Georgian Parliament Speaker: past haunting USAID not only in Georgia but in US too
Shalva Papuashvili
Photo: Parliament of Georgia
Georgian Parliament Speaker Shalva Papuashvili on Sunday said the United States Agency for International Development, instead of strengthening friendship between Georgia and US, had committed “some unfortunate blunders” that had not been addressed properly yet.
“In the wake of the 2020 Georgian elections, USAID-funded NGO ISFED spread false PVT results, conducted with NDI software, claiming that the elections had been rigged. When Georgian Dream, after a few weeks of documenting the matter, exposed the scam, the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy admitted the mistake and confessed that the local USAID branch had known about the falsehood all along but chose to keep silent. This revealed that the local USAID chief Adam Schmidt, who assured us at a meeting that an audit was done on the ISFED data and there was no mistake, in fact, was telling a lie to both the Georgian government and people”, the Parliament Speaker said in a social media message.
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“A separate issue is the integrity of the then US ambassador to Georgia who assumed a mediating function between the authorities and the opposition, while, with a high degree of probability, knowing about the falsehood but, nonetheless, keeping silence”, he continued.
Papuashvili stressed that ISFED continued operations in Georgia to this day, through foreign funding, and was now claiming, again, that 2024 elections too were rigged, without releasing their PVT results, because they actually correspond with the Central Election Commission numbers.
“We have an informed suspicion that non-release happened under the USAID pressure. When I met with the USAID Deputy Administrator Shannon Green and her deputy Alexander Sokolowksi last year in Tbilisi and asked them to shed light on the 2020 scandal, I was advised to forget the past and look into the future. Well, it seems that now the past is haunting USAID not only in Georgia but in the United States too”, he concluded.
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