Rubio is right: The ICC should be dismantled, brick by brick

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has picked a fight with The Hague, and the international-law priesthood is furious about it. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Rubio vowed the Trump administration would “dismantle the ICC, brick by brick, if necessary.” Human rights groups called it an assault on the “rules-based international order.” Editorial boards clutched their pearls.

They should look at who built the place first.

Luis Moreno Ocampo wasn’t some mid-level bureaucrat who slipped through the cracks. He was the ICC’s founding chief prosecutor, elected in 2003 by the court’s own member states, the man who spent a decade deciding which of the world’s atrocities were worth pursuing and which weren’t. He was, in every meaningful sense, the International Criminal Court.

And according to documents obtained by the French outlet Mediapart and examined by the European Investigative Collaborations network, he ran the office like a personal racket. While drawing a taxpayer-funded salary as the court’s top prosecutor, Ocampo allegedly controlled undisclosed shell companies in Panama and the British Virgin Islands and fed confidential court information to wealthy private contacts. The moment he walked out the door, he landed a reported $3 million consulting deal with a Libyan oil billionaire tied to men the ICC itself had investigated for war crimes. The court’s own watchdog eventually opened an inquiry into whether its own founding prosecutor had used inside knowledge to help paying clients dodge the justice system he ran.

The institution now being defended as humanity’s last check on genocide couldn’t keep its own chief prosecutor from selling access to it.

It didn’t stop there. Leaked recordings that surfaced this spring, reported by Newsweek‘s Romanian edition, appear to show Ocampo and his son plotting a paid influence campaign wrapped in the language of the Nagorno-Karabakh genocide question. The team, per the tapes, includes a former European Parliament aide who once advised the EU’s own foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, and now works to “shape European policy” on Ocampo’s behalf. The son doesn’t dress up the goal: “What we need to achieve is to remove Pashinyan,” he says on tape, referring to Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

Follow the money, because Azerbaijan’s president already has. Ilham Aliyev stated publicly that Ocampo’s funding traces to Samvel Karapetyan, a Russian-Armenian billionaire who built his fortune in Russia through the Tashir Group before parachuting into Armenian politics roughly a year before Armenia’s June 2026 election, and who spent much of that campaign under house arrest on charges of plotting to overthrow the government. His party still emerged as the country’s largest opposition bloc. The Center for European Policy Analysis has flagged the pattern for what it is: Russian-linked tycoons periodically reinvent themselves as opposition leaders at moments of crisis, giving Moscow a durable, well-funded lever inside a country it’s losing. Ocampo and his camp dispute the characterization of the recordings, and no court has settled the funding question. But the target tells you the story: Pashinyan is President Donald Trump’s partner in the Armenia peace framework, the one that handed a U.S. development finance arm a controlling stake in a strategic transit corridor and locked in a critical minerals deal aimed at cutting China out of the supply chain.

Moscow’s fingerprints on the motive aren’t subtle either. When Trump publicly backed Pashinyan and urged Armenians to “Make Armenia Great Again,” Russia responded by banning Armenian flowers, mineral water, and brandy and threatening to jack up the price Yerevan pays for Russian gas. Putin, meanwhile, dangled the line that Russia would have “nothing to say against” Armenia drifting toward the EU, the kind of throwaway indifference a patron affects right before trying to pull a client state back. A Kremlin-tied billionaire bankrolling a campaign to topple Pashinyan, using the ICC’s former chief prosecutor as the front man, isn’t a Caucasus border squabble. It’s an attempt to claw back an American-backed corridor by removing the man who signed off on it.

Somebody is trying to knock out an American ally, financed by Russian-linked money, dressed up in the vocabulary of international justice. That vocabulary belongs to the man who ran the ICC for its first decade, and he wasn’t done scaling it up. In further leaked material, Ocampo describes plans to move the whole operation onto “a platform that will use artificial intelligence,” calling the Armenia file a “pilot” for an AI-driven venture built to “organize global order and global disorder.”

That’s not a rhetorical flourish. Researchers at NewsGuard have found major chatbots repeating false narratives from the pro-Kremlin Pravda network roughly a third of the time, and European officials have warned, ahead of America’s own midterms, that pro-Russian networks are deliberately flooding AI systems to coax them into echoing Kremlin talking points. Ocampo’s own recordings supply the missing piece: a named individual, financed by Russian-linked money, describing his intent to industrialize exactly that kind of manipulation around a conflict that touches an American ally and an American-funded corridor.

Here’s the defense you’ll hear: One bad prosecutor doesn’t sink an institution. That works for a bank or a bureaucracy, where a crook can be fired, and the machine keeps running. It doesn’t work for the ICC. The court has no army, no territory, no revenue of its own. It has exactly one asset: the credibility of its judgment about who counts as a war criminal. Take that away, and there’s nothing left but a courthouse and a flag. The man who defined that credibility for 10 years was, based on the reporting, running it as a side hustle.

Now, set the Armenia file aside for a moment. The honest critics of Rubio’s campaign still have a point worth taking seriously. Look at the company America keeps if this goes forward: the states hostile to the ICC are Russia, China, Belarus, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. The states that support it are mostly Washington’s own allies. And the timing raises a fair question. Is this really about protecting American servicemen, or about heading off cases tied to Iran, Gaza, or Venezuela before they’re filed? Reasonable people can ask that and deserve a real answer, not a talking point.

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But the fix for a court that plays favorites isn’t to trust it more. It’s to stop pretending it earned the trust in the first place. Accountability for atrocity is a real need, genocide, war crimes, mass murder don’t stop mattering because the institution built to punish them turned out to be for sale. That’s exactly why it shouldn’t be left in the hands of a body that couldn’t police its own founder. American courts, American sanctions, and American power answer to voters. The ICC answers to whoever signs the consulting contract.

Rubio wants to take the court apart. Given who built it, the only real question is why it took this long.

Duggan Flanakin is a CFACT policy analyst.