New York Times Co. Saved $45 Million With Tax Break It Faults Meta For Using

A.G. Sulzberger (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images for the New York Times), Mark Zuckerberg (Finn Gomez/Getty Images)

The New York Times accused Meta of “exploiting a lucrative tax break” through “untested accounting magic.” One detail didn’t make the story: The Times itself reaped $47.65 million in benefits from the same research-and-development tax credit between 2021 and 2025, the Free Beacon’s Ira Stoll writes.

The front-page “Times Exclusive,” which carried four bylines and credited two additional researchers, described Meta’s use of the credit as “aggressive” and “risky” and warned that billions of dollars in tax savings could be overturned by the IRS. But the Times makes similar disclosures in its own SEC filings, including more than $78 million in “other liabilities” that encompass a “contingent tax liability for uncertain tax positions.”

“The only ‘magic’ is the Times newsroom’s ability to make something sound suspicious when the non-Sulzberger rich try to use the same tax tools that the family that controls the Times uses to maximize its own profits,” Stoll writes.

The Times even maintains a webpage documenting its research and experimentation efforts, including a project to design a digital version of an internal company museum for remote employees. The project’s designers explained that they wanted to “reduce the cognitive load for visitors” so they would not be overwhelmed by the virtual exhibits.

Stoll writes:

Maybe the “research and experiment” happening is how long any subscribers will continue to pay for this garbage.

Or maybe the real experiment under way is how long the market will continue to value the New York Times Company … as if the New York Times were an actual technology company rather than a family-controlled anti-Trump newsletter and podcasting platform that also operates a taxpayer-subsdized museum open only to employees.

READ MORE: New York Times Co. Saved $45 Million With Tax Break It Faults Meta for Using

Abdul El-Sayed (Sarah Rice/Getty Images)

Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed landed a $9,000-a-month consulting contract with Wayne County just six days after launching his campaign, allowing him to bill taxpayers roughly $300 an hour while running for office, the Free Beacon’s Alana Goodman reports.

Public records obtained by the Free Beacon show that Wayne County approved the deal on April 23, less than three weeks after El-Sayed resigned as director of its health services department. The eight-month contract authorized up to $72,000 for 30 hours of work per month providing “strategic support” during the leadership transition.

The payments were routed through AME Higher LLC, an entity El-Sayed created as a pass-through for consulting and speaking fees. “The news comes as El-Sayed has faced questions over his use of a tax loophole to avoid payroll and income taxes on payments he received through AME Higher LLC,” Goodman writes. His latest financial disclosure shows that he paid himself a $64,000 salary from the company and took another $103,000 as a “member draw,” a common strategy for avoiding payroll taxes, accountants told the Free Beacon.

The Wayne County deal was not El-Sayed’s only consulting work during the campaign. He has also collected more than $82,000 from One Health Partners, a Chicago-area nonprofit health care company that former employees have called a “scam.” The Free Beacon reported that the company focuses on buying medical practices and “exploiting Medicare” to increase revenue. It is run by Ali Karim, one of El-Sayed’s largest campaign donors, who was sanctioned by Wisconsin regulators for defrauding an investor and has been accused of fraudulent business practices in multiple lawsuits.

El-Sayed has bragged about his two-year tenure running Wayne County’s health department on the campaign trail, claiming he “led the rebuild from the studs” of its troubled juvenile detention facility. Investigators, however, found the facility “flooded with sewage and garbage” and littered with “dried feces and bodily fluids.” The facility later lost its full operational license and was placed on probation by state regulators.

READ MORE: Abdul El-Sayed Billed County Taxpayers $9,000 a Month in ‘Consulting’ Fees While Running for Senate

Bob Brooks (@VoteBobBrooks/X)

Pennsylvania Democratic House candidate Bob Brooks said on an application for a $15,000 taxpayer-funded COVID relief grant that he had no financial judgments against him and had not defaulted on any loans. Court documents reviewed by the Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross show otherwise.

When Brooks submitted the application in September 2021, two judgments stemming from unpaid credit-card debt were still active: $7,872 owed to FIA Card Services and $5,480 owed to debt collector Midland Funding. Asked whether he had “any judgements” against him or was “in default on any loans or leases,” Brooks answered “No.”

Brooks also had a far larger judgment hanging over him. In September 2020, a Northampton County judge ordered him to pay $130,386 to his former in-laws over a promissory note tied to a home they gave Brooks and his then-wife. Brooks and his attorneys argued in court earlier this year that the judgment dated to 2020.

“If a client with these facts asked me whether he could sign a loan application or other legal document, stating that he had no judgments against him, I would emphatically tell him no,” Pennsylvania attorney Jason Banonis told the Free Beacon. The application warned that making false statements could carry criminal penalties.

After the Free Beacon raised questions about his COVID grant application, Brooks’s team changed its tune, arguing that the judgment did not become final until January 2022, months after he applied. “A Court of Common Pleas judge ruled on July 27 that the actual date of the judgment remains ‘unanswered,’” Ross writes. “The judge indicated that the actual date of judgment was Nov. 19, 2020, 10 months before Brooks submitted the grant application.” This leaves open a technical question over whether Brooks faced a judgment from his former in-laws when he applied, a matter Banonis described as at best murky.

Brooks’s campaign denied wrongdoing and pointed to his history of money troubles, with a spokesman saying Republican opponent Ryan Mackenzie has “no idea what it’s like to struggle financially.” The campaign did not answer questions about the two credit-card judgments or Brooks’s earlier insistence that the judgment involving his former in-laws dated to 2020.

READ MORE: Bob Brooks Was in Trouble Over Unpaid Credit Cards and ‘Bilking His In-Laws’: He Didn’t Disclose It When He Applied for a COVID Loan for His Lawn Care Business

Elsewhere:

• With energy a key issue in November’s midterm elections, Massachusetts’s Democratic governor Maura Healey is pressing the Trump administration to hurry up and expand natural gas production in Massachusetts because it’ll help bring energy prices down. Amazing the sanity political expediency can bring!
• The Committee to Protect Journalists recently audited its widely cited list of journalists killed in Gaza after Free Beacon reporting exposed terrorists on the list. CPJ removed 19 terrorists and three other fake journalists, but an independent review by HonestReporting found that 102 of the 191 names still on the list, or 53 percent, have connections to terrorist groups. The IDF piled on Thursday with a dossier identifying 170 supposed Gaza journalists as operatives for Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other terror groups.
• A passenger who helped live-text details of the foiled hijacking attempt aboard FlyDubai flight FZ1073 slammed the media for initially describing the incident as a “fight between two pilots” rather than a terror attack. “It was really, really frustrating that the first reaction of the media out there is that by default it cannot be a terror attack, even though it’s clearly a terror attack,” the passenger told Fox News. “Why does the media decide to treat it as a fight between pilots when it’s already clear that it’s a terror attack?”
• After Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the assailant underwent “Islamist radical indoctrination,” President Donald Trump on Thursday told reporters that “based on what I’m hearing,” the terrorist pilot was linked to Iran and “could have been” linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Happy Friday, our full lineup is below.

1. New York Times Co. Saved $45 Million With Tax Break It Faults Meta for Using 2. Abdul El-Sayed Billed County Taxpayers $9,000 a Month in ‘Consulting’ Fees While Running for Senate 3. Bob Brooks Was in Trouble Over Unpaid Credit Cards and ‘Bilking His In-Laws’: He Didn’t Disclose It When He Applied for a COVID Loan for His Lawn Care Business 4. More Than Half the Names on Committee to Protect Journalists List of Slain Gaza Journalists Are Still Linked to Terror Outfits Despite Group’s Self-Policing ‘Audit’ 5. Colorado Dem Manny Rutinel, Running in a District Where Ranching Is Central, Once Said His ‘Entire’ Job Was To Sue Meat Corporations ‘For All They’re Worth’