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No Graft Found

Was former U.S. president Barack Obama caught "laundering money through the Cayman Islands" for private gain in March 2025, as a social media post claims? No, that's not true: The viral post misrepresented the words of a guest on the Joe Rogan podcast. That person was talking about U.S. government funding of a "Cuban Twitter", not about Obama's direct involvement in the project that social media described as money laundering. The story is more than a decade old. As of this writing, no credible sources implicated the former president in personal enrichment from the "ZunZuneo" project.

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on March 23, 2025. It opened:

BREAKING: Obama busted laundering money in the Cayman Islands.

This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:

(Source: X screenshot taken on Mon Mar 24 14:09:23 2025 UTC)

The post implied that former U.S. president Barack Obama (archived here) was caught laundering money overseas for personal gain in March 2025, but did not elaborate on the circumstances and timing of the purported wrongdoing.

The post partially repeated the language of other entries published in the same timeframe. Those examples can be seen here (archived here) and here (archived here).

Entries mentioning Obama, financial transactions and the Cayman Islands emerged on social media following Mike Benz's appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast published on YouTube on February 12, 2025.

However, Benz, who is now the director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (archived here), did not accuse the former president of benefitting personally from overseas money laundering.

The fragment of the interview that went viral on social media starts at the 1:20:08 mark in the original recording. In it, Benz begins by mentioning the Obama administration but then implies that his White House was also "fooled" by the architects of the effort to launch a Twitter-like social media platform in Cuba:

This was a scandal during the Obama USAID era. Now, we were running a number of rogue USAID operations in Cuba at the time, by the way. I have to say for the record I'm no fan of the Cuban government, I'm not even weighing in on whether it's the right or wrong thing to do you know -- in terms of regime change there or you know liberating people there from autocratic excess by that government. I'm simply showing the American people where your tax dollars are going and how these things are structured in order to systematically fool you, and to fool Congress, and to fool the White House.

In the clip, Benz went on to talk about "ZunZuneo".

By the moment of the podcast's recording, the story had been known for at least 11 years.

As reported by the Associated Press in April 2014 (archived here), ZunZuneo was a USAID-run program aimed at creating a "Cuban Twitter". Both the news agency and the Guardian (archived here) mentioned companies set up in the Cayman Islands said to have served the purpose of concealing from the Cuban government the project's ties with the U.S. government. While those articles raised questions about the program, they did not accuse Obama of "laundering money in the Cayman Islands" for personal enrichment. Furthermore, according to the AP and the Guardian, it was unclear whether Barack Obama had any prior knowledge of the project.

In December 2015, the Office of the U.S. Inspector General issued a report about the program (archived here). On page 7, it noted that "the methods designed to conceal funding sources and recipients pose inherent risks" but emphasized that it "did not find any evidence of fraud". The report said nothing about any purported Obama personal financial gains from the project.

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Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning USAID can be found here.