American intelligence agencies intercepted Ukrainian government communications in late 2022 describing an elaborate scheme to redirect hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid — money designated for clean energy projects in a war-ravaged country — back across the Atlantic to fund President Biden’s re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The intercepts have now been declassified and were obtained by Just the News.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, upon learning of the communications, directed USAID officials to search their records for any sign the plot was actually executed — and to determine whether the matter warrants a criminal referral to the FBI.
What her team found, or rather did not find, is itself a story. There is no substantive evidence the allegations were ever seriously investigated during the Biden years. Officials have also said the communications are not believed to be the product of Russian disinformation.
The declassified document is a summary of raw intelligence. Its language is precise and, if accurate, remarkable.
“The Ukrainian Government and unspecified U.S. Government personnel, through USAID in Kyiv, reportedly developed a plan that would provide hundreds of millions of US taxpayer dollars to fund an infrastructure project for Ukraine that would be used as a cover to send approximately 90% of funds allocated to the DNC to fund Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.” The plan, the summary continued, was designed with an exit: the infrastructure project would eventually be rejected as unnecessary, but by then the money would already be gone — allocated, dispersed, and untraceable.
The scheme, as described, had a certain bureaucratic sophistication. American subcontractors — their names still classified, redacted from the version obtained by Just the News — were identified as the vehicles through which the funds would move. Contracts would be written to resist scrutiny. The paper trail, by design, would lead nowhere. “In this manner,” the summary states, “most of the U.S. funding would be diverted to Joe Biden’s election campaign without the ability to track where exactly the funds came from.”
None of this has been proven. The intercepts describe a plan discussed, not necessarily a plan executed. That distinction matters enormously. But it also matters that serious allegations of foreign interference in an American election — interference allegedly involving American government personnel — apparently generated so little investigative urgency at the time.
The revelations land at a delicate moment. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is currently engaged in sensitive negotiations with President Trump’s envoys over a peace framework to end the war Russia launched in 2022. Whatever the ultimate legal significance of these intercepts, the politics surrounding them are, to say the least, complicated.
