The Speaker of the Georgian Parliament writes on the social network X that the "USAID, instead of strengthening friendship between Georgia and US, committed some unfortunate blunders".

"USAID, instead of strengthening friendship between Georgia and US, committed some unfortunate blunders that have not been addressed properly yet. I called on US Congressional investigation into these probably deliberate blunders but to no avail. https://tinyurl.com/3mpc9ufe

In the wake of 2020 Georgian elections, USAID-funded NGO ISFED spread false PVT results, conduced with NDI software, claimed that the elections had been rigged. When Georgian Dream, after a few weeks of documenting the matter, exposed the scam, ISFED admitted the ‘mistake’ and confessed that the local USAID branch had known about the falsehood all along but chose to keep silence. This revealed that the local USAID chief Adam Schmidt, who assured us at a meeting that audit was done on the ISFED data and there was no mistake, in fact, was telling a lie to both Georgian government and people.

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.

ISFED continues operations in Georgia to this day, through foreign funding, and is 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 US too", - writes Shalva Papuashvili.