I was seeing tweets connecting it to USAID, but I hesitated to blog it. Now, Meade sends me this link to ZeroHedge: "Politico, NY Times Propped Up By Millions Of Dollars From US Government." So, I'm putting that up and I'll excerpt this:
On Tuesday, staffers at Politico were notified that a 'technical error' had prevented paychecks from going out. Many joked that this had something to do with the Trump administration putting a freeze on USAID funding....And while there's no evidence the two are linked, the suggestion prompted internet sleuths to look into Politico's sources of funding. What they found was absolutely shocking. According to government spending tracker website USASPENDING.gov, Politico — which laundered the Hunter Biden '51 intel officials' propaganda during the 2020 election — received up to $27 million (and by some counts $32 million) from various US agencies during the Biden years....
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123 comments:
A giant scandal the size of a spectacular scandal.
High quality journalism is much more expensive to create than the shoddy junk you get from right wing sites.
I'm not shocked.
"$3.2 billion to the BBC"
First I was mad. Now I'm furious.
"High quality journalism" or State funded propaganda? Do you even know the difference?
We know that Democrat Party members and the DNC had a number of "journalists" on their payroll. This is my shocked face....
Astounding. Astonishing. The left are like termites silently eating away at the integrity of every institution in the country. It’s far worse than anything I anticipated. The Democrats truly are evil. I never thought I would say that.
Not surprising. The last few years the propaganda from our main street media was bad enough that it made the old Soviet Pravda look fair and balanced.
Sorry. My comment was intended to be subtly ironic.
I decided during the Kavanaugh hearings that the Dems weren't just the other party with roughly the same goals but disagreements over methods, but truly openly evil. There had been evidence over the years, but I kinda didn't want to admit it, but, for me, that's when the mask came off, they really were just power drunk monsters. The open brazen corruption now coming out is still a bit surprising in its scope.
And here all this time, I've been thinking they were all just well-intentioned, virtuous, useful idiots in a misinformed kind of way.
It is as though thousands of lazy girls and their lazy writing jobs cried out in horror, and were suddenly silenced. I feel something terrible has happened
A great disturbance in the farce.
Shut it down
Wow!
I knew they were propaganda rags
but I didn't know they were actual propaganda rags
"speak truth to power"
no, wait
"speak what they pay you to say"
NYT subscribers ought to get a tax refund
Nothing to see here. Do not look at the man behind the curtain.
So, does the government shovel money to the press because they are reliably left-wing or is the press reliably left-wing because the government is shoveling money to them?
Embrace the power of AND!
"High quality journalism is much more expensive to create than the shoddy junk you get from right wing sites."
You may have noticed that I almost never link to right-wing news sites. My links go to the NYT and other mainstream liberal sites.
I think I've linked to ZeroHedge 3 times in 20+ years (including this one today). And this post expresses doubt about whether to believe it.
But I also don't trust my usual liberal mainstream sites to cover all the news.
I watch ABC World News with David Muir. I do this not to be informed of what the news is but rather what "they" think is the news. In their reporting on USAID, they reported on the many children who will starve because of Trump's actions. The narrative was illustrated with pictures of starving children. There was no mention of any USAID funds being misdirected or misused......I wonder if their narrative will be the dominant one. I don't think I have ever taken any note of USAID until just recently. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the court of public opinion.
I'm bettin you ain't seen nothin yet! Just the tip of the iceberg.
I’m only surprised they didn’t do a better job of hiding it…
I made a WAG on Monday in a comment on Grimbeorn's post regarding Bill Kristol getting USAID money (through several cut-outs) that part of the reason that the Labour Party sent a bunch of their flacks over here to help Harris was because they knew if anybody looked closely at where money was flowing out of the US Government they were going to find all sorts of creepy crawlys under the USAID rock.
That *unt, Christine Blasey Ford, was bribed $1 million to falsely testify against Brett Kavanaugh. The bribe was illegally laundered through GoFundMe to hide its origins.
The Democrats aren't just evil ... it's a RICO-illegal political party no different from the Mafia. The party itself should be outlawed and its members jailed.
You will NEVER read this story in the New York Times.
…at least nobody will be held accountable..
FAR more children are KILLED with USAID funding that are fed by it (USAID being the primary spreaders of abortion in the third world.)
They didn't think they would have to. I guarantee that almost every Republican, and definitely the usual RINO suspects, are in on the grift.
"But I also don't trust my usual liberal mainstream sites to cover all the news."
That's only half the issue. The other half is if what they do report on is handled honestly.
The region says NO we want to live in Gaza RESPECT THE PEOPLE, Saudi Arabia says bullcrap. Riviera of the East statement is insulting. Egypt,Saudi,syria, the whole area says stay the FUK out of here.Why is America getting caught up in this bullcrap ? US soldiers occupying? Beautiful ocean side fronts..WTF...Musk can rebuild for the people, its their freakin homeland..trump does this look over here while I do this..Talk about being in every bodys business for a fee! trump says they ALL like the idea,,yeah except all the people in the region. Saudi says no Palestinians state they keep your ideas to yourself(or we'll cut off the cash floewto you know who)
Musk is blessing. I bet he found out the gov was funding twitter. He knew exactly where the funding was coming. He had lots of time to plan to expose and take down the corrupt operation.
From the ZeroHedge piece: "Once done with Politico look at its spawn Axios, founded by Politico veterans"
…not one shell corp or a single double Irish? Not just irreparably corrupt but lazy, too…
"all sorts of creepy crawlys under the USAID rock."
"A ball of worms" - Elon Musk
Weirdly, the left-wing claim that Gaza is the open air prison/refugee camp, that the density of the population is the highest in the world, that the situation in Gaza is unsustainable - and then object to the neighboring Egypt (which is where the ancestors of Gazans are from) allowing them to migrate there.
Can you explain?
It would surprise no one that the entire progressive media ecosystem is on the take. Kill them all with fire.
Not even that subtle.
I’ve tried to read the CRs but they are so intentionally vague it’s likely every one of these gifts ties to a line item. Fargin ice holes…
Keep wailing and rending your garments, Donkey Dau. It's therapeutic. We understand.
Leftist liberal: authoritarian and corrupt.
Rightist libertarian: independent and corrupt.
Diverse babies... virgins are aborted annually in iberal democracies with empathetic support as a wicked solution, their tissue recycled, their carbon sequestered, and the "burden" of evidence dies in darkness.
Worth noting that these appear to subscriptions, not grants. Still, I could understand an agency library maintaining a subscription, but hundreds of thousands of dollars for subscriptions for the rank and file just seems crazy. My agency won't buy us coffee.
Alice in Wonderland is not just a great fiction novel, it's easy to play too. It's not who was funded by a back door government funnel, it's who had the integrity to say no. The yesses are in the majority no doubt.
I hope I’m not the only one that spots the problem in Ann’s post…
Thank God for Musk's digital Avenger team. They've got the tools and the smarts to ferret out and fully disclose exactly where the funds have been going. The AI tools in particular are a game changer. Up until now all this fraud has been hiding in plain sight but couldn't be easily analyzed because of the sheer volume of the data. The AI makes it fast and easy.
I mention this also because I saw an article last night about a similar use of AI in New Jersey to analyze all the registered voter rolls in their 22 counties to cross-check and identify various types of registration fraud there. Brilliant. AI can do the same kind of rapid discovery, analysis and disclosure for election fraud that DOGE is doing for Treasury payment fraud and questionable use of tax money.
It's going to be a tough year for the Democrats and their networks of cash distribution/recirculation as well as fraudulent voter registrations.
Yeah, a byline of "Tyler Durden" with an accompanying photo of Brad Pitt's character from Fight Club just screams "legitimate journalism".
The Politico scandal is worse than you think. It’s not $8M that Politico received from USAID. It’s $34.3M that Politico has received from various swampy federal govt agencies. Politico is, without a doubt, a totally corrupt propaganda arm of the swamp.
Politico has never disclosed those payments even as they've written pieces covering USAID, posing as unbiased arbiters of truth. That represents one of the biggest scandals in the history of the press. The United States government was funneling money to a left-wing news outlet that has repeatedly done the bidding of the Democratic Party. As an example, you may remember Politico as the same news site that laundered the infamous letter from "51 intelligence officials" saying the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.
From RedState
Propaganda Broadcasting Service
Starving children are USAID's human shields.
That's why I have previously suggested a "truth in naming" for Politico as "Democratico: All the news we've been paid to print," as their masthead.
Think about how much worse this is than taxpayer dollars going to NPR and PBS, which at least aren't COVERT propaganda outlets.
They do this in Canada, the Liberal Party subsidies the press, and the press protects the liberal party, and without these subsidies, the press there would collapse.
A GIANT scandal?
Only the first of many…
"But I also don't trust my usual liberal mainstream sites to cover all the news."
Wait a minute. I thought you were supposedly reading this dreck in order to inform the rest of us about what lies the lying liars who always lie are telling today. You mean, you regard the NYT as a news site?
This is the USSR's archives opening up all over again.
Wow. Pictures of starving children? That is some high-speed reporting there. The funding was only cut yesterday. Hell, that's some high-speed starving there.
God bless Trump for not tipping his hand about going after USAID during his campaign (which probably would have spawned multiple additional assassination attempts) and then using DOGE and the relatively uncontroversial goal of reducing wasteful government spending as a Trojan Horse to get in there.
Now, if they had illustrated the narrative with images of the shocked hacks at Politico reading that e-mail ....
I am still getting over paying $39 million to the guy who became COVID patient zero to sew a Moderna spike protein designed to infect humans, and a bit of the AIDS virus in the a bat virus in Wuhan, then I learned that Barrack Obama's mother and grandmother both received CIA funding via USAID, and then I learned that a large segment of the Never Trump bloviosphere was funded with our tax dollars. It's just too much. If Trump fails, and he might, he will fail in a blaze of glory, like Achilles at Troy. Trump is epic.
“ You may have noticed that I almost never link to right-wing news sites.”
No problem. We’re glad to do that part.
You're right, Freder (as usual). That is kind of a sketchy bit of sourcing. So here, try this link. Half a million dollars to buy Politico Pro subscriptions for 37 users at the FDA. Seems legit.
"Yeah, a byline of "Tyler Durden" with an accompanying photo of Brad Pitt's character..."
Freder plays the role of mind guard here on Althouse. The idea is to get people to think about anything but these ideas which are dangerous to the whole narrative driven consensus manufacturing operation which is the DNC and the deep state.
Two front war
1...DOGE releases total payments to Politico, LLC...$8.2 Million in (checks document) 237 transactions. Politico misses payroll.
2...DOGE releases purchase order from Department of Health and Human Services for $443,998.00 for Politico Pro Subscription for 37 Users (checks calculator) or $11,999.94 each. Amount seems to keep individual items under $12,000 suggesting lower level approval required. Purchase Order coded item as Disaster Emergency Funds.
Can't wait til RFK Jr goes to work.
Interesting comment. It seems like USAID might be the main nexus of The Resistance. Trump figured that out and quickly shut it down.
Attribution on Obama please.
There was probably a carrot and a stick.
It should be remembered that Zerohedge.com was among the earliest, if not the earliest, news sites to break the Wuhan Institute of Virology/Covid-19 link, something that got them promptly cancelled across the board.
That alone elevates them far above the entire geriatric media ecosystem.
@Ficta: They were identifiably evil and RICO-like several years before that. Everyone who allowed Hillary's email server should be in prison. Everyone who sicced the IRS on conservatives should be in prison. Everyone with knowledge of Crossfire Hurricaine leading to the Mueller Investigation should be in prison. Then, we get to the openly treasonous stuff after that.
Trump's "Drain the swamp" talk ripped their masks away.
@Althouse: ZeroHedge has proven pipelines to people who know. They've been ahead of the mainstream -- and correct -- more times than I can count. They are far, far, far more reliably accurate than the WP or NYT. Still, ignore their promoted links on top, as those can be weird.
Google Ann Dunham and USAID and pick through the stories yourself.
"Amount seems to keep individual items under $12,000 suggesting lower level approval required. "
IF that's true, then it's time to trot out that statute they tried to use against Trump that makes it a crime to commit "fraud against the United States" (or some such term).
If you aren’t looking up companies in the database, you aren’t pissed enough. Politico LLC is the official title the Politico.com shows on their website. The USAspending.gov website notes that are affiliated with Sinclair, which I assume is Sinclair Broadcast Group. $5.14 million from HHS for a media company?
It’s ALL a giant scandal. The rocks have been kicked over and all of the the worms and beetles are milling around in confusion and terror. Corruption on an undreamed-of scale is being exposed. It is a bad time to be a Deep Stater or one of their minions.
Remember when Kammy Harris raised A BILLION DOLLARS, in like 3 hours?
All in little $20 contributions that couldn't be (WOULDN'T BE) traced?
And people guessed that the money was coming from The Ukraine?
It looks like it turns out; that ALL that money came from USAID..
Prove me wrong
@Freder Frederson: Let he who is without pseudonym cast the first stone.
for the lazy.. Here is Stanley (ann)'s book!
https://www.dukeupress.edu/surviving-against-the-odds
Author/Editor Bios
S. Ann Dunham (1942–1995), mother of President Barack Obama and Maya Soetoro-Ng, earned her undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral degrees, all in anthropology, from the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. Dunham spent years working on rural development, microfinance, and women’s welfare through organizations including USAID, the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, the Indonesian Federation of Labor Unions, and Bank Rakyat Indonesia.
For those who are interested in left wing journo pushback on the USAID cutoff of money to journalsis, here is the link to CJR's critique: https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/usaid-and-the-media-in-a-time-of-monsters.php
Money quote: "Journalists have been among those affected: according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the aid freeze appears to have put a hold on $268 million that was earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information” this year. In the recent past, USAID had boasted of supporting more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries—and yet, RSF notes, the full impact of the freeze is hard to measure, since many recipients are “hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks.”"
And Ms. Dunham's mother, Madelyn Dunham---who raised Obama while his mother was on assignment in Indonesia---acted as vice president of the Bank of Hawaii in Honolulu, which Madsen says was used by various CIA front entities. She handled escrow accounts used to make CIA payments “to U.S.-supported Asian dictators” including Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu, and President Suharto in Indonesia, Madsen says.
“In effect, the bank was engaged in money laundering for the CIA to prop up covertly its favored leaders in the Asia-Pacific region,” Madsen writes. “It is clear that Dunham Soetoro and her Indonesian husband, President Obama's step-father, were closely involved in the CIA's operations to steer Indonesia away from the Sino-Soviet orbit after the overthrow of Sukarno.”
https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1009/S00027/obama-and-his-family-tied-to-cia-for-years.htm
May have been for subscriptions to their news service, which initially was quite good. Many organizations in DC, including each Congressional office and Committee office had subscriptions.
"You may have noticed that I almost never link to right-wing news sites."
I'm not sure that Zero Hedge fits well in the "right wing news" category. They publish a variety of authors including some obvious Russian propaganda and Antiwar sites.
A word of caution, if you wish to maintain some small faith in the future of humanity - don't open the comments there!
I am not. nor have I ever claimed to be a journalist. Using my pseudonym to write what I intend to be a piece of serious journalism would of course be dishonest and unprofessional.
I had to dig to find the source documents. Here are three (of many).
The FDA: 37 users subscribing to Politico Pro for 2020, 2021, and 2022, and 49 users for 2023 and 2024 for between $2,000 and $3,000 each annually. https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_75F40120P00453_7524_-NONE-_-NONE-
The National Park Service: 1,000 annual print subscriptions to Politico for 2021-2024 for $200 each.
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_140F0422P0026_1448_-NONE-_-NONE-
Fish and Wildlife Services: Online subscriptions 2021-2024
https://www.usaspending.gov/award/CONT_AWD_140P2121P0047_1443_-NONE-_-NONE-
Etc:
https://www.usaspending.gov/search/?hash=c0db99717604798d8950ff11fb18b1bd
Check out Defending Democracy Together. USAID gives money to NGOs which give money to DDT. DDT's directors are the head honchos at theBulwark.com: Kristol, Charen, Longwell, Miller. The Bulwark concentrates almost entirely on attacking Trump. Presumably the NGOs got the money to do other things, but if they are also funding attempts to interfere in US domestic politics, shouldn't those NGOs have been denied government money?
Thanks for posting. I quit the Obama theatre after the person who verified Barry's birth certificate "drowned in the plane crash". Jeez, the only one who didn't survive. And after the font on the document was proved to not be in existence at the time, I just gassed out. This also explains turning off the verification of the credit card donations.
Scott Presler is a gem!
We need someone like that in WI!
Elon Musk found or had someone point out to him the $443,000 dollars the FDA shells out for 37 subscriptions to Politico. Those must be extra-special hyper-premium subscriptions with all the bells and whistles.
And indeed, top level Politico Pro subscriptions purportedly cost $10,000. I guess they include a lot of networking opportunities and access to staffers -- maybe even the inside track on planting stories.
Stick with your pseudonym Fredo, not even your comments are regarded seriously.
3.2 MILLION (not billion) to the BBC.
Still an outrage.
I'm sure they made clear that the "AID" part of USAID does not stand for "aid."
In an abundance of caution, I am now pointing out that this is sarcasm.
Where did you find that?
We need to wait to see what all the money was actually spent on. It might have been spent on advertizing or overpriced subscriptions. Granted it still might have been money that was improperly spent, but we won't know until it's all accounted for.
As we all know, there has never been a shortage of the government doing perfectly legal spending that is wasteful or ethically wrong. But that doesn't automatically make it illegal spending.
It is the subscriptions that are the channel for state money funding the journolism industry. I am not surprised and I think USAID is just the tip of the iceberg here- I bet various government agencies buy 10s of thousands to 100s of thousands of hard copy and digital subscriptions from the news business.
@Rabel: Yes, regarding their user comments. I learned an entirely new and disturbing meaning of "joggers" there.
What the hell do all those government agency employees need subscriptions to Politico for? I can see a few for top management. I can also see that a lot of subscriptions to the NYT might--might--be justified (my personal opinions of the NYT notwithstanding). But Politico?
What an incredible s*show we’re finding. We knew these journos were being paid to gaslight us, but it’s shocking to see we’re the dupes paying them. People need to go to jail. How much have they stolen from taxpayers? Claw it back!
Makes the Clinton Foundation seem pikers.
Maybe not, I'll wait.
Politico Pro subscriptions cost thousands of dollars and provide a suite of analyses. I would expect this kind of kneejerk ignorance from a Boebert type but not a law professor.
other mainstream liberal sites...
Rapidly being proven to be the clandestinely funded Deep State propaganda.
Master of Greased Palms Joe Biden taught Godfather Bill and Godmother Hillary, who in turn taught the young'uns The Way to Profit. The students included Barack Obama.
Corrections: "Left-wing biased source Politico Pro..." "I would expect and demand fairness from a government agency that was acting in good faith."
https://www.allsides.com/news-source/politico-media-bias
Shouldn't "subscriptions" (i.e., expenses, expenditures) come out of the specific government agency's budget? Why would these go through a USAID grant, an agency who's primary responsibility is supposedly foreign aid?
They've been hiding in plain sight for years, and it worked. There's just too much raw data to comb through, and too many layers of laundering. All it took was a couple of nerds on twitter - Oilfield Rando and Data republican - to develop a couple of search bots that crawl the data and provide it in comprehensible chunks.
It's not just Politico, it is the NYT, and the AP. Pravda media. I am thrilled they are being called out, and will lose their jobs. We have crops to pick and Hollywood needs people to clean their toilets, so they can get a job there. No welfare. Suffer.
Althouse said, "I think I've linked to ZeroHedge 3 times in 20+ years (including this one today). And this post expresses doubt about whether to believe it."
Good thing you have a husband with common sense.
https://twitchy.com/dougp/2025/02/05/karoline-leavitt-has-a-costly-message-politico-and-other-media-outlets-will-not-like-n2407898
“And here all this time, I've been thinking they were all just well-intentioned, virtuous, useful idiots in a misinformed kind of way.”
Politics creates heated discussion, but you only get the forehead vein bursting spittle flecked horror response when your funding is assailed.
The scandal is growing.
A newly uncovered federal contract shows that Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC (TRSS) was awarded over $9 million for a secretive program labeled “Active Social Engineering Defense (ASED) Large Scale Social Deception (LSD).”
The contract, issued by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), suggests the U.S. government is funding large-scale influence operations designed to shape public narratives.
Thomson Reuters Special Services is owned by the same parent company as the Reuters "news" agency.
Ann, don't you feel kinda....used...let alone... dumb.... to learn that your trusted left-wing sources have been paid millions by the federal government to spout radical leftist propaganda?
And how do you square "cruel neutrality" with relying only on left-wing sources?
Say… didn’t that ponce James VandeHei (co-founder of Politico, now with Axios) run his mouth in a big, big way just a few months ago about who the legitimate journalists really were?
Lousy corksoakers!!!
"the NYT and other mainstream liberal sites"
"Mainstream liberal"? If you say so.
"Politico Pro subscriptions cost thousands of dollars and provide a suite of analyses."
We tax payers are paying millions of dollars so that government employees can get political analyses?
"We tax payers are paying millions of dollars so that government employees can get political analyses?"
What business do government employees have getting involved in politics while they're at work?
Trump learned a lot from his correct assessment of the Burisma/Biden/Ukraine situation I think.
"What business do government employees have getting involved in politics while they're at work?"
Figuring out how to get more taxpayer money.
It is 99.9% graft- no one in government needs to have the government pay for this "pro" subscription- I don't give a flying fuck what Politico claims it does.
A million here, a million there, after awhile you're talking about real money.
The narrative was illustrated with pictures of starving children.
"Get that sandwich out of here! It doesn't work unless he LOOKs hungry!"
Keep digging! So far you haven't gotten past the deniability threshold.
"Shouldn't "subscriptions" (i.e., expenses, expenditures) come out of the specific government agency's budget?"
Most of them do. That's the difference between the 8 million figure (USAID payments) vs. the 32 Million ( money paid for subscriptions out of agency budgets).
You can see all the money paid to politico on the USASPENDING.gov link.
Enter Politico as a keyword, scroll down to the submit button and wait for it to come up.
34 million / 12,000 = 2833 felonies!
The ethics of the lesson is funds are fungible. Democracy suffers from progressive viability as it evolves with redistributive change schemes.
The primary debt forcing is esconced under the Obamacares umbrella. Can they identify and abort the minority weeds and still save the lawn from a Green and blighted environment under a blue sky? Good luck.
I have always assumed that many (most?) of the most vile comments on zerohedge are put there to discredit the site.
Speak for yourself. I can never understand what Dinky is incoherently and ungrammatically always raving about.
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