Global Corruption Reporting Group Suggests Peers “Launder Money Legally” to Hide Donors
OCCRP's publisher suggested journalism organizations obscure funding for "sensitive donors" and reframe certain critics as "extremist groups" during the International Journalism Festival '25.
Last week, as part of the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Drew Sullivan, the co-founder and publisher of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), laughed while making the candid suggestion that journalistic organizations should “launder money legally” to protect donors’ identities. The statement came one month after OCCRP successfully sued the U.S. government to have its frozen USAID funding restored, allowing the investigative journalism outfit to resume operations in half a dozen countries, according to the organization.
Sullivan appeared next to OCCRP editor-in-chief Miranda Petrucic and media expert Mary Fitzgerald—who previously led Open Society Foundations’ information democracy program—in a public panel on “preparing for a toxic future as a donor and journalist.” (“Why did we choose the term ‘toxic future’?” Petrucic asked rhetorically during the opening minutes of the panel. “It is really referring to a global environment that is growing much more hostile, one where journalists are criminalized, donors are discredited, and the very act of investigating wrongdoing is cast as illegitimate.”)
“What we’ve done, and what you should think of doing is, if you’ve got a particularly sensitive donor—maybe a donor who’s got operations in India or some place where they are really worried about their affiliation with you—try to pass the money through another party,” Sullivan said.
“OCCRP does that for its member organizations,” he continued. “We will take the money and pass it on to other journalists. Launder money legally [laughs]—move the money away so there is not a direct connection between you and the donor.” He suggested other international journalistic groups such as OCCRP’s peer, the Media Development Investment Fund, could be leveraged to follow OCCRP’s example of using intermediaries to obscure funding sources. MDIF did not respond to a request for comment.
Organizations that engage in such behaviors are often referred to as ‘dark money’ groups—a label OCCRP has sometimes used, critically, in its own investigations.
“I hate to say it, but most people are cowards,” Sullivan said of potential donors to investigative journalism. “They really don’t want the trouble. And if you’re an investigative journalist, you signed up for that trouble. But if you’re a donor, you didn’t sign up for that trouble. You didn’t sign up to be Soros’d.” The liberal billionaire financier George Soros faced decades of intense criticism before passing control of Open Society Foundations to his son, Alex, in mid-2023.
“We probably are going to see news organizations pull down, and even eliminate, donor pages in the months and years ahead,” Sullivan said, before continuing. “The problem is that everything on the internet is there forever, and so it’s better to make that decision sooner rather than later.”
Sponsors for last week’s festival included the tech giants Google and Microsoft, as well as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and the controversial consulting giant McKinsey & Company.
As Drop Site News and a consortium of European outlets previously reported, OCCRP has historically received more than half of its funding from the U.S., and which OCCRP has disclosed for particular years in its annual reports. (OCCRP has argued that revenue calculations are misleading due to much of the money being passed to other organizations and prefers to emphasize the smaller percentage of U.S. government funding of its operating budget.)
OCCRP’s work has often aligned with U.S. foreign policy interests, and the U.S. and other Western countries have likewise amplified OCCRP’s reporting. In a social media post on Wednesday, the British foreign office wrote that, “The @OCCRP, a network of independent journalists, has returned $11 billion to consumers worldwide. Their work enables governments to sanction corrupt individuals and states, and the UK will continue its crackdown on dirty money.”
Roughly two months ago, after the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) froze all of its aid, OCCRP initiated a lawsuit against the Trump administration for cutting off what it described as 29% of its budget. According to the complaint, the cuts forced OCCRP “to lay off 20 percent of its staff and reduce salaries and work time for the majority of the remaining employees.” OCCRP’s lawsuit proved successful in early March, resulting in a U.S. federal court lifting the funding freeze and at least partially ameliorating financial difficulties which OCCRP predicted would have resulted in program closures “in a half dozen countries.”
“We’ve been accused of not being as transparent as possible on our website about donors,” Sullivan said, in an apparent reference to the reporting from the consortium of independent newsrooms including Drop Site News. “Truthfully, there is always a balance in saying, you know, is this going to cost us criticism in certain markets versus being criticized for not being transparent.”
Fitzgerald also emphasized political backlash against journalists with ties to USAID during her remarks, noting that this applied to “probably half the room and half the festival, one way or another.”
Sullivan recounted a prominent researcher’s advice to “Attack! Attack! Attack!” in response to criticism, and agreed that it was better to avoid addressing facts and to instead focus on discrediting the messenger through a coordinated campaign.
“You don’t want to respond, necessarily, to [critics’] direct allegations,” Sullivan said, “they know what they’re saying is bullshit.” Sullivan instead recommended that, “you have to try to redefine this as an attack on an organization by an extremist group.”
In February, amid the funding cuts from USAID, the author Michael Shellenberger made an incendiary allegation that—because the CIA whistleblower who initiated President Trump’s 2019 impeachment cited an OCCRP investigation in a footnote, and because OCCRP received significant funds from USAID—OCCRP had therefore helped impeach Trump by leveraging USAID money in a collaboration with the CIA. In an apparent reference to Shellenberger, Sullivan said, “We were attacked by some right-wing content creators in the United States who had done this to some other people,” citing the Stanford Internet Observatory, a Department of Homeland Security official, and “doctors who were fighting against anti-vaxxers” as similar previous targets.
“And within a day of the allegations, it was amplified by, you know, people no less than Elon Musk, Donald Trump himself amplified it, and then it went to a series of what was clearly troll armies that spread this attack,” said Sullivan, before speculating that, “It was almost as if this was all set up, and we believe it was, that this was basically an assassination attempt against us.”
Sullivan advised his audience to increase coordination in counterattacks against such critics, stating, “And the other thing you should do is have some friends ready to amplify your attack. You should have other organizations who are similar to you, you should notify them, you know, ‘In the event that we’re going to be attacked, can you please respond? Can you say something in our defense?’ Because that helps amplify your message and it’s more voices saying ‘This is an attack,’ that this is not something based in reality.”
In reference to Russian intelligence services, Sullivan told the festival’s audience that, “OCCRP is very much like a tank, you know. We’ve had seventeen years of being attacked by the GRU and the FSB and various governments around the region, and our credibility helps in the long run ameliorate these kinds of attacks."
“But the donor stuff is more sensitive.”
Following publication of this piece, OCCRP provided Drop Site with the following statement:
The advice from our publisher Drew Sullivan reflects the harsh reality of today’s global media space. Independent media is under attack all around the world from governments, state actors, malign businesses, and bad faith conspiracy theorists, including Drop Site News, which is remarkably non-transparent about its own funding and only lists a political action committee as a funding source.
OCCRP members operate in more than 50 countries, many of which do not follow democratic norms. The media has the right to protect itself. Sullivan understands that some media will choose not to identify all of their donors — not because their funding will reflect poorly on the media outlet, but because there are active programs in some countries to destroy the media and increasingly, civil society itself.
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