The right-wing disinformation machine on Wednesday transformed the banal reality that the federal government purchases subscriptions for news outlets into what President Donald Trump described as potentially “THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY.”

Federal employees need accurate, up-to-date information relevant to their areas of expertise in order to do their jobs. The federal government pays for subscriptions to a variety of news sources in order to ensure that its workers have that information.

One such news source is Politico, which took in more than $8 million from federal agencies last year, according to publicly available data published on the government website USAspending.gov. 

Politico is best-known for the inside-the-Beltway political reporting it publishes for free on Politico.com and through its Playbook newsletter. But the outlet also produces a premium subscription product focused on policy called Politico Pro, which includes “an advanced technology platform that includes legislative and regulatory tracking tools, government directories, transcripts, outreach trackers and more,” as well as workflow tools, and E & E News, a subscription product that focuses on energy and environmental policy. Subscriptions to these products reportedly cost in the upper four to five figures for a limited number of users. 

There’s a reasonable argument to be had about whether Politico’s products are worth this level of expenditure by the federal government. But there are apparently plenty of institutions and individuals outside of U.S. agencies willing to shell out for them — including Republican members of Congress. 

“In total, 38 Republicans in the House spent over $300,000 on Politico subscriptions in the first nine months of 2024, and committees led by Republicans expensed almost $500,000 of Politico subscriptions in the same time period,” The Washington Post reported Wednesday. 

Politico also touts among its Pro subscribers Google, Johns Hopkins University, Amazon, and the AARP, as well as an array of researchers, lobbyists, and policy analysts. 

But on Wednesday, the conspiracy-obsessed dregs of the MAGA influencer crowd seized on the publicly-available data showing the federal government paying Politico for subscriptions, slapped it together with a payroll error that temporarily delayed paychecks at the outlet and a Trump administration freeze on the disbursement of foreign aid funds at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and attempted to concoct a major government and media corruption scandal.

“Fun Fact: @Politico received USAID funds. Everything makes sense now,” the former Fox producer Kyle Becker wrote in a viral post X before highlighting the Politico payroll snafu.

In another viral X post, MAGA streamer Benny Johnson claimed:

This is the biggest scandal in news media history:

No employee at Politico got paid yesterday. First time ever the company missed a pay period. This is a crisis.

Now we learn Politico — a “news company” — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was being massively funded by USAID.

Trump & Elon deleted their funding.

Now Politico will go out of business. 

The corruption is endless.

(Johnson, who was fired from BuzzFeed News in 2014 for engaging in mass plagiarism, received millions of dollars that originated with a covert Russian government propaganda fund bankrolling malign Kremlin influence campaigns, according to a 2024 federal indictment. He subsequently said that he was the “victim” of the operation and hadn’t known where the money was coming from.)

Reporters at more credible outlets spent the day providing the context that the MAGA warriors withheld (including that the money to Politico for subscriptions from USAID constituted only $44,000 over two years). But the White House added more fuel to the lie bonfire when press secretary Karoline Leavitt falsely claimed that USAID had paid $8 million for Politico subscriptions and that the contracts would be canceled. 

The MAGA conspiracy theory subsequently spread to Fox’s stars, who baselessly alleged that Politico’s reporters were getting paid off by the government to produce favorable reporting.

“It's grotesque,” Fox host Will Cain said of the Politico subscriptions on his afternoon show. “It's at a minimum subsidizing a political operation under the guise of a media. It's perhaps money laundering to ideological compatriots.”

“The money for Politico is a huge scandal.” Jesse Watters alleged on The Five. Watters claimed that the service “only started getting paid for by the Biden administration” and previously “a couple people had it in the government” (in reality, the federal government paid Politico at least $1 million in each year of Trump’s presidency, increasing to $2.6million in fiscal year 2020). 

“This is a payoff product, because when they started paying Politico, no one at Politico reported Biden was brain-dead for four years. They tank the laptop. They tank -- if you pay all this money, didn't you think you might learn Biden was brain-dead? They pay you not to do journalism,” Watters added. “

“Politico didn't get paid to do journalism — they got paid to stop doing journalism,” Watters added on his show that night, claiming that the Biden administration had been “funneling … taxpayer money over there in exchange for good coverage.”

These complaints are a bit rich. Federal agencies typically pay Dow Jones & Co., the corporate cousin of Fox, between $500,000 and $1 million per year, presumably related to subscriptions to Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. And also on Wednesday, Fox announced that it was hiring Lara Trump, President Trump’s daughter-in-law, to host a weekly show on the network.

Meanwhile, the president, who is deeply immersed in the daily rantings of his supporters and regularly regurgitates ludicrous conspiracy theories about the press, joined the attack on Thursday morning.

“LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS,” he wrote on Truth Social. “THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY! THE DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE. TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!”

The upshot of all of this nonsense is that the MAGA base has new lore they can use to explain away any unfavorable coverage for Trump from Politico. And executive branch officials at agencies will have less access to information than congressional Republicans or corporate lobbyists.

Idiotic MAGA influencers peddling nonsense are apparently part of the mechanism by which the government functions now.