Top Official Of USAID-Linked Foreign Aid Agency To Plead Guilty To Taking Bribes

The chief financial officer of the African Development Foundation, a federal agency affiliated with USAID, will plead guilty to steering grants and contracts in exchange for bribes.

The previously-obscure African Development Foundation became a darling of the Left when its CFO, Mathieu Zahui, locked its doors to prevent Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from entering. Democrat politicians framed it as an act of moral courage, and left-wing media called the group “the little agency that could.”

But on Friday, the Department of Justice said Zahui admitted that he was doing exactly what conservatives have suspected is common in foreign aid: Laundering money through poor nations and then back to D.C. insiders, who used it to enrich themselves.

According to a court papers filed Friday, the African Development Foundation sent $800,000 to a Kenya-based company run by Zahui’s friend. The friend’s paid Zahui a kickback of $12,000, and the company kept $134,886 for doing no work.

The rest of the money was simply a “pass-through” where the Kenyan company paid bills that the agency owned to other people. That made it appear that more money was going to African aid as opposed to bureaucratic overhead, and added a layer that concealed where the agency’s money was actually going.

Zahui has agreed to plead guilty to accepting gratuities and making a false statement to a federal law enforcement officer, after he lied to the USAID Office of Inspector General’ bout having received the kickbacks. He could face up to seven years in prison.

“The USADF Director of Financial Management’s fraudulent acts betrayed the trust of the American people,” the USAID Office of Inspector General’s acting Assistant Inspector General for Investigations Sean M. Bottary said in a statement.

“When they show up, we didn’t let them in”

The Daily Wire broke the story of Zahui’s crimes in May after uncovering a search warrant for Zahui’s phone, granted by a D.C. judge in November 2024, during the Biden administration. The series, titled, This Foreign Aid Agency Locked Its Doors To Keep DOGE Out. Now We Know Why. included details that are redacted in charging papers, which refers to the company only as “Co-Conspirator 1.”

Zahui steered contracts and grants to a firm called Ganiam, which was run by a friend named Maina Gakure. Gakure and Zahui previously worked together for the Department of Veterans Affairs in California, where Gakure was in charge of contracts. Gakure later created his own company designed to exploit the government’s “8(a)” law, which allows minority-owned companies to get no-bid contracts.

He also established an Africa-based version of the company, to which Zahui steered money. (One of the contracts was ostensibly for “travel” during COVID, when travel was shut down.) Each time Zahui awarded Gakure’s company a contract, Gakure would send Zahui kickbacks to his personal bank account, the disgraced CFO admitted in federal court.

The flow of money to Africa made it seem–to Congress, the public, and auditors–that the agency was fulfilling its mission. But Ganiam was actually used as a slush fund, with Gakure serving as an intermediary to pay bills elsewhere–including in D.C.

The Daily Wire interviewed Zahui at his home for nearly two hours in May, where the African immigrant spoke with indignation that his federal job might be ending.

“When they show up, we didn’t let them in,” he said of DOGE auditors. Eventually the Trump administration changed the locks on the building, but Zahui gained access. “They forget, or they didn’t know there was a back door that they didn’t lock,” he said.

Zahui said that the agency had money scattered in bank accounts across Africa, and that he would frequently travel to tend to it. Some money that appeared on balance sheets as being sent to Africa was later redirected back to D.C., he acknowledged, saying “a grant can pay for people, even if it’s not in Africa.”

“Ganiam was not a grant, it was a contract,” he said, before later acknowledging that Ganiam also received a grant. When asked how he knew Gakure, he said, “He was in D.C., it was bid, it was in the U.S. Then he returned home as a Africa diaspora, returning home, that’s it.”

“He has moved a long time ago. Very, very long time ago, okay, even before COVID,” he added. (Gakure’s Virginia-based minority contracting company received a COVID bailout from the federal government.) Zahui was hired as the CFO of a federal agency even though he declared personal bankruptcy, a fact he first denied, then admitted in the interview.

Gakure did not return a request for comment in May.

Sen. James Risch (R-ID), the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had for years documented serious irregularities at the African Development Foundation, and pleaded for officials to reform the agency, saying that if they did not clean house, it risked the public losing faith in foreign aid more broadly. They failed to heed his warning, and his prediction came to pass, with the Trump administration abolishing USAID, the larger foreign aid agency, outright.

“This is a tremendous win for law and order,” Risch told The Daily Wire of Zahui’s guilty plea.

“What started in 2023 as a simple inquiry from my committee into questionable dealings at USADF will now become justice served,” he told The Daily Wire. “Corruption like we have seen at the USADF will not stand.” Risch has introduced a bill to abolish the agency.

Lawfare

After Trump’s election, the agency’s CEO, Travis Adkins, quit, leaving Zahui in charge as part of a three-person executive committee. President Donald Trump fired its board and named Pete Marocco, who oversaw the demolition of USAID, as chairman of the African Development Foundation.

But Zahui notified the White House that the federal agency would not be recognizing the Trump administration’s authority.

Remarkably, even after the Biden-era criminal investigation into Zahui was revealed by The Daily Wire, left-wing lawyers used the D.C. courts to ensure that Zahui remained in charge.

In June, a judge tossed out a lawsuit filed by an ousted board member, finding that Trump had the right to fire the board. Lawyers from the same left-wing firm, Democracy Forward, then filed suit with a different plaintiff: a for-profit company in Zambia that said the U.S. government is its only customer.

The lawyers argued that abolishing ADF would be unfair to the company. In July, a judge ruled in their favor, imposing an injunction that blocked Marocco from controlling the agency. Zahui was brought back to work as part of the three-person executive committee.

Because of a Supreme Court ruling limiting the breadth of injunctions, the ruling was later modified to only require that the specific Zambian firm, Rural Development Innovations Ltd., be paid, with Marocco free to otherwise axe the agency. This month, the Democracy Forward lawyers have been pleading with the judge that the ADF staff must be restored to work, so that the Zambian firm can call them for advice.

On Monday, the Trump administration filed court papers in that lawsuit saying that the Democracy Forward lawyers are seeking to “restore all 353 grants and forty-three contracts that Marocco cancelled as acting chair and rehire all sixteen employees that Marocco terminated.”

In December, a law firm run by a founder of Democracy Forward sued The Daily Wire and one of its alleged sources. The plaintiff is Adkins, who quit as the agency’s CEO after Donald Trump’s election. The lawsuit was leaked to The Daily Beast, which ran with the headline, “Federal Official Shows How DOGE and MAGA Shattered His Life In New Lawsuit.”

Though Adkins voluntarily quit before the Daily Wire stories, Adkins is seeking money, citing as damages that he has not found a job willing to pay him $500,000 a year as he expected.

An email, provided by Adkins’ attorneys, shows that after Zahui directed Gakure to wire $17,000 to Adkins’ personal assistant, Adkins replied, “Thanks for this Mathieu – let us know what needs to be done next to fully resolve this matter.”

The alleged Daily Wire source being sued by Adkins is a black former ADF staffer who filed a sworn affidavit saying Adkins told her he “wanted all of his direct reports to be Black.” Atkins denies the allegations.

The agency’s onetime general counsel, Mateo Dunne, was placed on leave by Adkins after Dunne pointed out rampant misconduct.

“As General Counsel, I led an internal investigation that revealed substantial fraud, waste, and abuse. When I reported my findings, the agency retaliated and sought to destroy my career and reputation. Today I am fully vindicated. This is an indictment of an agency culture that facilitated corruption, punished integrity, and silenced dissent,” Dunne said.

A federal official familiar with ongoing investigations into USADF said USAID IG’s investigation said that “this case is the tip of the iceberg,” citing “corruption at the highest level in an agency entrusted to support impoverished communities in Africa.”

Marocco, who was put in charge of the ADF, told The Daily Wire that the agency “is a scam that delivers no value to the American taxpayer, and its budget should be zero.”

“We are investigating many alarming behaviors that demonstrate the agency’s defiance of the President, disregard for the taxpayers, arrogance and entitlement by bureaucrats and foreigners with no semblance of accountability, ridiculous waste, systemic abuse and crime,” Marocco said.

“USADF should be abolished, and there must be a post-mortem on this degenerate enterprise that operated under the guise of government ‘philanthropy,’” he said.

Though USAID has been abolished, its inspector general, which specializes in rooting out fraud in foreign grants, has 350 open investigations. Congress voted to give it purview over foreign aid disbursed by the State Department and other agencies.

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