D.C. Judge Sides With Trump In Lawsuit Over Control Of Corrupt Foreign Aid Agency

A Washington, D.C., judge on Tuesday threw out a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s control of the African Development Foundation, a small federal agency that locked its doors to prevent Trump’s staff from entering and had to be physically taken over by U.S. Marshals.

The suit was brought by Ward Brehm, a former member of the agency’s board of directors, which is appointed by the president. On February 24, the White House notified Brehm that he was fired. But Brehm later insisted he was not just on the board, but had become president of the agency — not Pete Marocco, the architect of the USAID demolition, who Trump also named as president of the similar African aid group.

Senior Judge Richard J. Leon ruled that Brehm “never lawfully held the position, and the Court is not at liberty to unilaterally install him as president. The Court therefore finds that summary judgment is warranted for the defendants.”

“The ‘President may remove anyone he appoints,’ unless Congress ‘wishes to restrict the President’s removal power,’ which it ‘must make clear in a statute,'” he wrote, citing precedent.

The White House removed all five board members on the same day, but ADF staff would not share contact info for the board members with Trump staff, and notifications to members besides Brehm were sent to invalid email addresses.

On February 28, the White House wrote to the African Development Foundation’s Chief Financial Officer, Mathieu Zahiu, that the agency had become “Board-less” and Trump had temporarily appointed Marocco as acting chair.

Zahui consulted with the fired board members, then told the White House that agency staff would not recognize Marocco as their boss because “a board nomination requires Senate confirmation.”

On March 3, the old board held a meeting that purported to appoint Brehm as the chair. They notified Congress that they had seen the February 28 email, but that Brehm was the new president.

Marocco then held a board meeting with only himself and terminated Brehm. “Since then, both Brehm and Marocco claim to be USADF’s president,” the judge wrote.

Judge Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote that Brehm could not be president of the agency because he had been fired from the board before it supposedly elected him president. Even the other board members, whose emailed termination notices were bungled, knew they had been fired, he said.

“President Trump removed the board prior to Brehm’s appointment, and thus Brehm was not lawfully appointed! Brehm’s removal claims must therefore fail.”

He noted that chief financial officer Zahui consulted with the previous board members before refusing the accept the White House’s appointee, and that “Zahui effectively notified the Board members of their terminations.”

A Daily Wire investigation found that, according to the USAID Inspector General, Zahui received secret payments to his personal bank account after improperly steering contracts to a friend. One of the contracts was for travel during COVID, when no one was traveling. A search warrant was executed on Zahui’s phone in November, but as of now, he has not been criminally charged.

The Daily Wire’s investigation found that the African Development Foundation affirmed many of the fears that critics expressed about USAID, particularly that money advertised as going to poor people in third-world countries was being rerouted to D.C. bureaucrats and their friends.

The African Development Foundation sent “grants” to African groups on the condition that they send part of the money to American groups affiliated with agency officials and even wire money directly to the personal bank accounts of Foundation employees in Washington, the investigation found.

By law, the group is only permitted to give aid to African groups, and the maneuvering allowed Congress to think it was a low-overhead charity sending the bulk of its money to Africans, when in reality, it was essentially cooking the books.

“The grant was provided to an African organization … a grant can pay for people,” Zahiu told the Daily Wire about one instance of the agency forcing an African group to use part of its grant to pay the salaries of D.C. staff. “Yeah, granted, they were in D.C.” He also said that after DOGE changed the office’s locks, he gained access through a back door.

One longtime employee said the agency’s staff locked DOGE out because “the contracts don’t make sense, and they know [DOGE] will find lots of wrongdoing and illegal activity.”

“I’m not a fan of DOGE, but some of the things they’re doing need to be done. They have been operating like this for years, and no one did anything about it,” she said.

Another employee, program manager Kate Ristroph, explained in a videotaped internal investigative interview obtained by The Daily Wire how an agency official gave a grant to an African group on the condition that it route some of the money to his former employer in D.C. “We’re in that murky territory of like, is this legal?” she said.

Mateo Dunne, the agency’s former lawyer, said he was summarily removed from his job by CEO Travis Adkins after sounding the alarm about lawbreaking.

One piece of misconduct he raised involved one of the now-fired board members, John Agwunobi.

Agwunobi was the CEO of Herbalife, a company accused of being a pyramid scheme, and used the federal agency to push the multi-level marketing firm in Africa months after it paid a $122 million settlement to the Department of Justice to settle charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. ADF misrepresented the partnership as being with a nonprofit when it was actually with the for-profit company, and connected Africans with the company’s reps, he said.

Adkins also bragged about concealing operations from Brehm and other board members, saying “them white motherf***ers, they don’t need to know … I don’t think I should tell them s***,” his former assistant told The Daily Wire.

The assistant, who is black, said in a sworn affidavit that “On at least three occasions, Mr. Adkins told me that he wanted his entire team (to include the General Counsel) to consist only of Black people. He wanted all of his direct reports to be Black.”

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