Democrats Panic After Their Horrifying Money Laundering Scheme Was Revealed

As Twitter began to gain popularity around 15 years ago, millions of people in Cuba were looking for a similar website they could use to send short messages to the world. It was difficult to access Twitter itself because Cuba’s communist government restricted internet access, so there was a big untapped market there.

Fortunately for Cubans, an alternative quickly emerged. It was called “ZunZuneo,” which is a Cuban expression that’s supposed to sound like the noise a hummingbird makes. So we had Twitter and they had a knockoff called ZunZuneo. Even though it was a pretty cheap knock-off, however, the application quickly became popular, gaining tens of thousands of users in a matter of months. The creators of the app had obtained a list of 500,000 Cuban cell phone numbers from somewhere — presumably the black market — so they were able to pitch the program directly to users. And cell phones were the key to the whole business model: ZunZuneo was able to evade Cuba’s internet restrictions because it relied entirely on text messaging and cellular services.

After just a couple of years in service, though, ZunZuneo abruptly disappeared. It just went offline without any warning whatsoever. No one had any idea what happened to it.

It wasn’t until several years later that we learned the truth, because of an investigation that was published by the Associated Press. It turns out that ZunZuneo was secretly created by the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID. Yes, the U.S. government’s “international development” agency had created a social media app in Cuba without telling anyone — in this country or in Cuba.

In response to this reporting, the White House spokesman claimed that it was all a big misunderstanding. Watch:

So the White House spokesman, Jay Carney, claims that everything is above-board. After all, USAID is all about helping other countries, and we were just helping Cuba out. What’s the problem? 

As it turns out, even if you assume that the U.S. should be “helping out” foreign countries by sending them taxpayer money — which we obviously shouldn’t be doing — there are still major problems here. Here’s a big one. According to the Associated Press: “The estimated $1.6 million spent on ZunZuneo was publicly earmarked for an unspecified project in Pakistan. but those documents don’t reveal where the funds were actually spent.”

In other words, this was fraud. Congress authorized the money to go to Pakistan. The president signed an appropriations bill sending the money to Pakistan. And the money did not go to Pakistan. Instead, it went to Cuba. American voters were told that the money was going to one place, and it went to another. And there’s a very clear reason why USAID might have been interested in lying about where the money was going, which is this: The point of spending the money was not to “develop” Cuba. The point was to overthrow Cuba’s government.

From the Associated Press:

USAID and its contractors went to extensive lengths to conceal Washington’s ties to the project, according to interviews and documents obtained by the AP. They set up front companies in Spain and the Cayman Islands to hide the money trail, and recruited CEOs without telling them they would be working on a U.S. taxpayer-funded project … Eventually… they hoped the network would reach critical mass so that dissidents could organize ‘smart mobs’— mass gatherings called at a moment’s notice — that could trigger political demonstrations, or ‘renegotiate the balance of power between the state and society.’

Reading that, you can’t help but think about all of the “smart mobs” that the government has probably worked to organize in this country. This is clearly what our intelligence agencies are good at. They launder money with the goal of overthrowing governments with “color revolutions” all the time, whether it’s in Ukraine or Cuba. But you’re supposed to think they’d never do the same thing here. They’d never, say, stoke racial tensions so that half the country is lit on fire in the name of “racial equity.”

In this particular case, though, the U.S. government got caught. And that led to some embarrassment among Democrats. For example, one prominent Democrat, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, asked USAID, “What in heaven’s name are you thinking? If you’re going to do a covert operation like this for a regime change, assuming it ever makes any sense, it’s not something that should be done through USAID.” So he gave them a finger-wagging. And then nothing happened. USAID suffered no consequences whatsoever.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

I bring all of this up because it’s one of many egregious examples of how USAID has been operating, with total impunity, over the past several decades. This is an agency that JFK created by executive order during the Cold War, to help fight the spread of communism. Then Congress formally established USAID with a law called the “Foreign Assistance Act.” And ever since then, the agency has steadily grown and spent more and more taxpayer money overseas. Like all government programs, it has simply consumed more and more resources over time, like cancer, with no sign of ever going away. There is no accountability for any of this spending. This is Enron-level accounting, and we’ve been tolerating it for decades. If Americans knew what was happening, they’d overwhelmingly oppose all of it.

Take a look at this chart, to give you just one more example. This is from USAID’s website, and it was first flagged by someone named Jeff Carlson:

USAID

As you can see, as of September of 2024, USAID has already spent most of the $39 billion dollars it’s been allocated for Ukraine. Supposedly, this is not military assistance — because after all, USAID is about “international development.” By contrast, the Defense Department was been allocated something like $124 billion for Ukraine, and they spent around $49 billion of it. In other words, if you thought that Pentagon spending accounted for the vast majority of our spending in Ukraine, you’d be wrong. As it turns out, USAID is doing a lot of work in Ukraine. And the truth is that we have no idea what they’re doing there. 

Supposedly, the money is going to an “economic support fund,” to pay the pensions and salaries of Ukrainian government bureaucrats. That’s the stated reason, which is bad enough. But almost certainly, they’re also laundering a lot of money to promote propaganda for the war effort there. The level of fraud is hard to comprehend. Just imagine auditing a $39 billion “Economic support fund” for Ukraine. But there are no line items, so you can only imagine it.

Again, this has been going on for a very long time. As far back as 2017, Congressman Francis Rooney pointed out that USAID was subsidizing the World Economic Forum, for no apparent reason. Watch:

In 2017, Rep. Francis Rooney questioned why U.S. taxpayers were funding the World Economic Forum through USAID:

"Why should American taxpayers subsidize the WEF when its attendees all arrive on Gulfstream G5s?"

In 2024, Rep. Scott Perry introduced legislation to defund the WEF,… pic.twitter.com/5t9Bd2K3g9

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) February 4, 2025

Yes, we’re paying globalist billionaires with your tax money. You never voted for that. Congress never authorized it. But it happened. And no one ever put an end to this slush fund, so it just grew bigger and bigger. The other day, the White House press secretary outlined a small percentage of where some of this USAID money is going today. Watch:

As bad as all of those line items sound — and they obviously sound really bad, and are really bad — the truth is it’s probably much worse than that. It’s the federal government “saying” they’re spending your money to make gay comics in Peru. It’s the federal government “saying” they dropped $70,000 to promote DEI in Irish theaters. That’s what they’re claiming. And, as we’ve established, they have no problem lying about all of this. So the chances are pretty high that, in reality, all of this money actually went to coup attempts that you know nothing about — and that you will never know anything about.

In a previous era, this would be called a “Constitutional crisis.” A federal agency has gone rogue. They are spending money that Congress — and the voters — have not authorized them to spend. And on top of that, none of this is a good idea anyway, since we’re the only country on the planet that routinely dishes out huge amounts of money like this to foreign governments. We should not be giving a single penny of American tax dollars to any foreign government anywhere. But we’re doing a lot more than that. So now, finally, the Trump administration is putting an end to it.

The USAID website was just taken offline. USAID workers weren’t allowed in the building yesterday and Trump and Elon Musk have agreed that the agency should be shut down.

In response, Democrats are panicking over this in a way that they haven’t panicked over anything else Trump has done. They’re extremely animated over the collapse of an agency that funnels money overseas, without accounting for any of the spending. It’s almost as if they benefited in some way from this spending. 

Here for example is congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who claims that this moment is the official beginning of Trump’s dictatorship. Yes, we’re currently living in the first “dictatorship” in history that began with a popular vote victory, and that will end four years later at the conclusion of the term, as prescribed in the Constitution. Watch her explain:

If you can get past all of the hysteria, the point she’s trying to make is that USAID was established by Congress and therefore, only Congress can get rid of USAID. Until that happens, if the president doesn’t want to send billions of taxpayer dollars overseas, then he’s a dictator. That’s what she’s saying.

On the contrary, this is of course the exact opposite of a dictatorship. Trump ran on certain promises, and is now delivering to the voters precisely what they asked for. One of those promises, from the very beginning, has been to cut waste, root out corruption, and drain the swamp. It’s pretty clear that Trump is doing all three of those things through this assault on USAID. Trump, as the executive, doesn’t have to waste our money, even if Congress has authorized him to do so. (Even Democrats agree with this, by the way. You might remember that Democrats once argued that Barack Obama didn’t have to enforce immigration law, even though it was passed by Congress).

To the extent anyone was acting like a “dictator” in this scenario, it was the unelected bureaucrats at USAID. No one voted for them. No one even knows their names. They regularly lied about where your money was going. They spent money without congressional authorization in order to overthrow foreign governments, which is criminal for about five different reasons. Even Democrats have admitted that. None of that sounds particularly democratic. And yet, no one in the Democrat Party ever objected to it.

The real reason Democrats are freaking out is pretty obvious. Trump is tearing their money laundering operation to pieces. Their slush fund is being decimated. You might remember that Ilhan Omar previously stated — according to a translation of her remarks that was obtained by The Daily Wire — that as long as she’s in office, “Somalia will never be in danger.” She also said she’d work “day and night” to preserve the interests of Somalis in the United States. And part of that work, we can assume, means ensuring that billions of dollars in U.S. aid continues flowing into Somalia. So that Somalia can squander all of it, as it has always done, and the country can continue to be a hellhole, which it has always been and always will be. This is the kind of corrupt arrangement that USAID has established for many politicians in many different contexts.

That would certainly explain why, seemingly out of nowhere, Democrats are taking to the streets in defense of USAID. They had a whole parade of speakers outside the agency headquarters yesterday. Here was congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD):

He begins by saying, “Elon didn’t create USAID,” as if that’s a damning point in some way. We’re supposed to be outraged that Elon Musk did not create a massive and unaccountable government bureaucracy that lights money on fire. Congress did that. Thank you for establishing that, Jamie Raskin.

Then things descend into self-parody, when he talks about Elon Musk and Donald Trump “impounding” taxpayer money, as if they’re stealing it. No, they’re saving taxpayer money from being wasted on foreign countries. They’re not stealing it. They’re preserving it. They’re keeping it within the United States. That’s what voters overwhelmingly want. And any Democrat who claims this is somehow “unconstitutional” needs to explain why they allowed USAID to unconstitutionally steal our money for the better part of a century.

Democrats know they have no explanation for this, which is why they’re in a full-on panic, as they attempt to convince Americans that USAID — an entity that most Americans didn’t even know existed until 24 hours ago — is somehow vital to their daily lives. Here’s the Democrats’ leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Listen to his concerns about what might be coming next:

Schumer is panicking: "If DOGE can shut down USAID, next it might be the IRS or intelligence agencies" pic.twitter.com/yyr3seJW04

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 3, 2025

As far as I can tell, Chuck Schumer meant for this soundbite to seem menacing. He meant for Americans to tremble in fear at the possibility that the IRS might cease to exist. One day, Schumer warned, you may be able to go about your life without worrying about whether the IRS will suspend all of your constitutional rights under the guise of an “audit,” in an attempt to squeeze just a little more money out of you so that the federal government can waste it on gay plays in Peru. Can you even comprehend the horror?

There will be legal challenges to the closure of USAID. Democrats will continue to lie about this organization and what it does. They will do everything they can to make you afraid of something that should’ve happened a long time ago. And that’s because they’re the ones who are terrified. They’re not even doing a very good job of hiding it. They understand that, finally, they’re going to have to account for the taxpayer money — your money — that they’ve been spending. And the more Democrats melt down, the more it becomes apparent that they have no way of doing that.

DOGE has gone from a meme to an existential threat to entrenched government corruption. And now — much more rapidly than we thought possible — that corruption is finally being exposed, humiliated, and thoroughly destroyed.