Trump official dismantling USAID had secret foreign meetings with Christian nationalists

Before Peter Marocco was selected to dismantle America’s entire foreign aid sector on behalf of Donald Trump,
he was an official with the State Department on a diplomatic mission.

In 2018, during Trump’s first term,
Marocco was a senior political appointee tasked with promoting stability in areas with armed conflict.

That summer, he made a two-week trip to the Balkans, visiting several Eastern European countries in what was advertised as an effort to
“counter violent extremism” and “strengthen inter-religious dialogue.”

At the time, the U.S. was trying to maintain a fragile peace agreement it had helped broker two decades earlier in the region.

The Balkans are still living in the shadows of the Bosnian war,
a 1990s conflict between the region’s disparate ethno-religious groups that led to the deaths of an estimated 100,000 people,
including thousands of Muslim civilians who were massacred by Serb forces.

To avoid compromising such delicate international relations, American diplomatic work is carefully prescribed,
even down to the people U.S. officials meet
— and those they should avoid, like politicians under Treasury Department sanctions for corruption or war crimes.

On a 2018 visit to the Balkans, Marocco secretly met with officials whom the American government had determined were off-limits without the highest levels of approval:
ethnonationalist Bosnian Serb separatist leaders.

Those politicians had been working for years to defy their nation’s constitution and undermine the American-backed peace deal
in an effort to promote a Christian Bosnian Serb state.

ProPublica pieced the episode together from interviews with seven current and former U.S. officials.

Among those in attendance was #Milorad #Dodik, according to one of the officials.

The leader of a political region within the broader nation,
Dodik was at the time under U.S. sanctions by the Trump administration for actively obstructing American efforts to prevent more bloodshed.
(The officials interviewed for this article requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the administration.)

Dodik has since called himself
“pro-Russian, anti-Western and anti-American” in a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin
and is currently under new sanctions for corruption charges.

He has also vowed to tear the country apart rather than allow the U.S. to unify it.
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-official-destroying-usaid-secretly-met-with-christian-nationalists-abroad-in-defianc/