Published on Jul 22, 2026
The Washington Reporter, a conservative media outlet promoted by President Donald Trump, regularly fails to disclose conflicts of interest stemming from Garrett Ventry’s work as a paid lobbyist for companies the outlet covers. In several cases, the site published articles on Ventry’s clients Eli Lilly (LLY) and the Dutch AI company Nebius (NBIS) without mentioning […]
The Washington Reporter, a conservative media outlet promoted by President Donald Trump, regularly fails to disclose conflicts of interest stemming from Garrett Ventry’s work as a paid lobbyist for companies the outlet covers. In several cases, the site published articles on Ventry’s clients Eli Lilly (LLY) and the Dutch AI company Nebius (NBIS) without mentioning Ventry’s paid work.
Political consultants Brian Colas and Garrett Ventry founded the Reporter in April 2024, with Colas as CEO and Ventry as COO. Since then, the outlet has frequently secured exclusive interviews with prominent lawmakers and officials—including FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson, who gave his first interview to the site, and who in that role regulates the very companies that retain Ventry as a lobbyist.
On its masthead, the website reads, “We rely on our day jobs as political operatives and government affairs professionals to find content that can serve our readers. If you have tips and scoops, send them our way. We cover stories pushed by interested parties–including lobbyists or operatives with clients–as long as the content is true, fair, and insightful.”
After The Capitol Forum reached out to Ventry and Colas for comment on July 7, the Reporter changed their masthead to say Ventry was no longer COO. Ventry and his lawyer stated at that time that Ventry had stepped down from his executive position at the Reporter in September 2024.
However, in filings to the Virginia State Corporation Commission in April 2025, to the SEC in March 2026, and in May 2026 to the Florida Division of Corporations, Ventry is listed either as an executive or a director for The Washington Reporter, Inc., alongside CEO Brian Colas and director Seth T. Taube, senior counsel for Baker Botts and general counsel for D.C. strategic advisory and venture capital firm McKenna & Associates.
Further, on June 25, 2026, the Reporter filed an annual report to the Virginia State Corporation Commission stating Ventry was its Chief Operating Officer.
Ventry and his lawyer did not respond to a follow up question on the discrepancies between their statements and the SEC and state corporation filings.
Reporter CEO Colas also concurrently runs a public affairs firm, Colas & Associates, that says on its website that it opposes legislation, mobilizes opposition to harmful regulations, and develops relationships with influential Republicans on behalf of its clients.
The Reporter’s Editor-in-Chief Matthew Foldi, a former U.S. congressional candidate, writes most of its news content. The rest of the site contains interviews with President Trump and op-eds from lobbyists and Republicans in the administration or on Capitol Hill. None of their staff currently have press passes with the U.S. Senate or House, according to the online press gallery database.
In response to a request for comment, Colas said, “An attack on the Washington Reporter is an attack on the First Amendment, on our democracy, and on journalists everywhere. We stand by our fearless reporting, and we have nominated Matthew Foldi’s groundbreaking data center story for the Walter Cronkite Award which is a great honor for a new outlet. The Washington Reporter, ranked as the second-most trusted outlet by Senate Republican staff, will never back down to these hurtful smears from the Capitol Forum—an outlet that was not even ranked in the Senate Republican staff survey.”
Of the three reporters besides Foldi listed on the website’s About Us page, one is an Ole Miss student who wrote one article, one is a UVA student who is a staffer for Sen. Tom Cotton, R-AR, who wrote six articles, and one is a legal counsel for an Arkansas-centered lobbying firm who wrote one article in October 2025.
Michael Cobbs is not on the “About Us” page but is listed as a reporter in several of their recent articles. The Capitol Forum was unable to find any online information on him.
At the time of writing, Editor in Chief Matthew Foldi has over 65,000 followers on X.com that act as an audience for the Reporter’s articles that he links to in posts. A since-corrected post last week from the Reporter’s X account—reporting that Trump was set to claim that Georgia’s Democratic Senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock “are illegitimate because of fraud”—received 13 million views.
Eli Lilly and Nebius. Starting in February 2025, the Washington Reporter published at least four articles praising Eli Lilly for its “investments in America,” soon after Ventry’s January 2025 registration as a lobbyist for the company.
On May 12, 2026, the outlet reported on Nebius’ investment into a data center in Missouri, with the company’s logo featured at the top of the article. Despite widespread local opposition to the Nebius data center, the Reporter article neglects to mention any potential downsides of the project. The article also notes Nebius’s philanthropy, saying that “Nebius has already made its impact on its latest community known; the company recently made a sizable donation that helped eliminate school meal debt in Independence and Ft. Osage School Districts.”
In an article released July 9, two days after The Capitol Forum reached out to the executives for comment, the Reporter published a new article stating that it had nominated its Nebius article for a Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.
Ventry has worked as a registered lobbyist for Nebius since early 2025.
Colas and Ventry. Colas & Associates currently touts as clients several consumer products companies, a large financial services client, a healthcare trade association, a banking firm, and a technology focused trade association.
Colas has run the firm since October 2022, with a brief break from January to August last year when he was staff director for his longtime boss Tom Cotton and the Senate Republican Conference.
Ventry, who is listed as the former COO on the website’s masthead, started his own lobbying firm GRV Strategies in January 2022, after briefly serving as chief of staff to former Rep. Ken Buck, R-CO.
Senate Lobbying Disclosure documents indicate that Ventry has been registered to lobby for the Coalition for App Fairness since April 2022, a trade association aiming to reduce Apple and Google’s power over their app stores. Since February 2025 Ventry has been registered to lobby for ADC Tech Inc., a U.S. entity of Dutch AI cloud service company Nebius Group, and since January 2025 has been registered to lobby for Eli Lilly. In May and June this year, Ventry also registered to lobby for the Lebanese bank Société Générale De Banque Au Liban and Indian conglomerate Jindal International, respectively.
Ethics experts. Media experts who spoke to The Capitol Forum said the site’s right-wing lean does not present a problem—those are common in Washington and elsewhere.
The issue instead is that the Washington Reporter adopts the form of a journalistic outlet to legitimize itself, said Subbu Vincent, director of Journalism and Media Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “It’s not journalism, but they want to make the claim that it’s journalism.”
Beyond the lack of disclosure of financial ties, Vincent said the site shows no real intent in the substance, sourcing, and process inherent to serious journalistic work and appropriates that form to propagate the stories.
“No legitimate news outlet would run articles like that,” said Mark Feldstein, Richard Eaton chair of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland. “These are advertisements, not news.”
Feldstein said the Nebius and Eli Lilly articles looked more like glorified press releases than news articles, and that if a student of his turned it in, they would get a failing grade.
“It’s fine for the website to be politically conservative,” Feldstein said. “It’s not fine for it to be a propaganda vehicle for corporations while its COO is being paid on the side by those corporations and not disclose it to the public.”
Vincent added that when the Reporter’s stories circulate on news feeds and social media downstream from the Capitol Hill audience, where the readers know the sources for the articles, the general reading audience has a right to know that a registered lobbyist is also a top manager at an outlet that claims to be doing “accurate, fair and responsible” journalism.
“That’s a violation of the rights of the audience who are actually receiving the stories on the news feeds,” Vincent said.
Articles like the ones published by the Reporter can function to disseminate narratives because they are “baked and shaped to look like something” that can be cited to unsuspecting readers, said Joan Donovan, assistant professor of journalism and emerging media studies at Boston University. “A website like this… acts as the foundational infrastructure, the story that can be linked back to.”
Events. The Reporter has recently hosted several events that have coincided with articles it published on related topics.
Last year, the outlet co-hosted a book party event for Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-MO, with PhRMA, the main trade group for pharmaceutical companies, including Ventry client Eli Lilly. Months later, the Reporter published a story titled “EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Eric Schmitt says TrumpRx is driving down prescription costs, calls portal ‘important’ for patients.”
In December, the Reporter hosted an event in collaboration with the Electronic Payments Coalition (EPC) where EPC executive chairman Richard Hunt moderated a talk by U.S. Senator Tim Scott. The EPC is a trade group led by Mastercard (MA) and Visa (V) which strongly opposes the Credit Card Competition Act.
The Reporter published an article the next month titled, “SCOOP: ‘A gift to Letitia James’: Conservative groups, credit union leaders come out against revised Credit Card Competition Act,” and last month published an exclusive interview with EPC executive chairman Richard Hunt on the credit card bill.
In response to a request for comment, EPC managing director Nick Simpson said, “We routinely partner with third-party organizations and media outlets, just like The Capitol Forum does, to educate policymakers about the harm of the Durbin-Marshall credit card mandates. As for your attempts to spin it into anything else, we’re not particularly troubled by commentary from an activist publication that hosts similar events to advance the agenda of corporate mega-stores.”
Further, on November 6, 2025, the Reporter hosted an event about Google (GOOG) with Washington Free Beacon editor in chief Eliana Johnson, where Garrett Ventry (after his reported stepdown in September 2024) is listed alongside Matthew Foldi and Brian Colas for a Reporter discussion on conservative media, Congress, and the Trump presidency.
They also held an event with Microsoft Senior Director of External Affairs Suhail Khan last year. “There is no better way to reach an audience of policymakers than through the Washington Reporter, and we look forward to many more premiere events,” Colas is quoted as saying in the Reporter’s recap of its Microsoft (MSFT) event.
A few months later, the Washington Reporter published an article titled “SCOOP: Microsoft’s Brad Smith rolls out ‘Community-First AI Infrastructure’ with praise from Trump, Congress,” and an article featuring an exclusive interview with Microsoft’s Director of External Affairs, Suhail Khan. Khan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After another request for comment on the Reporter’s events, Colas said, “The Capitol Forum hosts events with lobbying firms such as FGS Global and law firms such as Geradin Partners while covering issues that affect those firms without disclosure.”
Background information. In the article announcing it had nominated itself for a Walter Cronkite award, the Reporter cites Nate Brand, senior advisor to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, as saying “unlike most of the D.C. newsletters, the Washington Reporter is a must read when it hits your inbox… Their rapid growth, scoops, and access clearly has become the envy of other publications.”
The Reporter’s site says that it “has grown into a must-read for more than 15,000 D.C. insiders, including thousands of congressional staff, administration officials, and elected leaders.”
Prior to The Capitol Forum’s requests for comment, the Reporter’s masthead did not include the line on the content coming from the editors’ day jobs as political operatives and government affairs professionals. It had been on the masthead from the site’s founding until September 2025 but had then been taken off until this past week.
“Matthew Foldi, who is a giant pain in the ass, is a patriot and a longtime friend,” said Joe Simonson, director of public affairs for the FTC. Of the companies involved, Microsoft, Eli Lilly, and Nebius Group declined to comment. PhRMA, Google, and the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
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