Flack Who Axed USAID Leaves State Department

The Guardian reports:

Pete Marocco, the Trump administration official who played a major role in dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID), has left the State Department, a US official said on Sunday.

“Pete was brought to state with a big mission – to conduct an exhaustive review of every dollar spent on foreign assistance. He conducted that historic task and exposed egregious abuses of taxpayer dollars,” a senior administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Trump has claimed without evidence that USAID was rife with fraud and run by “radical left lunatics”, while Musk falsely accused it of being a “criminal” organization.

NBC News reports:

In early 2023, online sleuths who aided the FBI in cases against hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters identified Marocco and his now-wife as being among the rioters who stormed the Capitol in 2021, pointing to multiple images of them on the Capitol grounds that day and CCTV video that shows the man they identified as Marocco entering the Capitol through a broken window.

Photos of the person who entered the building were a strong facial recognition match for publicly available images of Marocco, online sleuths said. Marocco, like hundreds of others whom sleuths identified as people who entered the Capitol, was not charged before Trump pardoned all Jan. 6 defendants.

Marocco did not respond to a request for comment. Reached by D Magazine last year, he did not deny that he entered the Capitol, but he referred to “smear tactics and desperate personal attacks.”

There’s more at the first link. No paywall.