Pence's "Special Envoy" in Foreign Aid Office Sparked an Ethics Complaint Just After He Started

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Pence’s “Special Envoy” in Foreign Aid Office Sparked an Ethics Complaint Just Weeks After He Started His Job

Weeks before joining the administration, Max Primorac, a USAID appointee and adviser to Vice President Mike Pence, pushed the business interests of a client to an organization funded by USAID.

by Yeganeh Torbati May 13, 11:19 a.m. EDT

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In early 2018, an incoming Trump political appointee and ally of Vice President Mike Pence made an unusual suggestion to a United Nations agency whose funding hinged on support from a skeptical Trump administration: He pitched them to do business with one of his private-sector clients.

“Might merit your team’s consideration,” Max Primorac wrote in January, weeks before he formally started at the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he would eventually become an adviser to Pence.

The client pitch by an incoming official sparked a complaint a month later from an anonymous State Department official, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. The U.N. agency, the United Nations Development Program in Iraq, had by then received over $190 million in funding from USAID, the complaint said.

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