The U.S. Institute of Peace acting president Dr. Darren Beattie told Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck on Tuesday about the melee that took place at his agency’s headquarters during its takeover by the Department of Government Efficiency in March.
Beattie, who is also undersecretary for public diplomacy at the State Department, revealed both the lengths that deep-staters went to cover their tracks as well as what illicit trade the agency apparently had an interest in propping up in Afghanistan.
The USIP is a taxpayer-funded think tank established by Congress in 1984 that had a budget last year of $55 million. The Heritage Foundation noted in a 2024 report that the agency lacked transparency and mechanisms to ensure fiscal accountability; was full of partisans; and had greatly overstepped the bounds of its original mission.
Beattie told Beck that the USIP is an “important member of the NGO archipelago,” whose quasi-governmental, quasi-private “chameleon character” helps America’s foreign policy establishment “fulfill some of those more sensitive functions that had been exposed in the course of the Church [Committee] hearings” regarding misconduct by American intelligence agencies, including the CIA.
Pursuant to President Donald Trump’s Feb. 19 executive order concerning the “reduction of the federal bureaucracy,” the DOGE set to work earlier this year on eliminating bloat and inefficiencies at the USIP.
The Trump administration fired the voting members of the agency’s board of directors along with the USIP’s president, former Clinton official George Moose; terminated nearly all of the institute’s staff and activities around the world; had elements of the DOGE take over the institute’s headquarters; and transferred USIP’s property to the General Services Administration.
Deep-staters apparently desperate to cling to power at the agency tried to fight this house-cleaning, not only filing legal challenges but getting physical.
After DOGE member Kenneth Jackson was temporarily made acting president of the agency, Trump’s efficiency team attempted to enter the USIP’s headquarters. However, Moose and agency staffers repeatedly barred their entry.
Finally, on March 17, the DOGE managed to enter with the help of law enforcement.
In response to Moose’s claim that the “DOGE has broken into our building,” the DOGE responded:
Mr. Moose denied lawful access to Kenneth Jackson, the Acting USIP President (as approved by the USIP Board). @DCPoliceDept arrived onsite and escorted Mr. Jackson into the building. The only unlawful individual was Mr. Moose, who refused to comply, and even tried to fire USIP’s private security team when said security team went to give access to Mr. Jackson.
Beattie told Beck that during the DOGE takeover of the agency, USIP staffers “barricaded themselves in the offices. They sabotaged the physical infrastructure of the building. There were reports of there being loaded guns within the offices.”
“There was one hostage situation where they held a security guard under basically kind of a false-imprisonment type of situation,” continued Beattie. “It was extremely intense. Far more so than the better-known story of USAID.”
‘I think even more bizarre than having this former Taliban guy on the payroll is the kind of schizophrenic posture in relation to Afghanistan exhibited by the US Institute of Peace.’
Beattie noted further that “in the course of all of that, they tried to delete terabyte of data — of accounting information that would indicate what kind of stuff they were up to, what kind of people they were paying.”
After the DOGE secured the headquarters, former Trump adviser and DOGE head Elon Musk indicated that the DOGE recovered the terabyte of financial data that USIP staffers allegedly deleted to “cover their crimes.”
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The DOGE not only exposed significant waste and alleged fraud but questionable contracts, including a $132,000 contract with a former Taliban official, Mohammad Qasem Halimi, who served as the extremist regime’s chief of protocol, then later as a “fixer type” in Afghanistan.
“What the heck is an organization like this doing having an individual who is a former Taliban member on their payroll?” Beattie said to Beck.
Beattie suggested ProPublica’s recent attempt to paint Halimi as a victim of the DOGE was a “total joke,” stressing that “he was probably one of these people who was playing all sides, made a lot of enemies.”
“I think even more bizarre than having this former Taliban guy on the payroll is the kind of schizophrenic posture in relation to Afghanistan exhibited by the U.S. Institute of Peace,” continued Beattie.
The USIP’s acting president suggested that his supposedly peace-focused agency was apparently interested in keeping Afghanistan’s opium trade alive and well.
“One truly bizarre thing is that one of the U.S. Institute of Peace’s main kind of policy agendas was basically lamenting the fact that the opium trade had dissipated under Taliban leadership,” said Beattie. “They had multiple reports coming out, basically saying, ‘This is horrible that the opium trade is diminished under the Taliban. We need to find some way to restore it.’ How bizarre is that?!”
“The whole story of opium and Afghanistan and its connection to government entities is a very intricate and delicate and fascinating one. But it seems very clear that the U.S. Institute of Peace was involved in that story to some degree,” added Beattie.
Beck noted that “this is the real deep-state stuff that I think bothers people so much. Look, we expect our CIA to do stuff — we don’t necessarily want it to do it, but we expect it. But when it’s in the State Department, when it’s in every department … pushing money to NGOs to overthrow governments, it’s out of control.”
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The post Barricades, bureaucrats, and opium: Darren Beattie reveals to Glenn Beck what deep-staters tried to pull at USIP appeared first on TheBlaze.
