukrainians in “PSYOP” tactics.
The US government funded a Ukrainian military intelligence firm which smeared US Vice President JD Vance, US Counterterrorism Director Joe Kent, and Rep. Thomas Massie as “foreign propagandists of the Russian Federation.”
To this day, the online blacklist published by the USAID-funded Ukrainian group, known as Molfar, lists Vance, Massie, and Kent as “foreign propagandists” aligned with the Russian government, and demands their “removal from public positions, the introduction of sanctions, and investigations into personal involvement in crimes.”
“These individuals pose a threat to the national security of countries that do not support the terrorist policy of the Russian Federation,” Molfar states.
Molfar’s website condemns Vance for having “compared Ukrainian democracy to Afghanistan” and stating that he “remains opposed to continuing to finance this war.” Perhaps worst of all, in the eyes of the Ukrainian information warriors, was his stance on Ukraine’s NATO aspirations: “He declared that Ukraine should not join NATO, because it would supposedly mean “inviting the American nation to go to war.””
In 2022, a representative of Molfar was quoted in CNN accusing President Trump of “absolutely pro-Kremlin” behavior because “Trump said that Crimea is Russian, because people speak Russian.”
Molfar, a Ukrainian term for a sorcerer or wizard, describes itself as an open-source intelligence agency which “collects lists of Ukrainian enemies to bring war criminals to justice.” Its website previously named both USAID and the US Civil Research and Development Fund (CRDF) as “partners.” The legality of US agencies sponsoring foreign groups to smear Americans and meddle in American politics is questionable at best.
A report bearing USAID’s logo, which was published one year after Russia’s invasion by Ukraine’s National Coordination Cybersecurity Center (NCSCC), noted that Molfar had helped train thousands of government employees on smear tactics, and were providing instruction on cyberwarfare – including PSYOP techniques – to public workers with the direct assistance of the US government.
“The NCSCC, with the support of the U.S. Civil Research and Development Fund (CRDF Global) and the U.S. Department of State, held the 3-day online training “OSINT – intelligence using open sources,” the report stated.
“Together with leading practical researchers of the Ukrainian company Molfar,” over 2,000 public workers “did practical assignments on the following topics: open-source searches, contact search, using Telegram bots, PSYOP and their use as a method of information warfare, image analysis, and human intelligence (HUMINT) or social engineering.”
In total, “USAID said that it will allocate $60 million” to “strengthen Ukraine’s cybersecurity,” the report’s authors wrote.
While smearing US political leaders, Molfar has targeted numerous American journalists, including The Grayzone’s editor-in-chief, Max Blumenthal, whom it vowed to expose as a Russian agent in a message to hundreds of media contacts.
A mass email sent by Molfar’s public affairs director, Daria Verbytska, falsely accused Blumenthal of “adapting to russian narratives after magical expansion of income,” while promising to deliver a report on Blumenthal’s “approx income, its sources, fake CV info, cooperation with other propagandists, evidence, negative, connections with people worldwide, family, contacts, property and additional info.”
Molfar’s report amounted to a barely coherent collection of false, borderline libelous claims, accusing Blumenthal of “fake news” for making objectively true statements such as, “The US and NATO are sponsoring the war in Ukraine.”
However, the dossier contained his home address, the addresses of family members, and even those of their co-workers. USAID had therefore sponsored a doxxing operation which placed American citizens in danger for criticizing the Ukrainian government – and which targeted others simply for their association with Blumenthal’s family.
In a report for the UK’s Morningstar Online, journalist Steve Sweeney documented how Molfar was “recklessly endangering lives by publishing a ‘traitors’ list with personal data, photographs and even family details of supposed Russian collaborators — including children.”
Others targeted by Molfar include tech mogul Elon Musk, journalists Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, and The Grayzone’s Aaron Maté, as well as economist and geopolitical commentator Jeffrey Sachs.
Shockingly, Molfar wasn’t the only group to receive funding from the US government to create a blacklist accusing Americans of supposed thought crimes.