Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., chair of the House Oversight DOGE subcommittee, threatened potential ‘criminal referrals’ during a hearing Wednesday on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
‘This committee, based on this hearing and witness testimonies, will consider recommending investigations and criminal referrals,’ Greene said, beginning a line of questioning after several witnesses made opening remarks to the committee. The congresswoman reiterated that Hunter Biden was on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma when his father, Joe Biden, was vice president.
‘The prosecutor general of Ukraine at the time, Viktor Shokin, was investigating Burisma for corruption. Biden threatened, and it’s on video, to withhold 1 billion of USAID grant to Ukraine if Shokin wasn’t fired,’ Greene said, before questioning one of the witnesses, former USAID official and Heritage Foundation senior research fellow, Max Primorac.
‘Is USAID supposed to be used as leverage by a president to protect his son?’ she asked.
Primorac responded, ‘No, we call that corruption.’
‘In your estimation, roughly what percentage of USAID funding is doled out to bad actors or to efforts that don’t have the best interests of Americans in mind?’ Greene added.
Primorac said it was discovered through the work of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that USAID has been paying out over 50% to overhead charges and the inspector general of USAID ‘criticized the agency for not knowing the overhead charges being handed out to all of these actors for $142 billion of disbursements.’
‘That is extremely troubling,’ he added.
Another witness, Middle East Forum Executive Director Gregg Roman, said in his opening statement that he was there to testify ‘because there’s a fox loose in the henhouse of our foreign aid system – a system intended to uplift lives abroad that instead has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars to radical and terrorist-linked organizations.’
‘If we don’t fix these fences now, we risk fueling violence against our allies, our troops, and potentially ourselves,’ he said, later adding: ‘I urge this committee to make a formal criminal referral to the Department of Justice regarding USAID’s systemic failure to prevent taxpayer dollars from reaching terrorist organizations. USAID’s reckless bureaucrats should be dragged not just in front of this committee, but before a criminal court judge who can get to the bottom of this travesty and lock up any government official who risked the lives of innocent people around the world to advance these radical anti-American pet projects.’
Greene did not specify who would potentially be the recipients of the criminal referrals.
The chairwoman said that the ‘Democrat-run USAID should not get to use our federal government – our U.S. taxpayer dollars – as their party piggy bank to push their radical agenda in countries that we have no business giving money to.’
Greene said 95% of all political contributions from USAID employees go to Democratic Party candidates or PACs.
‘The revolving door between USAID employees and NGOs that receive USAID funding is undeniable. Maybe we should consider investigating whether USAID funding has made it back to Democrat campaigns?’ she later asked.
In her closing remarks, Greene again posed bringing criminal referrals in connection to USAID funding.
‘What we have heard today is that USAID has been used as a tool by Democrats to brainwash the world with globalist propaganda to force regime changes around the world,’ she said. ‘But if USAID funded terrorism that resulted in the death of Americans,’ Greene added, ‘then this committee will be making criminal referrals.’
Committee Democrats spent the hearing arguing that the Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID was illegal, and is ‘reordering the global stage’ to favor foreign adversaries and ‘undermining global democracy.’