White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaking to reporters on March 17, 2025

The New York Times reports Podcaster Benny Johnson has been a regular in the Oval Office since President Donald Trump and his aides invited right-wing entertainers into the press room. What’s less regular is his honesty.

The day after Trump announced the federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, the White House invited Johnson to the press briefing, where he told Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt and the rest of the press corps about recording murders on a camera outside his home, and that his “house was set ablaze in an arson” attack.

Claims by critics that Washington wasn’t dangerous, he said, were “lies.”

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But the Times reports police records showing no murders on Johnson’s block since at least 2017. And his home was not burned. It was a neighbor’s house that caught fire, according to the city’s fire department in 2021.

“Such details didn’t stop Ms. Leavitt from leapfrogging off his comments to promote the president’s federalization of Washington’s law enforcement,” writes Times reporter Ken Bensinger.

Johnson’s history does not suggest honesty, Bensinger adds. He got his start in media in 2011 at right-of-center website The Blaze before jumping to BuzzFeed News in 2012, where he was fired two years later, after editors discovered plagiarizing in 41 of his articles. Johnson apologized, but the Times reports three years later, his plagiarism continued at conservative news site the Independent Journal Review. He was suspended and then demoted after assigning an article that falsely implied that Obama had influenced a federal judge’s ruling that adversely affected Trump. Johnson also had to retract an article that falsely attributed information to Antifa.

And then, last fall, the Times reports federal prosecutors revealed charges against two Kremlin operatives who had paid $10 million to a company called Tenet Media to produce video content as part of an influence operation. Johnson was one of the influencers contracted by Tenet to create that content.

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He described himself as an unwitting victim of the Russian scheme.

More recently, the Times reports Johnson gained nearly 3 million new subscribers to his YouTube channel from April to July of this year, while also showing a suspicious drop in total monthly views of his videos by more than 40 million — an overt suggestion of manipulation.

“Clearly we’re dealing with an administration that’s far more focused on narratives than truth, and this conduct is consistent with that,” Freedom of the Press Foundation Director Seth Stern told the Times. “It is awful that real journalists who attempt to report real news and feel constrained by the pursuit of truth and don’t make stuff up are no longer able to get the access they once had.”

Read the New York Times report at this link.