The day after President Trump announced the federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, the White House invited the podcaster Benny Johnson to sit in what is called the new media seat at the administration’s press briefing. The privilege includes being called on first by the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt.
Mr. Johnson took the opportunity at the briefing to recount what he claimed was his own experience with crime in the nation’s capital in recent years. He said that he had recorded murders on a camera outside his home, and that his “house was set ablaze in an arson.” Any claims that Washington wasn’t dangerous, he said, were “lies.”
“Thank you for making this city safe, because no parent should have to go through what my family went through,” Mr. Johnson told Ms. Leavitt.
In fact, police records show, nobody has been murdered since at least 2017 on the block where Mr. Johnson lived in Washington. And his home was not burned, though his next-door neighbor’s house was “intentionally set” on fire, according to the city’s fire department. Mr. Johnson left Washington permanently 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.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump and his aides have routinely excoriated traditional news outlets for what they call misleading and dishonest reporting about the administration. But the White House has had no such reservations about right-leaning influencers, figures such as Mr. Johnson, who have a documented history of playing fast and loose with the facts.
These new media personalities enjoy rare access and support from the administration. They, in turn, give the White House unwavering cheerleading for the administration’s agenda, blasted out to millions of followers on social media.
Among them is Jack Posobiec, who in 2017 helped spread the debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory and last year stated that his goal was to “overthrow” democracy; Tim Pool, a podcaster who last fall was revealed to have been paid indirectly by Russia as part of a secret political influence operation; and Julie Kelly, a right-wing journalist who helped start the false narrative that the Jan. 6, 2021, riots were an “inside job.”
Even among that group, Mr. Johnson, who has a large following on YouTube, a popular daily podcast and a large X account, stands out for his checkered journalistic record. Over the years, he has been fired from one job for plagiarism and suspended from another for publishing an article containing an unfounded conspiracy theory about Barack Obama that was later retracted. He has been accused of repeatedly propagating false election information and, like Mr. Pool, produced videos that had been secretly funded, via a seemingly legitimate media firm, by Kremlin operatives.
Nonetheless, Mr. Johnson has repeatedly been given access to high-level Trump administration officials and invited to take place in numerous events, including sitting on a Justice Department panel titled “Forum on Big Tech Censorship” a few months ago and occupying the coveted new media seat on an important day for the White House.
“Clearly we’re dealing with an administration that’s far more focused on narratives than truth, and this conduct is consistent with that,” said Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a First Amendment nonprofit. “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.”
Mr. Johnson directed questions to his lawyer, who did not comment.
Davis Ingle, a White House spokesman, said in a statement that “Americans’ trust in the mass media is at its lowest point in more than five decades.”
“That’s why the White House has embraced new voices across the political spectrum with significant and growing audiences to better reflect the media habits of the American people in 2025,” he added.
Mr. Johnson, 39, a father of four who is originally from Iowa, got his start in media in 2011 at The Blaze, the right-of-center website started by the former Fox News host Glenn Beck. He quickly showed a talent for creating memes and viral content.
He jumped to BuzzFeed News in 2012, but was fired two years later, after the publication found instances of plagiarism in 41 of his articles. At the time, Mr. Johnson posted an apology: “To the writers who were not properly attributed and anyone who ever read my byline, I am sincerely sorry.”
Three years later, while at the Independent Journal Review, a conservative news site, he was accused of plagiarism again. Shortly after that, he was suspended and demoted after assigning an article that falsely implied that Mr. Obama had influenced a federal judge’s ruling that adversely affected Mr. Trump. Later, Mr. Johnson wrote an article that was retracted because it contained social media posts falsely attributed to the antifascist antifa movement.
Last fall, 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. Mr. Johnson was one of the influencers contracted by Tenet to make that content. He has described himself as an unwitting victim of the scheme and unaware of who was financing Tenet. He has not been charged in the investigation.
More recently, Mr. Johnson drew scrutiny for gaining 2.5 million new subscribers to his YouTube channel from April to July of this year, a huge spike that nearly doubled his already large following on the platform.
But over that same period, total monthly views of his videos decreased by more than 40 million, according to data from the analytics firm Social Blade. That led to questions about whether Mr. Johnson’s account may have been manipulated in some way, since subscriber growth and video views generally move up and down together on the site.
“The views he should be getting based on more than two million new subscribers should be massive, and it’s just not there,” said David Pakman, a progressive pundit with 3.3 million subscribers on YouTube, who had noticed the unusual growth pattern last month.
Nicole Bell, a YouTube spokeswoman, said Mr. Johnson had paid for advertisements meant to drive subscriptions on the platform. The company’s public tool for searching ads on the site shows three such spots, far fewer than the hundreds that many other YouTube accounts buy to build their brands. Ms. Bell said YouTube “did not find any evidence of inauthentic traffic, including inauthentic channel subscriptions or views,” on Mr. Johnson’s account.
On any given day, Mr. Johnson cranks out three or four YouTube videos, a two-hour podcast, an Instagram story or two, and a dozen posts on X, covering a variety of topics but unwavering in its support of Mr. Trump’s agenda.
Early this month, after a Department of Government Efficiency employee was bloodied in a late-night assault, Mr. Trump posted to Truth Social about crime in Washington, calling it “totally out of control.”
Mr. Johnson soon jumped into the conversation, posting a video the next morning saying that the topic “hits near and dear to my heart” and that “my family nearly died.” He added that “my home was burned to the ground” and that “people were murdered in my front yard.”
Several days later, he posted footage on X from a security camera outside his former home that he said showed “what life was like for a family living in DC.” The edited video includes the sound of a gunshot and someone crashing through a bush onto the front yard of Mr. Johnson’s rowhouse, followed by firefighters and police officers ramming open the door of the adjoining home as smoke billowed from the property.
“Here’s a mass shooting and murder in my front lawn, followed by my house being set on fire with my wife and infant child inside,” he wrote.
Without question, the area of Northeast Washington where Mr. Johnson lived has long had a problem with violent crime. And on Oct. 24, 2020, the Metropolitan Police Department did investigate a shooting on Mr. Johnson’s block, a report obtained by The New York Times shows. Three people were transported to hospitals with “non-life-threatening injuries,” one of whom lived in the house next door to Mr. Johnson. No one was murdered. Last year, the Police Department arrested and charged a man in the shootings.
A separate report, from Washington’s fire department, described a fire that “was intentionally set” the morning after the shooting, but in the neighboring house, not Mr. Johnson’s. The fire department was able to put out the fire after about 20 minutes; two dogs died, and security footage viewed by The Times shows Mr. Johnson’s wife and a child being escorted out of their house, but no people were injured.
Mr. Johnson’s home was not burned in the fire, and records show that he sold it in July 2021. He relocated to his present home in Tampa, Fla., a move he has described as “personally escaping communism.”
Ken Bensinger covers media and politics for The Times.
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