Jack Hunter, a staff member of Senator
Rand Paul's office, resigned in 2013 after a
Free Beacon report detailed his past as a pro-secessionist radio
shock jock known as the "Southern Avenger". From October 2015 to May 2016,
The Free Beacon hired
Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on "multiple candidates" during the
2016 presidential election, including
Donald Trump. The
Free Beacon stopped funding this research when Trump clinched the Republican nomination. Fusion GPS later hired former British intelligence officer
Christopher Steele and produced the
Steele dossier that alleged links between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.
Paul Singer, a major donor to the
Free Beacon, said he was unaware of this dossier until
BuzzFeed News published it in January 2017. On October 27, 2017, the
Free Beacon publicly disclosed that it had hired Fusion GPS, and said that it "had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele". The
Free Beacon came under criticism for its reporting on Fusion GPS. Three days before it was revealed that the
Free Beacon had funded the work by Fusion GPS, the
Free Beacon wrote that the firm's work "was funded by an unknown GOP client while the primary was still going on." The
Free Beacon has published pieces portraying Fusion GPS's work as unreliable "without noting that it considered Fusion GPS reliable enough to pay for its services". In 2022, a
Free Beacon article by Patrick Hauf accused President
Joe Biden's administration of planning to use federal dollars to fund safe smoking kits that included
crack pipes as part of a
harm reduction initiative; this prompted outrage among Republicans in Congress, some of whom proposed a bill to ban the federal government from funding drug paraphernalia.
Bill Gertz, a senior editor until October 2019, took $100,000 from
Guo Wengui, a conspiracy theorist, without disclosure, wrote stories citing him, and introduced him to
Steve Bannon. Gertz was subsequently fired, with a disclaimer appended to his affected stories. and subsequently expanding on, the plagiarism accusations against Harvard President
Claudine Gay, who resigned shortly thereafter.
The Washington Post called Gay's resignation "a major win" for the
Free Beacon, which it called "the rare conservative media outlet that does significant reporting of its own". In May 2024, the
Free Beacon reported that the
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA had continued to evaluate applicants based on race rather than qualifications despite the illegality of race-based affirmative action in California
since 1996. According to the outlet's reporting, 50% of UCLA medical students now fail basic tests of medical competence. A former admissions staff member called UCLA a "failed medical school". On July 3, 2024, the
Free Beacon reported that a number of senior administrators at
Columbia University had exchanged text messages demeaning members of a panel on Jewish life on campus after the
2024 Columbia University pro-Palestinian campus occupations. In August 2024, three deans resigned in the wake of that reporting. == Reception ==