Late 2024 a story broke about Russian disinformation campaigns.

The unnamed Tennessee-based company that the Justice Department alleges was being funded by Russian operatives working as part of a Kremlin-orchestrated influence operation targeting the 2024 US election is Tenet Media, which is linked to right-wing commentators with millions of subscribers on YouTube and other social media platforms, according to a US official briefed on the matter.

That story about foreign influence, basically to get a Russian operative into the White House, has now been expanded into White House executive policy – trying to ban all federal purchases of a news source that may be critical of the White House.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, responding Wednesday to a question about a right-wing conspiracy theory … elevated a bogus claim spreading on social media … In an X post, Will Sommer, a media reporter at The Washington Post, pointed out that Johnson, who helped buoy the false theory, ironically received secret, illegal payments from the Russian government.

The White House appears to be specifically targeting media it has a grudge against, to prevent freedoms in speech, by claiming it’s merely engaged in a spending review that is linked to its already illegal and racist grudge-based agency shutdown.