Influencer Who Received Russian Funds Added to White House Press Pool

On 28 March 2025, The Dai­ly Beast report­ed that a right-wing influ­encer who was paid to spread Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da dur­ing the 2024 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion has been added to the White House press pool. The arti­cle begins:

A right-wing influ­encer who was paid hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars to spread Russ­ian pro­pa­gan­da dur­ing the 2024 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion has been added to the White House press pool. On Fri­day, some­one from Tim Pool’s “Tim­cast” YouTube chan­nel will be part of the press pool cov­er­ing Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump, said Will Som­mer, a jour­nal­ist with The Bul­wark, in a social media post on X. The deci­sion comes after the White House stripped the Wash­ing­ton, D.C. press corps of its author­i­ty to decide who among its cor­re­spon­dents will be part of the dai­ly rota­tion of reporters assigned to fol­low the pres­i­dent. That opened the door for the White House to bring in sym­pa­thet­ic pod­cast­ers and influ­encers, even as it has banned the Asso­ci­at­ed Press from par­tic­i­pat­ing in the pool or trav­el­ing with Air Force One. Pod­cast­er Tim Pool was one of six con­ser­v­a­tive influ­encers fea­tured by Tenet Media, a Ten­nessee-based com­pa­ny that was secret­ly fund­ed by Russ­ian state media employ­ees, accord­ing to a crim­i­nal indict­ment filed in September…

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Key Points:

• Tim Pool report­ed­ly earned $100,000 per episode for a show with Tenet Media, a com­pa­ny alleged­ly fund­ed by Russ­ian state media.
• Offi­cials described Pool as “unwit­ting” in the scheme, allow­ing him to keep the mon­ey despite the Russ­ian connections.
• The White House recent­ly stripped the DC press corps of author­i­ty to select pool reporters, enabling direct selec­tion of influencers.
• The Asso­ci­at­ed Press remains banned from the press pool after refus­ing to use Trump’s pre­ferred “Gulf of Amer­i­ca” terminology.

Pool has been active in a wide vari­ety of US right-wing “cul­ture war” activ­i­ties, and in April 2022, the GIOR report­ed that his pod­cast was one of a group of right-wing pod­casts pro­mot­ing false the­o­ries about the exis­tence of US-sup­port­ed bio­log­i­cal weapons capa­bil­i­ties in Ukraine.

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