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.
The indictment charged two Russian media executives with allegedly funneling $10 million to Tenet, whose personalities were paid to “amplify domestic divisions in the United States” by parroting Kremlin talking points on immigration, inflation and foreign policy, according to the Department of Justice.
Pool earned $100,000 per episode for a weekly show he hosted, the Washington Post reported, and made major real estate purchases in West Virginia the same month Tenet launched.
Although the indictment only referred to “Company 1,” media outlets were able to identify Tenet and the individual influencers based on the detailed allegations.
The company’s founders allegedly knew the company was backed by Russian money, but Pool and the other influencers—who included Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin—were “unwitting” figures, according to officials. Tenet shut down soon after the indictment was released.
“Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims,” Pool said in a since-deleted post on X, as reported by CNN. “The show is produced in its entirety by our local team without input from anyone external to the company.”
“Putin is a scumbag,” he said in another social media statement, according to PBS.
And yet Tenet licensed Pool’s podcast The Culture War and shared the episodes widely, meaning Pool’s work organically aligned with Russian disinformation campaigns. He has claimed the Democrats cheated in the 2020 election and interviewed the masterminds of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol on his podcast.
After relying on armies of trolls and bots to try to influence the 2016 and 2020 elections, Russia decided to use established right-wing media stars in 2024, The New York Times reported.
And since Pool didn’t willingly participate in the scheme, he and the other influencers got to keep the money.
Pool has 2.3 million followers on YouTube, where he hosts the Timcast daily news show and podcast. The Culture War streams on Spotify. Pool interviewed Trump on his podcast in May 2024 and endorsed his re-election campaign.
As he joins the press pool, the Associated Press—one of the world’s most trusted news outlets reaching 4 billion people worldwide—can’t get near the president after it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” as ordered by Trump.
The storied agency is being forced to rely on less-experienced pool reporters and photographers—and now, apparently, right-wing influencers—who soften their questions and leave information out of their reports, its journalists said Thursday during a court hearing challenging their exclusion.
“There’s no rhyme or reason” to the White House’s process for choosing the press pool, the AP’s top Washington photographer told the court. “I don’t think anyone knows.”
