Politico – incestuous media poster child

Politico – incestuous media poster child
By Terry A. Hurlbut
Yet another scandal broke yesterday from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), still checking USAID’s books, discovered some infuriating things. Among them was their careful cultivation of a leftist media outlet, Politico. They funded them indirectly, but the funding was effective, just the same – nor was USAID the only agency. This funding turned Politico into a government organ in all but name. And when Musk shut off the spigot, Politico suffered a shocking financial shortfall.
Details of the Politico connection to USAID and other agencies
Ben Kew at The Gateway Pundit broke the story yesterday morning at 10:30 a.m. EST. The facts he revealed were sketchy, and other news outlets dispute some of them. But this much is beyond dispute: Politico has received $8.2 million from various agencies since 2016. A very angry journalist named Isaac “Ike” Saul of the site Read Tangle shared these details:
Alright I swear this is the last time I am going to try to explain this but nobody can read govt docs so here goes!
1. Politico did NOT get "$8 million in a year" from USAID. It got $8 million from 2016 to fiscal year 2025 from ALL government agencies and departments.
2. USAID spent a grand total of $44,000 on Politico Pro subscriptions over two years. That is it. It was for a subscription to their trade pub E&E.
3. All of this information is freely available on http://USAspending.gov, the source website everyone is getting these numbers from.
4. Politico Pro is not = Politico dot com, the website you are all familiar with. It is a premium subscription service that has dashboards, tools, legislative tracking, etc. In many cases it costs north of $10,000/year per subscription.
5. If you are sharing claims counter to these, you are spreading disinformation because you don't know how to read a government database.
Shortly after CNAV read that post, Mr. Saul, or someone else, deleted it.
Mr. Saul shared no specific search results from USA Spending to support his apology for Politico. But a separate organ called The Dispatch did share such search results, and provided more details:
• Total revenues to Politico LLC from all agencies, from 2016 to Fiscal Year 2025: $8.2 million.
• Revenues from USAID came as subscription fees by two USAID bureaucrats, who each purchased a subscription to Politico’s premium E&E (Energy and Environment) newsletter. (See here and here for documentation.)
• The E&E newsletter is only one Politico premium subscription product. Another is Politico Pro, a “policy intelligence platform.” The Departments of Energy (DOE), Health and Human Services (HHS), and the Interior (DOI) all have bought subscriptions to both. The Dispatch provided three examples, one each from DOE, HHS, and DOI.
Small amounts add up to bigger ones, and the amounts quoted, while not quite adding up to a million a year, do come close.
Questions many aren’t asking
Erick-Woods Erickson, normally no friend of anything “Trumpian,” asked the questions Isaac Saul refused to ask:
• Would Mr. Saul, for example, have overlooked these figures if Republican legislative aides or other staff had bought such subscriptions? (And to continue the analogy, used Caucus Dues to pay for them?)
• Why did staff in these Cabinet departments pay such sums for premium subscriptions? Are Politico’s products really that good, objectively speaking?
• What do government staff need with premium subscriptions anyway? Can’t their house organs give them the same information?
Here is one question even Erick-Woods Erickson didn’t ask. Why, at the very moment this story broke, did Politico miss payroll? From Max Tani, Media Editor at Semafor:
Staff at Politico did not get paid for the latest pay period. The company just sent several emails to employees saying it believes there was a technical error, and is looking into how to fix the issue.
https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/1886776855312687477
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, and the third time it’s enemy action.
Ian Fleming
At DOGE’s suggestion, the new confirmed or Acting Secretaries of the departments involved, as well as Secretary Rubio as Acting Director of USAID, canceled these subscription contracts.
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.
https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1887208656854270086
Elon Musk, as head of DOGE, warned that:
Many media outlets are going to experience a mysterious drop in revenue.
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887164691199254919
Predictable defenses started rolling in, and from more than Read Tangle. CNN’s Brian Stelter called the cancellations “a symbolic stick-it-to-the-media gesture.”
https://x.com/brianstelter/status/1887208896994877853
Similarly, The Washington Post said the $8.2 million was “just paying for subscriptions.” In a statement that Fox News quoted, Politico flatly denied being a “beneficiary of government programs.” Of course they defended their premium subscriptions as a “valuable” source of information to “public and private” clients.
Analysis
Cancellation of subscriptions that bring in revenues of $1 million a year is certainly more than “a symbolic… gesture.” That goes double when, as seems likely, that cancellation makes the publisher miss payroll, even if temporarily. More to the point, this explains revelations two former Politico reporters made in the week of the Inauguration. Ben Kew (see above) shared a transcript of a podcast by Tara Palmeri, in which she interviewed former colleague Marc Caputo on this subject.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm3XiIKD910
Politico, of course, led with a headline about the 51 spooks who disparaged the Hunter Biden Laptop story. As Facebook and Twitter (as it was then known) took down stories about the laptop, Politico editors specifically instructed their staff not to write about it. Politico also suppressed stories about Biden’s already bad mental condition and his family financial and other crimes. These two reporters called their editors cowards for killing their stories.
Politico also published the leaked first draft of Justice Samuel A. Alito’s opinion in the Dobbs decision.
Any publisher faces a dilemma when a Big Story could offend a large advertiser – or subscription bundler. When that advertiser or bundler is the government, that directly compromises the role of an adversarial press. But when a cadre of bureaucrats sways a publisher to skew stories to help an opposition candidate get elected, that makes them more dangerous than Rome’s Praetorian Guard, who could make or break Emperors.
Thus we have seen an example of the Deep State in action.
Link to:
The article:
https://cnav.news/2025/02/06/news/politico-incestuous-media-poster-child/

Breaking story:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/02/revealed-politico-received-huge-amounts-taxpayer-money-usaid/
https://www.readtangle.com/
https://x.com/Ike_Saul/status/1887269202869768509
https://www.usaspending.gov/
https://thedispatch.com/article/fact-check-politico-usaid-funding/
https://www.usaspending.gov/recipient/fa0cefae-7cfb-881d-29c3-1bd39cc6a49e-C/latest
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_720DD123PC00130_7200_-NONE-_-NONE-
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_72REFS24PC00047_7200_-NONE-_-NONE-
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_89603020P0023_8960_-NONE-_-NONE-
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_7524_-NONE-_-NONE-
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_140P2121P0047_1443_-NONE-_-NONE-
https://ewerickson.substack.com/p/just-keep-some-perspective

Cancellation, etc.:
https://x.com/maxwelltani/status/1886776855312687477
https://www.yahoo.com/news/doge-cancels-politico-government-funding-200829761.html
https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/1887208656854270086
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1887164691199254919
https://x.com/brianstelter/status/1887208896994877853
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/05/republican-ire-usaid-finds-an-unusual-target-politico/
https://www.foxnews.com/media/politico-denies-beneficiary-government-programs-questions-swirl-over-taxpayer-funding

Effects:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/01/former-politico-reporters-reveal-how-company-killed-negative/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pm3XiIKD910

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