White House Engages In Vicious Conspiracy Theory Against Free Press

According to USAspending.gov, an official source for U.S. government expenditure data—and the resource used by Becker in his post—Politico received $8.2 million in total payments from government departments and agencies between fiscal year 2016 and fiscal year 2025. However, only $44,000 of this total came from USAID.

Neither Politico nor Johnson returned a request for comment from The Dispatch Fact Check. Becker could not be immediately reached.

It’s pretty bad that CNN would botch simple facts that badly but then CNN is terrified of Trump and probably people over there are demoralized. That’s still no excuse for quoting wrong facts. $8 million in subscription for multiple users for nine years is a lot more believable than $8 million for one year. Shame on CNN. But the real shame is on the White House and Fox News. OMFG.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed on Wednesday that Politico has been receiving funds from the U.S. government that will dry up as President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cracks down on spending.

Leavitt was asked about reports that “media outlets” will be impacted by Elon Musk’s plan to cut funding for U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Politico received at least $8.2 million from the U.S. government in recent years, with $44,000 of that coming from USAID, according to USAspending.gov.

“Upon coming out here to the briefing room, I was made aware of the funding from USAID to media outlets, including Politico, who I know has a seat in this room, and I can confirm that the more than $8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to, essentially, subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers dime, will no longer be happening,” Leavitt said.

“The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now,” she continued. “This is a whole government effort to assure that we are going line by line when it comes to the federal government’s books.”

Now here’s where it gets ugly.

The news from the White House came after a Politico staffer expressed concern that employees receiving their recent bi-weekly direct deposits late could have been tied to Musk’s spending crackdown.

Many Politico employees typically receive direct deposit every other Tuesday, but this week they woke up and noticed the funds didn’t hit their account. An employee told Fox News Digital that management didn’t communicate about the issue until 9 a.m., when they chalked it up as a “technical error.”

It was a technical error. Two things happening concurrently are being chalked up to the same causation, which is the government paying Politico, rightfully, for products it sells and Fox News and the White House are characterizing it as left-wing propaganda paid for by the taxpayers. Wrong, wrong, and WRONG!

Now if Elon Musk wants to cancel subscriptions, he can cancel subscriptions. But there is specialized information in these subscriptions. The implication here from the White House, and reported by Fox News, is that the taxpayers are paying for Politico to write about the government. Yes, Politico does write about the government but the subscriptions in question are specialized research subscriptions, not just day to day journalism about the government. Those general articles are available for free and paid for by ads, like much of blogging content on the internet. That point is never pointed out anywhere and that is the crux of the matter.

But if Musk thinks the government will function better without information, then I guess he can bounce the Politico outlet. Why not? Bounce all media outlets he doesn’t like.

The irony here is that Benny Johnson, a key popularizer of this secret Politico funding theory, actually was himself secretly and illegally paid millions of dollars by the Russian government. He claims he didn't know the money was from Russia. https://t.co/JmCaVwf1pz

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) February 5, 2025

Here’s the bottom line:

1. PoliticoPro is a policy intelligence platform. It’s specialized information and a subscription to it is expensive, thousands of dollars a year. E&E is an environmental subscription, same premise.
2. Subscriptions to AP and Reuters are also paid for by the government. Along with subscriptions to the New York Times, Washingon Post, etc.
3. These subscriptions are being mischaracterized as some kind of evil doing, malfeasance, defrauding the taxpayers.
4. It’s all part of Trump’s plan to take down the free press.
5. Fox News and right-wing social media are right there with Trump. God knows it is to their benefit to eliminate the truth and have us living in an Orwellian Hell where the truth is memory holed.

This is very scary. But this is the new abnormal. Get used to it. And it looks like at the end of the day, independent media outlets are going to be the only place you can get the truth because none of them (I should say “us”) are owned by billionaire oligarchs who know nothing about journalism.

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