💥Barricades, bureaucrats, and opium · Darren Beattie with Glenn Beck

Barricades, bureaucrats, and opium: Darren Beattie reveals to Glenn Beck what deep-staters tried to pull at USIP (US Institute of Peace)
Aug 27, 2025
Beattie provided insights into what the old guard at the US Institute of Peace tried to cover up amid the DOGE's takeover.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Glenn Beck:
This is probably the most INSANE Deep State story you've never heard.
The State Department's Under Sec Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie debunks ProPublica’s claim that DOGE “targeted” an “Afghan scholar who fled the Taliban”:
“There was a whole saga of a takeover of the US Institute of Peace under DOGE.
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Just to give you a sense of what these [US Institute of Peace workers] were like, they barricaded themselves in the offices. They sabotaged the physical infrastructure of the building. There were reports of loaded guns within the offices.
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There was one hostage situation where they held a security guard under basically kind of a false imprisonment type situation. It was extremely intense. Far more so than the better known story of USAID.
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And in the course of all of that, they tried to delete a TERABYTE of data of accounting information that would indicate what kind of stuff they were up to. What kind of people they were paying.
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And in the course of that, DOGE found that one of the people on their payroll was this curious figure who had a prominent role in the Taliban government and then seemed to play a bunch of angles across each other.
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The question is, what the heck is an organization like this doing having an individual who is a former Taliban member on their payroll?!
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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.
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One truly bizarre thing is that one of the US Institute of Peace's main kind of policy agendas was basically lamenting the fact that the opium trade had DISSIPATED under Taliban leadership. 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!
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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 US Institute of Peace was involved in that story to some degree.
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The ProPublica thing, as usual and as expected, was a total joke…What's very clear is he was a former Taliban guy, and he was probably one of these people who was playing all sides, made a lot of enemies.
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This has nothing to do with DOGE.
This random former Taliban guy, I think his contract was $130,000.”

@glennbeck
https://x.com/i/status/1960410635793260796

ARTICLE:
https://www.theblaze.com/news/barricades-bureaucrats-and-opium-darren-beattie-reveals-what-deep-staters-tried-to-pull-at-usip