Ex-Top Foreign Aid Official Cries As He Is Sentenced To Prison For Bribes

WASHINGTON — A former top foreign aid official was sentenced Wednesday to prison after admitting to accepting bribes and lying to federal investigators.

Mathieu Zahui, former chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, cried in the courtroom and said, “I stand before the court with shame,” before being sentenced to four months in prison by Judge James Boasberg.

Zahui awarded more than $600,000 in no-bid contracts to a friend’s company based in Africa, which did no actual work. The friend paid him $12,000 in bribes for the contract, Zahui acknowledged in court papers. The African Development Foundation is a federal agency that is the “little brother” of USAID.

The case seems to prove a theory of President Donald Trump and Elon Musk correct: That money appropriated to agencies like USAID was enriching insiders in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, who essentially laundered it through third-world countries. Zahui used the Africa-based company as a pass-through to pay agency bills, making it seem like the agency was fulfilling its mission by sending most of its money to Africa, while the foreign company simply used the money to write checks to D.C. bureaucrats and others at Zahui’s direction. The friend, Maina Gakure, kept $136,000 as his cut.

The criminal charge and guilty plea came after a Daily Wire investigation in May 2025 revealed corruption at the agency, including that Zahui had taken bribes from Gakure. Court papers do not name Gakure or his company, Ganiam Ltd., referring to them only as CC-1, for “co-conspirator.”

READ MORE: This Foreign Aid Agency Locked Its Doors To Keep DOGE Out. Now We Know Why.

The Daily Wire interviewed Zahui for more than an hour prior to the criminal charge, and he struggled to explain why Gakure’s company was being paid. One of the contracts was for “travel” during COVID, when no travel was occurring.

Prosecutors said sentencing guidelines called for 15 to 21 months in prison on the felony counts of “receiving a gratuity as a public official” and “making false statements to federal law enforcement.”

They asked for the high end of that range, saying, “the public could reasonably question the legitimacy and stewardship of the organization when a senior official entrusted with financial oversight instead manipulates the system for the benefit of himself and his friend. A meaningful sentence is therefore necessary to make clear that individuals who abuse positions of trust and misuse public funds for personal gain will be held accountable, and to deter others,” prosecutors said.

But Boasberg — the D.C. federal court’s chief judge, and a notorious liberal who was behind many of the injunctions that have hamstrung the Trump administration — gave a far lower sentence than the guidelines. The four months in prison will be “followed by 12 months of supervised release. I will not order any restitution but I will order forfeiture of $12,000. I will waive any imposition of a fine,” he said.

Six current and former employees of the federal agency wrote letters to Boasberg supporting and praising him. Paul Olson, a current employee, wrote that he does “not condone the conduct” of Zahui but also that “he is an enjoyable person with whom to travel, socialize, and celebrate.” Prosecutor Sungtae Kang said that one government contractor who wrote a letter asking for a light sentence, Afia Frempong, was actually paid for her work via the pass-through scheme, which enabled Zahui and his friend to skim off the top.

Zahui’s lawyer argued that he should receive no prison time because Zahui, who is from the Ivory Coast, “was born and raised in a culture where communal living was essential … Both Mr. Zahui and [Gakure] immigrated to the U.S. from Africa … Zahui felt an affinity with [Gakure] because of their shared experience and cultural values,” and they “helped each other.”

The lawyer, Karen D. Williams — who previously represented the wife of former Sen. Bob Menendez, who took gold bar bribes from foreign nationals —also urged Boasberg to impose no jail time because The Daily Wire and Republicans “[used] this case as political fodder in support of efforts to defund and eliminate ADF altogether.”

Like Zahui, Gakure immigrated to the United States and was hired by the federal government to administer contracts. Gakure later quit the government to create his own Virginia-based company designed to get government contracts via minority contracting laws. He also created an Africa-based version of the company, which was funded by the African Development Foundation. Zahui told The Daily Wire that Gakure moved from Virginia back to Africa, although records show his company took PPP loans, aimed at mitigating United States job losses during the coronavirus, during the same period.

By mid-2024, during the Biden administration, the USAID inspector general had already seized Zahui’s phone and found the electronic kickback payments. Not only was he not charged by the Biden Department of Justice, but he was later promoted to be part of a three-person committee that was running the agency.

In that role, Zahui blocked DOGE from entering the building to review its finances. Democrat politicians and media outlets lauded it as an act of heroism at the time. Virtually no legacy media outlets reported on his subsequent guilty plea.

After Trump assumed the presidency, he fired the agency’s board and named Pete Marocco, who presided over the demolition of USAID, as its acting chair. Marocco terminated staff and contracts.

But another D.C. judge blocked Trump from controlling the federal agency, saying all actions taken by Marocco are null and void. The ruling came after an African for-profit company sued, saying depriving it of United States grants would be a financial hardship because ADF was its only customer.

Without a presidentially appointed and Senate-confirmed board chair, the agency now operates in a bizarre limbo, being run by the remaining members of the committee, who worked closely with Zahui and are openly hostile to the president.

The lawsuit on behalf of the African for-profit company was brought by a law firm of Democrat operatives that was pressing for Zahui’s committee, not the president’s appointee, to be in charge of the agency, even after The Daily Wire revealed Zahui’s corruption.

Zahui remained in a top role at the agency for more than a year after prosecutors filed court papers detailing the bribes. After the agency’s then-general counsel confronted Zahui over legal and financial issues, the African Development Foundation’s then-CEO, Travis Adkins, placed the general counsel on leave. Adkins is now suing The Daily Wire. His most recent filing is focused on keeping the case in D.C. court, rather than a different jurisdiction.

Related: This Foreign Aid Agency Locked Its Doors To Keep DOGE Out. Now We Know Why.