Bogus Claims that USAID Funded Politico and Epstein
PLUS: Now the Russians Claim Zelensky Bought Hitler’s Mountain Retreat; NewsGuard Finds AI Models Spread False Claim Most Often in Russian and Chinese
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Today:
Aiding and abetting: Conservatives invent frivolous USAID spending
Home swap: Zelensky falsely accused of misspending military aid on a German retreat once owned by Hitler
Ads for the Peace Corps, Harbor Freight, and Vizio fund false claim that U.S. spent $50 million on condoms for Gaza
NewsGuard audit finds Western AI chatbots produce most disinformation in Russian and Chinese
And More …
Today’s newsletter was edited by Eric Effron and Sofia Rubinson.
1. USAID Financing Politico and Jeffrey Epstein? Trump Supporters Draw False Conclusions About Funding
By Macrina Wang and Sarah Komar
What happened: Conservative commentators are advancing bogus accusations about the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), claiming to have uncovered wasteful and corrupt spending.
Context: Elon Musk has been leading the effort through the Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle the USAID, accusing the agency, which provides humanitarian aid to developing nations, of exploiting U.S. taxpayers.
Here are two examples of false claims circulating about USAID:
Funding ‘fake’ news: The media company Politico, owned by German conglomerate Axel Springer, was reported to have received millions of dollars in USAID funding.
A closer look: This narrative appears to have originated with a Feb. 5 X post by conservative commentator Benny Johnson that included a screenshot of Politico’s USASpending.com page. The screenshot showed that Politico received $8.2 million in federal funds in the past year.
Johnson’s post stated: “Now we learn Politico — a ‘news company’ — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was being massively funded by USAID. Trump & Elon deleted their funding. Now Politico will go out of business.” The post received 11.6 million views and 227,000 likes in one day.
On X, Musk posted a screenshot of a President Donald Trump Truth Social post that stated: “LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN (sic) AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A ‘PAYOFF’ FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS. THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY!” The post garnered 37.2 million views and 626,000 likes within a day.
Actually: Politico received $44,000 from the USAID, which was for subscriptions to a specialized Politico newsletter.
USAID’s two payments to Politico — one for $20,000 in September 2023 and one for $24,000 in September 2024 — were for subscriptions to E&E News, Politico’s paid energy and environment publication, NewsGuard found through a review of USASpending.gov.
Between Feb. 1, 2024, and Feb. 6, 2025, the federal government — not just USAID — did pay $8.2 million to Politico, all of it for subscriptions to paid products including E&E News and Politico’s policy intelligence product Politico Pro, according to USASpending.gov. As noted above, USAID’s Politico expenditures amounted to just $44,000.
Supporting child sex trafficking: USAID was reported to have paid the late convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein $265,915 in 2023.
A closer look: This claim began spreading on Feb. 5 among conservative social media users who shared a screenshot showing that a “Jeffrey E Epstein” received $265,915 in 2023 from USAID.
Conservative X user @HustleBitch_ shared the screenshot in a post captioned, “Jeffrey Epstein was being paid by USAID as a Director. Are you ready to see what’s next?” The post garnered 202,500 views and 2,600 likes in one day.
Conservative TikTok user @OfficialKiddChris1 said in a video: “In 2023 Jeffrey Epstein getting payments from USAID. Elon Musk and DOGE is (sic) doing a great job. There’s gonna be so much to come to light. I’m so ready for it.” The post received 58,900 views and 12,200 likes within a day.
Actually: The payment went to a different Jeffrey Epstein and was not provided by USAID.
The convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died in a New York City jail in August 2019 in an apparent suicide — four years before this supposed payment.
The screenshot shared by those advancing this false claim shows that “Jeffrey E Epstein” is identified as a director of health insurance organization “Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc.” A 2013 press release announced the naming of “Jeff Epstein” to the boards of Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc. The LinkedIn profile for “Jeff Epstein” shows that he was a Kaiser board member in 2023.
The screenshot captures results from a search tool that tracks USAID funding. The tool, called DataRepublican.com, allows users to “trace” the connections of organizations to USAID-funded NGOs. While the tool shows Kaiser Foundation Health Plan as being loosely connected to some USAID-funded NGOs, the tool itself acknowledges that “funding is fungible, meaning USAID dollars do not directly flow into these NGOs in a literal sense.”
Kaiser Foundation Health Plan Inc.’s Form 990 in tax year 2023, available on the Internal Revenue Service’s site, shows that the $265,915 mentioned in these false claims was board member Jeff Epstein’s “reportable compensation from the organization” — not from USAID.
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2. Russian Network Adds Hitler’s 14.2 Million Euros ‘Eagle’s Nest’ to Zelensky’s Fabricated Real Estate Portfolio
What happened: Pro-Russian sources, amplified by U.S. commentators, are falsely claiming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky used 14.2 million euros in Western military aid to purchase Adolf Hitler’s “Eagle’s Nest” or “Kehlsteinhaus,” the official Nazi retreat built for Hitler atop the Bavarian mountains.
The baseless claim originated on a Russian network targeting Germany ahead of its Feb. 23 snap election. The network was apparently set up by NewsGuard’s 2024 Disinformer of the Year John Mark Dougan.
A closer look: The false narrative originated with a Feb. 5 article on a German-language site “Aktuell-Nachricht” (“Current News”).
The article, titled, “Volodymyr Zelensky bought the Kehlsteinhaus, which previously belonged to Hitler,” included purported purchase documents showing that the mountain retreat was sold to Zelensky for 14.2 million euros.
From Feb. 5 to Feb. 7, there were 2,100 articles and social media posts jointly mentioning “Zelensky” and “Eagle’s Nest,” in comparison to zero mentions during the previous two-day period, according to a social media analytics tool used by NewsGuard.
Pro-MAGA X user @its_The_Dr posted on Feb. 5: “Wow I was wondering where that missing 100 Billion went, Could this be a small Part of it? EXPOSED: Zelensky used €14.2M to buy the legendary ‘Eagle’s nest’ previously owned by Hitler!” The post received 6,200 views and 120 likes within a day.
Actually: As noted above, this claim is baseless and appears to be part of a long-running Russian disinformation campaign aimed at portraying Zelensky as corrupt and misusing Western military support to amass a personal fortune.
A NewsGuard review of property records, public data, and news reports found no evidence of such a sale. According to the official website of Kehlsteinhaus, it is owned by the Bavarian state and managed by Berchtesgadener Landesstiftung, a charitable foundation.
“Aktuell-Nachricht,” where the claim originated, is not an authentic local German news outlet. The site is part of a network of 102 AI-generated German-language websites that NewsGuard and German non-profit investigative newsroom Correctiv previously linked as Russian disinformation sites apparently operated by Dougan, a U.S. fugitive turned Kremlin propagandist. (NewsGuard discovered 171 fake local news sites that Dougan similarly launched in the U.S. in the runup to the 2024 presidential election to spread false and divisive claims.)
In a Feb. 6 X post, Ukraine’s Center for Combating Disinformation called the Hitler estate claim “another fake spread by Russian propagandists through a supposedly German publication,” adding, “Russia regularly fabricates such stories to discredit the Ukrainian president and his family.”
Indeed, NewsGuard has previously reported on numerous false Russian claims suggesting corruption by Zelensky, including that he bought Sting’s Italian winery, King Charles’ Highgrove Estate, and Hitler’s favorite Mercedes sedan.
Click here to find out more about NewsGuard Trust Scores and our process for rating websites. You can download NewsGuard’s browser extension, which displays NewsGuard Trust Score icons next to links on search engines, social media feeds, and other platforms by clicking here.
3. Brand Victims of the Week: Ads for the Peace Corps, Harbor Freight, and Vizio Fund False Claim that the U.S. Pays for Condoms in Gaza
In this Reality Check feature, NewsGuard identifies global brands that support the spread of misinformation by unintentionally funneling programmatic advertising dollars to sites that repeatedly peddle false claims. Unless advertisers use inclusion or exclusion lists to place their programmatic ads, these ads will appear on websites regardless of their trustworthiness.
What happened: Programmatic ads for the Peace Corps, Harbor Freight, and Vizio were spotted by a NewsGuard analyst on an article published by PJMedia.com (Trust Score: 27.5/100) that advanced the false claim that the U.S. earmarked $50 million to be spent on condoms in Gaza.
A closer look: The Jan. 28 PJMedia article was titled “On the Way Out the Door, Biden Regime Authorized $50 Million for Condoms for Gaza” and stated, “As it was on its way out, the Biden regime looked around at the devastation in North Carolina and Los Angeles, at the American people’s suffering from inflation, at ever-rising gas prices, and at the increasing difficulty ordinary people have in simply making ends meet, and decided: Hey what we really need to do is send $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza.”
Actually: As previously reported in Reality Check, there is no evidence to support this claim.
Trump State Department officials told reporters that the $50 million sum was in reference to two $50 million aid packages for Gaza provided by the International Medical Corp (IMC), a nonprofit that provides global humanitarian assistance. However, a NewsGuard review of IMC’s government contracts found no evidence of $50 million going to Gazan condoms. The IMC denied the claim in a Jan. 29 statement.
NewsGuard has found that PJMedia.com previously advanced false claims about U.S. politics, including that widespread fraud affected the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Representatives for the Peace Corps, Harbor Freight, and Vizio did not immediately respond to NewsGuard’s emailed requests for comment.
(Disclosure: NewsGuard is among the companies that license data that would help advertisers only advertise on reliable, brand suitable news sites.)
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If you see or hear something that you think may be provably false, please alert NewsGuard via realitycheck@newsguardtech.com and we'll do our best to get to the bottom of it. Note: Tips should not include content that you simply disagree with, however strongly.
4. AI’s Multilingual Failure: NewsGuard Audit Finds Highest Failure Rates in Russian and Chinese
A NewsGuard audit of leading AI chatbots found that the models spread misinformation more readily in non-English languages. Moreover, the top 10 artificial intelligence models are significantly more likely to generate false claims in Russian and Chinese compared to five other languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
Indeed, a user who asks a top Western chatbot a question about a news topic in Russian or Chinese is more likely to get a response containing disinformation or propaganda, due to the chatbot’s reliance on lower-quality sources and state-controlled narratives in those languages.
To read NewsGuard’s full report, click here.
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