From anti-corruption investigations to viral communication. The career of Jon Ossoff

In January 2019, Jon Ossoff’s mobile phone suddenly lit up with a flurry of calls and messages. They were from colleagues at the small documentary production company he ran, bearing terrible news. The previous evening, Ahmed Hussein-Suale Divela, a Ghanaian journalist and colleague of Ossoff’s, was driving through the outskirts of Accra when two men on a motorbike pulled up alongside his BMW and opened fire through the window. The bullets struck him in the neck and chest, killing him instantly. A few months earlier, Ossoff had worked with Divela on a documentary about corruption in African football. The investigation, which had used a hidden camera to film FIFA’s second-highest-ranking official in Africa accepting a bribe, had sparked a political storm in Ghana. A prominent member of the Ghanaian Parliament had reacted by inciting violence against Divela during a television broadcast: “If you come across him anywhere, slap him… beat him up,” he had said. “Whatever happens, I’ll pay for it.” On the evening of 16 January, the two armed men had followed Divela to his neighbourhood. No one has been convicted of the murder. Ossoff, who had served as a security adviser to the team in Ghana, was devastated by the news of Divela’s death. “I have never been so devastated by anything in my professional life,” Ossoff recalled in a recent interview. “It was everything I detest: corrupt people, exposed for their corruption, taking revenge by killing a journalist.”

But the episode also taught him a lesson. Exposing corruption attracted attention, and attention was a form of power. Seven years on, Ossoff, now a US senator, is putting that theory into practice in his re-election campaign in Georgia and is also testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2028. During the election campaign, Ossoff has focused on an aggressive anti-corruption message, highlighting his investigative work in the Senate and attacking President Donald Trump and his “Mar-a-Lago mafia”, whom he accuses of profiting from the presidency.

This message has galvanised voters in Georgia, where polls show Ossoff with a clear lead over his Republican opponent: a dramatic reversal compared to 2024, when the state voted for Trump by a narrow margin. Online, meanwhile, videos of his tirades against ‘the criminal president’ have gone viral on multiple occasions, filling social media feeds with cinematic overhead shots of Ossoff speaking solemnly from a lectern. The viral videos have drawn flattering comparisons with the aesthetic of Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, fuelling the buzz surrounding Ossoff as a potential outsider in the presidential race. Yet Ossoff’s ability to turn an anti-corruption message into viral content comes as no surprise to his former colleagues at Insight Film, the independent production company he ran from 2013 to 2021. According to interviews with colleagues and close associates from that period, his time at the helm of the company served as a sort of unconventional apprenticeship in the workings of the modern attention economy. It was there, they say, that he first grasped the power of corruption as a political issue and learnt to turn anti-corruption investigations into effective political entertainment. “He understands communication as a medium,” says Clive Patterson, who joined Insight in 2008 and is now its chief executive. “He knows how to connect the dots to form a bigger picture and present it in a way that people can really relate to.”

During the election campaign, Ossoff cited his career as a documentary filmmaker as one of his key credentials for tackling allegations of corruption and self-interest within the Trump administration. In an interview, he cited his work in the Senate, where he led investigations into abuses in federal prisons and within Georgia’s foster care system, as an example of the skills he had developed as a producer. “I applied the investigative skills I learnt whilst running Insight to carry out truly incisive oversight in the Senate,” he said. But the lessons from his film career go beyond the mechanics of anti-corruption investigations. At Insight, Ossoff began to hone the viral communication techniques that fuelled his rise to national prominence. “When I watch these videos and see him talking about corruption and Trump, I think: ‘Hey, that’s nothing new’,” says Anas Aremeyaw Anas, a Ghanaian undercover journalist who has frequently collaborated with Ossoff’s company. “That’s the Jon I know.”

Ossoff’s journey into film began in 2003, in a plum orchard in south-west France. Ossoff, then aged sixteen, was on holiday with his family when he was invited to dinner at the home of a family friend. Sitting opposite him was Ron McCullagh, a British documentary-maker who had founded his own production company, Insight News Television, in London in 1991. The two discussed documentaries and foreign affairs, and McCullagh was impressed by Ossoff’s knowledge of global politics. They stayed in touch after Ossoff returned to the United States and, in the summer of 2008, whilst Ossoff was a student at Georgetown University, McCullagh invited him to undertake a summer placement at the company’s London office. The fledgling professional relationship soon proved beneficial to both of them. In 2011, whilst Ossoff was already working as a senior foreign policy adviser to Congressman Hank Johnson (a Democrat from Georgia), McCullagh produced a film with the Sierra Leonean journalist Sorious Samura on corruption in the country’s timber industry. The film implicated the Vice-President of Sierra Leone and caused such a serious scandal that the government threatened to arrest Samura. To protect his journalists, McCullagh rang Ossoff to ask for help from Washington. Ossoff informed Johnson, who in turn organised an open letter, signed by 18 fellow members of Congress, calling on the State Department to investigate the situation in Sierra Leone. Shortly after the letter was published, Samura and his team managed to leave the country safely. Two years later, Ossoff was back in the UK: he had left Capitol Hill to study for a master’s degree at the London School of Economics. The decision to leave Washington, he explained, was partly due to his distaste for the extent of corporate influence in the capital, which he had witnessed whilst working on the annual defence appropriations process. “I couldn’t stand the corruption,” he said in a 2020 election advert.

In London, Ossoff would occasionally meet McCullagh for lunch at the Frontline Club, a private club frequented by war correspondents. During one such meeting, McCullagh made him an offer: would he like to take over as the company’s chief executive? Ossoff, who had once dreamt of becoming a diplomat, accepted, despite having no experience in journalism or film beyond his internship at Insight. Within the company, McCullagh’s decision to promote a 26-year-old student to the top job initially raised some eyebrows. The suspicions were fuelled in part by the financial agreement Ossoff had accepted upon joining: he and McCullagh would each invest $250,000 in the company, which was on the brink of insolvency. Much of Ossoff’s stake came from an inheritance received in 2008 following the death of his grandfather, a successful leather goods manufacturer. Samura, who was a co-owner of the company at the time, says that Ossoff’s colleagues knew he was well-off, but that his wealth was not a decisive factor in his recruitment: “We knew he had a bit of money, but we also knew he had the skills to bring it in for us.” Once on the job, his colleagues say, Ossoff quickly earned the trust of the small team. “He had a sort of natural aptitude for the kind of work we were doing,” says Patterson: “He was very sharp.”

As chief executive, Ossoff’s first move was to rebrand the company as “Insight Twi”, short for “The World Investigates”, to highlight its collaborations with foreign journalists. He then set about sorting out the accounts. In his first year, he made his mark amongst the increasingly select group of broadcasters willing to invest in international investigative journalism, securing commissions from Al Jazeera English for two investigations: one on Rwandan strongman Paul Kagame and another on China’s growing influence in Africa. Diarmuid Jeffreys, a commissioning editor at Al Jazeera who has collaborated with Ossoff on various films, recalls that Ossoff could be ruthless when negotiating the terms of agreements. “Jon was stubbornly determined to secure every last cent they needed to make these films,” recalls Jeffreys. Ossoff also found new sources of funding to support the company’s work. In January 2015, he secured a grant of $350,000 from the Omidyar Network, the philanthropic foundation funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, for a training programme for investigative journalists in Africa. Together with investments from Ossoff and McCullagh, these moves put the company back on a relatively stable financial footing: by the end of 2015, it had just over $150,000 in the bank, according to financial documents filed in the UK at the time. Ossoff personally oversaw the various stages of Insight’s production process, including research and development, editing and distribution. He also doubled the size of the small team, hiring four new researchers and junior producers. Among the directors, he gained a reputation as a particularly hands-on producer who was always present on location. “At the end of every day’s filming, we’d have a sort of debriefing,” says Joshua Baker, who directed a 2018 film produced by Ossoff about the Islamic State’s abuse of a Yazidi woman in Iraq. “A couple of times I literally rang him at three in the morning so we could discuss the situation together and run through possible scenarios.”

Ossoff proved to be particularly cautious when it came to risk management and information security. One of his first reforms as chief executive was to move all company communications to encrypted channels, and Baker recalls working with him on a risk assessment document of over 50 pages prior to filming in Iraq. He was also interested in the technical aspects of filmmaking. Before the team began filming the documentary on Kagame, Patterson recalls, Ossoff used part of the company’s limited budget to upgrade to a higher-spec camera. “He wanted to invest in the film’s aesthetics,” says Patterson. “He understood the language of cinema.” Ossoff’s meticulousness could sometimes irritate his reporters. When he worked for the BBC, for example, it fell to him to ensure that reporters adhered to the broadcaster’s complex rules on undercover filming. In disputes between the broadcaster and the reporters, he often sided with the broadcaster out of an excess of caution. “I used to get angry with him,” recalls Anas. “A crime is taking place right before my eyes and you want me to do all this paperwork?” Ossoff worked mainly from home in Georgia and from the company’s London office, but his job occasionally took him out into the field. In 2014 and 2015, he travelled to Kenya and Ghana with Jeffreys and his colleagues from Insight for a series of workshops for African journalists. The trip offered his colleagues a rare opportunity to see his more relaxed side. On the evenings after the workshops, Anas recalls, Ossoff liked to visit neighbourhoods off the tourist trail in Accra, where he would eat zongo rice with his fingers and work up a sweat over bowls of spicy stew. One evening, the team gathered at the bar of the run-down hotel to play a drinking game called ‘top shelving’, in which they competed to see who could drink the most exotic spirits from the top shelf of the bar. “I thought I was pretty good at it, but Jon beat me,” recalls Jeffreys. “When I think back on it, it still annoys me a bit.”

In November 2016, Insight was preparing to publish a series of investigative reports on Latin America when the US went to the polls. Ossoff’s colleagues say that Trump’s surprise victory shook him to the core. “Much of his work has focused on oppression and human rights abuses,” says Helen Spooner, a researcher and producer hired by Ossoff in 2015: “I think he saw what was coming in America.” Some colleagues were nevertheless surprised, however, when, in January 2017, he announced that he would be stepping back from the day-to-day running of the company to stand for a seat in Congress in Georgia. “He’d never spoken about politics in that way before,” says Spooner. Other colleagues were less surprised. Samura recalls a conversation he had with Ossoff early in his tenure at Insight about the persistence of racism in the southern United States. Impressed by Ossoff’s views on the subject, Samura joked that he and McCullagh sometimes fantasised about Ossoff one day being in the White House. Ossoff, he recalls, simply smiled and gave an evasive answer. “He gave almost a politician’s answer,” says Samura. “You could tell this young man was thinking big.”

Ossoff returned to Insight in July 2017, shortly after narrowly losing the run-off. He threw himself back into the organisation’s work, launching an investigation into a series of unsolved murders in Malawi and a behind-the-scenes look at Anas’s investigation into corruption in African football. Both projects encountered problems. In February 2018, a team of reporters led by Anas was in Malawi to investigate the murders, which had been traced back to a group of hitmen selling human body parts for ritual purposes. Posing as a local businessman, Anas had arranged a meeting with one of the killers, but the operation went awry: the meeting was postponed until after sunset, when a group of villagers mistook Anas and his crew for the killers, threatening them with machetes and pelting them with stones. The team eventually managed to escape with the help of the local police, but only after blowing their cover and exposing the investigation. The incident, which led to recriminations between the crew and McCullagh, who was overseeing the production, troubled Ossoff, who was very safety-conscious. “He wasn’t happy with what we’d done,” recalls Anas, acknowledging that the team had taken a risk by continuing the meeting even after sunset.

The lingering unease from that episode influenced the handling of subsequent operations. For two years, the Anas team, of which Divela was a member, carried out a series of undercover operations targeting African football officials, culminating in an operation that filmed FIFA’s second-highest-ranking African official accepting a bribe of 65,000 dollars. In June 2018, Anas’s production company released a documentary on the investigation. The film quickly became an international sensation, leading to the dissolution of the Ghana Football Association, the suspension of several referees and the resignation of a senior FIFA official. Alongside Anas’s film, Insight released its own documentary with the BBC on the making of Anas’s investigation. The films prompted fresh threats against Anas and his team. In Ghana, Kennedy Agyapong, a Member of Parliament whose allies had been implicated in the investigation, used his popular television programme to broadcast photos of Divela and details of his and Anas’s movements. The team in Ghana stepped up security measures, but the situation on the ground remained dangerous. On 16 January 2019, Divela was shot dead. Following the shooting, Ossoff travelled to Ghana to speak at Divela’s funeral and published an editorial in the Washington Post calling on international press freedom organisations to investigate the murder, which remains unsolved. But the experience brought home to him the limits of his influence as a journalist. “To really make a difference,” Ossoff recalls thinking after the shooting, “you have to get involved in the political arena.”

Eight months later, in September 2019, he announced his candidacy for the Senate in Georgia. Ossoff formally left Insight in February 2021, the month after his victory in the run-off. Shortly after taking office, he transferred ownership of the company to Patterson and another colleague, who reorganised it as Insight Film. Ossoff received no compensation for relinquishing his stake, which was valued at between 1 and 5 million dollars according to the documents. Since then, his former employees have observed with a sense of déjà vu as Ossoff has brought his cinematic approach to the fight against corruption in the Senate. Patterson cites his performances during recent hearings, in which the senator clashed with Trump’s nominees over their support for the administration’s controversial policies.

“I recognise the person questioning those individuals before the committee very well,” says Patterson. During a confirmation hearing this summer, an impassive Ossoff sat at the table opposite Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence. “Who won the 2020 election?”, asked Ossoff. “I’m not going to play along with this,” replied Clayton, shifting uneasily in his chair. “This is a job interview,” retorted Ossoff. “Who won the 2020 election?” Clayton dodged the question and Ossoff pressed him again. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, an exasperated Clayton threw up his hands and leaned back in his chair. Before the hearing ended, Ossoff’s team edited the exchange and posted it on social media: it immediately went viral.