I'm certainly no expert, but there should be at least two mega-scandals that come out of the utterly corrupt USAID. The POLITICO scandal that you outlined, plus USAID may have funded some overseas "media" two write news articles (with fictious facts, of course) that were used to support the first impeachment from Trump 1.0. Talk about a coup... the demontards were trying to unseat a sitting US President with nothing but their own made up lies!
Why would the swamp want to do this? It's because the never ending ATM machine known as Ukraine was about to be exposed by Trump. Ukraine was actually making progress on becoming 'not-so-corrupt' until Biden, in a blatant act of family-preservation and self-preservation had the prosecutor who was likely going to expose the entire corrupt operation, fired for the exact type of quid pro quo that the demontards accused Trump of attempting with his phone call to Zelensky. Well sumbitch, the prosecutor was fired in exchange for $1B in loan guarantees (as everyone with an open mind has by now heard Bribe'em say in his own words!) Yes, the Ukraine ATM was used by politicians from both parties, aka the swamp dwellers. Of particular interest to Joe Bribe'em was that the entire Bribe'em crime syndicate were on the verge of being totally exposed by the soon to be fired prosecutor. Given the timeline, all this Ukraine ATM corruption was going on while Obama was president, and with his point man for Ukraine, Joe Bribe'em neck deep in corruption. Of course Obama knew what was going on and did nothing to stop it.
So the media then and now aren't really trying to protect Bribe'em and his crime family. I doubt the media would give a fcuk about the Bribe'ems if they had a pocket full of fcuks to give. They were/are protecting the chosen one, Obama.