President Joe Biden’s USAID awarded an $800 million contract to a business operating out of a Virginia home even after it formally ruled that its key manager lacked “honesty or integrity” — a reference to the fact that, according to a May 12 guilty plea, he had secured USAID contracts through bribery for a decade.
The contract was for addressing “issues affecting the root causes of irregular migration from Central America to the United States” — the work that Biden assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris, but which she never appeared to address, a Daily Wire investigation found.
The Department of Justice announced Friday that Walter Barnes III, the founder of government contractor Vistant (previously known as PM Consulting Group, or PMCG) and Roderick Watson, a USAID contracting official, pleaded guilty to a bribery scheme in which Barnes and two others conspired to pay Watson $1 million in exchange for $544 million in contracts.
What has not been reported is that the Biden administration continued to steer contracts to Vistant/PMCG even after it knew of the massive corruption: the migration contract, even larger than the $544 million in the indictment, and others that are still active.
The $800 million contract went to a joint venture between Barnes’ company and CollaborateUp, a tiny consultancy run out of a suburban home in Falls Church, Virginia, where its CEO, Richard Crespin — who runs the company while also working at a think tank — lives. The Virginia home was the address listed on the $800 million contract.
In announcing its $800 million contract, CollaborateUp said it would address the “irregular migration from Central America to the United States” by addressing “climate change.” Its website also touts its work “advancing DEIA” and combating “misinformation.”
This year, it added Mark A. Green, a former Republican congressman who served as Donald Trump’s appointee to lead USAID during his first term, to its payroll as a “senior advisor,” according to its website.
Vistant’s criminal scheme relied on joint ventures to exploit a DEI policy called 8(a) contracting, which lets the government award contracts with no or limited competition when the recipient is a racial minority or a small business. It formed a joint venture with a larger company —which was bribing Watson and would actually do the work — so Watson could use Barnes’ status as a black man to steer the contracts to him, rather than being obligated to go through an open competitive process.
Barnes’ company ultimately received hundreds of millions of dollars, stripping his “disadvantaged” status, and the CollaborateUp joint venture reversed the maneuver, relying on CollaborateUp’s status as a small business to win a contract with limited competition, while relying on Barnes and other larger firms to actually do the work.
CollaborateUp says it “co-developed” USAID’s “procurement reform” policies “alongside former Administrator Mark Green.” That means the company that USAID put in charge of contracting reform got a massive contract for itself after partnering with someone who criminally corrupted the USAID contracting process, then put a former USAID official on its payroll.
The bribes by Barnes and his co-conspirators laid out in charging papers — which included cash, fake payroll payments, a country club wedding, a trip to Martha’s Vineyard, a down payment on a house, and basketball tickets — took place between 2013 and 2022. By 2023, USAID inspector general investigators knew of the corruption. On November 9, 2023, the government barred Vistant and Barnes from contracting based on “evidence of conduct indicating a lack of business honesty or integrity.”
That same day, it notified the Vistant-CollaborateUp joint venture, called PMCG CollaborateUp JV LLC, that it had been chosen for the “root causes of migration” contract.
A USAID contracting official believed the contract was “legally questionable” and told the contractors later that month that he was yanking it. He said that even though CollaborateUp owned 51% of the joint venture, according to the proposal, almost all the work would be done by Vistant or subcontractors. That meant CollaborateUp brought little to the table except being a middleman, while the contract’s “driving force” was banned for lack of integrity, according to civil court papers.
Yet the contractors appeared to feel so entitled to nearly $1 billion in government money that they took the government to court demanding it. It asked a judge for a permanent injunction “prohibiting USAID from rescinding its award.”
On June 10, 2024, Paul Young, a go-between who paid Watson to obscure the paper trail to Barnes, was indicted for his role in bringing Watson to influence “the award of USAID contracts valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.” The indictment refers to Vistant and Barnes as Company 3 and CC-3 and says, “Young began making payments from CC-3 to CC-1 [Watson].” It describes how, for example, in October 2022, CC-3 sent a down payment for Watson’s home to him through Young.
Two days later, on June 12, 2024, Judge Charles F. Lettow issued “a limited injunction,” punting the decision about the $800 million contract back to USAID to reevaluate. By that time, Vistant had been removed from the list of banned contractors, though the ban on its founder, Barnes, remained.
On August 22, 2024, USAID awarded the “indefinite quantity” contract of up to $800 million for “USAID Central America Regional Support Services” to PMCG CollaborateUp JV LLC. It made an initial payment of $10,000 that day.
Further demonstrating that the government knew at the time that Vistant/PMCG had gotten its previous USAID contracts through bribery, one week later, prosecutors offered a plea deal to a co-conspirator of Barnes, Darryl F. Britt, that laid out the findings of a long-running investigation from USAID’s inspector general. The plea deal referred to Vistant as Company 2, and Barnes as CC-2.
“Indefinite delivery” contracts are open-ended contracts that allow the government to send repeated work to a company over a period of time up to a maximum amount, meaning the government could pay PMCG CollaborateUp as much as $800 million, but could also pay less.
The migration contract was terminated in February 2025 — not because Barnes was corrupt, but because the Trump administration was shuttering USAID over suspicion that graft and insider deals were common, which liberals decried as a conspiracy theory.
Yet the Biden administration’s General Services Administration, which oversees government-wide contracting, also gave PMCG CollaborateUp JV LLC two contracts lasting five years each, despite the government’s knowledge that Barnes had gotten contracts through bribery.
On November 6, 2024 — the day after the presidential election — GSA awarded the joint venture an indefinite delivery contract through 2029, whose cap was listed as $999,999,999,999.00. It paid $2,500 as the opening salvo.
On December 19, shortly before the Biden administration left office, GSA gave it another indefinite delivery contract with similar terms. According to its GSA Price List, the company rents administrative assistants to the government for $93.68 an hour. CollaborateUp did not return a request for comment.
The half-billion dollar bribery scheme is just one instance of fraud at USAID that was known about during the Biden administration, but not prosecuted until the Trump administration.
Stephen Paul Edmund Sutton, a British citizen who worked for a USAID contractor, pleaded guilty on May 19 to taking kickbacks related to an electric program in Pakistan. Sutton and a co-conspirator who worked for him were in charge of giving out subcontractors to Pakistani vendors to perform work.
In 2015, the pair created two companies and had the contractor pay them for forklift and crane services. Then, those companies hired Pakistanis for half the amount. Prosecutors said the agency was defrauded of $100,000. Sutton was ordered to be handed over to immigration authorities instead of jail.
The Daily Wire previously revealed that USAID’s inspector general told a federal court in November that another foreign aid contracting official, Matthieu Zahui of the African Development Foundation, had steered contracts to a friend who secretly paid him personally. USAID had credible tips about Zahui for years, but didn’t take his phone until February 2024. The phone, it said, contained evidence that he was receiving wire transfers to his personal bank account from the owner of a contractor he had steered government funds to.
But USAID did not ask a judge for a search warrant to conduct further investigation until November 4, the day before the election. Zahiu has not been criminally charged as of now.
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[[{“value”:”
President Joe Biden’s USAID awarded an $800 million contract to a business operating out of a Virginia home even after it formally ruled that its key manager lacked “honesty or integrity” — a reference to the fact that, according to a May 12 guilty plea, he had secured USAID contracts through bribery for a decade.
The contract was for addressing “issues affecting the root causes of irregular migration from Central America to the United States” — the work that Biden assigned to Vice President Kamala Harris, but which she never appeared to address, a Daily Wire investigation found.
The Department of Justice announced Friday that Walter Barnes III, the founder of government contractor Vistant (previously known as PM Consulting Group, or PMCG) and Roderick Watson, a USAID contracting official, pleaded guilty to a bribery scheme in which Barnes and two others conspired to pay Watson $1 million in exchange for $544 million in contracts.
What has not been reported is that the Biden administration continued to steer contracts to Vistant/PMCG even after it knew of the massive corruption: the migration contract, even larger than the $544 million in the indictment, and others that are still active.
The $800 million contract went to a joint venture between Barnes’ company and CollaborateUp, a tiny consultancy run out of a suburban home in Falls Church, Virginia, where its CEO, Richard Crespin — who runs the company while also working at a think tank — lives. The Virginia home was the address listed on the $800 million contract.
In announcing its $800 million contract, CollaborateUp said it would address the “irregular migration from Central America to the United States” by addressing “climate change.” Its website also touts its work “advancing DEIA” and combating “misinformation.”
This year, it added Mark A. Green, a former Republican congressman who served as Donald Trump’s appointee to lead USAID during his first term, to its payroll as a “senior advisor,” according to its website.
Vistant’s criminal scheme relied on joint ventures to exploit a DEI policy called 8(a) contracting, which lets the government award contracts with no or limited competition when the recipient is a racial minority or a small business. It formed a joint venture with a larger company —which was bribing Watson and would actually do the work — so Watson could use Barnes’ status as a black man to steer the contracts to him, rather than being obligated to go through an open competitive process.
Barnes’ company ultimately received hundreds of millions of dollars, stripping his “disadvantaged” status, and the CollaborateUp joint venture reversed the maneuver, relying on CollaborateUp’s status as a small business to win a contract with limited competition, while relying on Barnes and other larger firms to actually do the work.
CollaborateUp says it “co-developed” USAID’s “procurement reform” policies “alongside former Administrator Mark Green.” That means the company that USAID put in charge of contracting reform got a massive contract for itself after partnering with someone who criminally corrupted the USAID contracting process, then put a former USAID official on its payroll.
The bribes by Barnes and his co-conspirators laid out in charging papers — which included cash, fake payroll payments, a country club wedding, a trip to Martha’s Vineyard, a down payment on a house, and basketball tickets — took place between 2013 and 2022. By 2023, USAID inspector general investigators knew of the corruption. On November 9, 2023, the government barred Vistant and Barnes from contracting based on “evidence of conduct indicating a lack of business honesty or integrity.”
That same day, it notified the Vistant-CollaborateUp joint venture, called PMCG CollaborateUp JV LLC, that it had been chosen for the “root causes of migration” contract.
A USAID contracting official believed the contract was “legally questionable” and told the contractors later that month that he was yanking it. He said that even though CollaborateUp owned 51% of the joint venture, according to the proposal, almost all the work would be done by Vistant or subcontractors. That meant CollaborateUp brought little to the table except being a middleman, while the contract’s “driving force” was banned for lack of integrity, according to civil court papers.
Yet the contractors appeared to feel so entitled to nearly $1 billion in government money that they took the government to court demanding it. It asked a judge for a permanent injunction “prohibiting USAID from rescinding its award.”
On June 10, 2024, Paul Young, a go-between who paid Watson to obscure the paper trail to Barnes, was indicted for his role in bringing Watson to influence “the award of USAID contracts valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.” The indictment refers to Vistant and Barnes as Company 3 and CC-3 and says, “Young began making payments from CC-3 to CC-1 [Watson].” It describes how, for example, in October 2022, CC-3 sent a down payment for Watson’s home to him through Young.
Two days later, on June 12, 2024, Judge Charles F. Lettow issued “a limited injunction,” punting the decision about the $800 million contract back to USAID to reevaluate. By that time, Vistant had been removed from the list of banned contractors, though the ban on its founder, Barnes, remained.
On August 22, 2024, USAID awarded the “indefinite quantity” contract of up to $800 million for “USAID Central America Regional Support Services” to PMCG CollaborateUp JV LLC. It made an initial payment of $10,000 that day.
Further demonstrating that the government knew at the time that Vistant/PMCG had gotten its previous USAID contracts through bribery, one week later, prosecutors offered a plea deal to a co-conspirator of Barnes, Darryl F. Britt, that laid out the findings of a long-running investigation from USAID’s inspector general. The plea deal referred to Vistant as Company 2, and Barnes as CC-2.
“Indefinite delivery” contracts are open-ended contracts that allow the government to send repeated work to a company over a period of time up to a maximum amount, meaning the government could pay PMCG CollaborateUp as much as $800 million, but could also pay less.
The migration contract was terminated in February 2025 — not because Barnes was corrupt, but because the Trump administration was shuttering USAID over suspicion that graft and insider deals were common, which liberals decried as a conspiracy theory.
Yet the Biden administration’s General Services Administration, which oversees government-wide contracting, also gave PMCG CollaborateUp JV LLC two contracts lasting five years each, despite the government’s knowledge that Barnes had gotten contracts through bribery.
On November 6, 2024 — the day after the presidential election — GSA awarded the joint venture an indefinite delivery contract through 2029, whose cap was listed as $999,999,999,999.00. It paid $2,500 as the opening salvo.
On December 19, shortly before the Biden administration left office, GSA gave it another indefinite delivery contract with similar terms. According to its GSA Price List, the company rents administrative assistants to the government for $93.68 an hour. CollaborateUp did not return a request for comment.
The half-billion dollar bribery scheme is just one instance of fraud at USAID that was known about during the Biden administration, but not prosecuted until the Trump administration.
Stephen Paul Edmund Sutton, a British citizen who worked for a USAID contractor, pleaded guilty on May 19 to taking kickbacks related to an electric program in Pakistan. Sutton and a co-conspirator who worked for him were in charge of giving out subcontractors to Pakistani vendors to perform work.
In 2015, the pair created two companies and had the contractor pay them for forklift and crane services. Then, those companies hired Pakistanis for half the amount. Prosecutors said the agency was defrauded of $100,000. Sutton was ordered to be handed over to immigration authorities instead of jail.
The Daily Wire previously revealed that USAID’s inspector general told a federal court in November that another foreign aid contracting official, Matthieu Zahui of the African Development Foundation, had steered contracts to a friend who secretly paid him personally. USAID had credible tips about Zahui for years, but didn’t take his phone until February 2024. The phone, it said, contained evidence that he was receiving wire transfers to his personal bank account from the owner of a contractor he had steered government funds to.
But USAID did not ask a judge for a search warrant to conduct further investigation until November 4, the day before the election. Zahiu has not been criminally charged as of now.
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