# Politico Washington political news organization, launched as *The Politico* on **January 23, 2007** and headquartered in Arlington, Virginia. It was founded by **Robert Allbritton**, who supplied the capital through the Allbritton family's media holdings, and built editorially by two *[[Washington Post]]* alumni — **John F. Harris** as editor-in-chief and **Jim VandeHei** as executive editor. VandeHei later left to co-found [[Axios]]. ## Business model Politico's significance in the media economy is less its free site than **Politico Pro**, a high-priced subscription tier selling granular policy coverage — energy, health, defense, trade — to lobbyists, trade associations, congressional offices and corporate government-affairs shops. That product is why a Beltway news outlet was worth what it sold for. **In October 2021 the German publisher Axel Springer acquired Politico** from Allbritton — including the remaining 50% of the Politico Europe joint venture and the tech site Protocol — in a transaction valued at **more than $1 billion**. The deal made a foreign-owned publisher the proprietor of one of Washington's most-read political outlets, a fact that recurs in arguments about press ownership and influence. ## KB significance Politico occupies an unusual slot in the vault's media map. It is not an ideological outlet in the sense of [[Breitbart News]] or [[The Free Press]]; its business is **access and granularity**, sold to the people being covered. That makes it a useful index of elite Washington consensus, and it makes its reporting on the executive branch commercially load-bearing in a way that ideological outlets' is not. On **September 18, 2026**, Politico was one of three outlets — with [[CNN]] and MS NOW ([[MSNBC]]) — that [[Donald Trump]] announced he was banning from the White House. See **[[White House Press Ban]]**. The ban came the same day Politico's Audrey Decker and Mark Satter reported that a shipment of **F-35 fighter-jet parts** bound from Australia to the U.S. for repairs had been diverted to Hong Kong and disappeared. Politico's White House correspondent **Cheyenne Haslett** was denied entry to the grounds the next morning. ### The litigation, September 21 On **September 21, 2026** the three banned outlets sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, naming [[Donald Trump]], communications director [[Steven Cheung]], chief of staff [[Susie Wiles]] and Secret Service director [[Sean Curran]]. The complaint pleads the **First and Fifth Amendments** and seeks a temporary restraining order restoring the credentials. The case drew Judge [[Timothy Kelly]] — the Trump appointee who ordered [[Jim Acosta]]'s hard pass restored in 2018 — who set a hearing for **September 23**. The same day, the five-network television pool suspended pooled coverage of the president after [[CNN]], scheduled for pool duty, was barred and the other four networks declined to substitute. That evening the White House launched its own 24/7 stream, "TRUMP TV: The Essentials Station." Politico is also the outlet that broke the **September 15, 2026** account of Texas Republicans' alarm over railroad-commission nominee [[Bo French]] and the damage his posts were doing with Hispanic voters. ## See Also - [[White House Press Ban]] · [[Timothy Kelly]] - [[CNN]] · [[MSNBC]] · [[Washington Post]] · [[New York Times]] - [[Right-Wing Media Timeline]]