Breitbart News

Breitbart News Network, LLC is a limited liability company organized in Delaware in 2011 with its business address in Los Angeles. Its only filing on the Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR system is a notice of an exempt securities offering that names Andrew Breitbart as chief executive officer and manager and Larry Solov as president and manager.¹ Breitbart died on March 1, 2012, shortly after midnight, at the UCLA Medical Center, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office.²

The 2011 Securities Offering

The notice, a Form D filed on September 26, 2011 under accession number 0001530877-11-000003, reports an offering of equity securities under the Rule 506 exemption with a date of first sale of August 17, 2011. The total offering amount and the total amount sold were each 9,999,990 dollars, the minimum investment accepted was 1,999,998 dollars, and two investors had invested, none of them non-accredited. The form reports no sales commissions or finders' fees and was signed on September 23, 2011 by the company's counsel. It does not name the investors.¹

Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker in March 2017 that the Mercer family met Andrew Breitbart in 2011 at a conference organized by the Club for Growth; that Steve Bannon drafted a business plan for the Mercers calling for an investment of 10 million dollars in Breitbart News in exchange for a large stake; that the Mercers signed the deal in June 2011; and that one provision of the deal placed Bannon on the company's board. She wrote that the investment was made through Gravitas Maximus, L.L.C., which she described as a front group that once had the same Long Island address as Renaissance Technologies, and that Breitbart News had operated from office space in Santa Monica that Bannon owned. According to Mayer, Breitbart died nine months after the signing and Bannon became executive chairman.³

Executive Chairman

In February 2014 the company described Bannon as its executive chairman.⁴ A November 2015 company announcement identified Larry Solov as president and chief executive.⁵ Mayer reported that a house lease Bannon signed in 2013, published by The Washington Post, stated his Breitbart salary as 750,000 dollars.³ On January 9, 2018 Bannon stepped down as executive chairman. A source close to Bannon told ABC News, on condition of anonymity, that he was essentially forced out and had to choose between Breitbart and his political activities; ABC reported that the Breitbart board had discussed his future after remarks attributed to him in Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, that Rebekah Mercer, whom ABC described as a Breitbart shareholder, had disavowed him after the remarks, and that a source close to Mercer, also speaking anonymously, told ABC that she favored his departure. Solov said: "Steve is a valued part of our legacy, and we will always be grateful for his contributions."⁶

Editorial Direction and the Trump Campaign

Mayer wrote that under Bannon's direction the editors introduced a rubric called Black Crime, and that by tracking which negative stories about Hillary Clinton drew the most clicks and likes the editors identified the most potent story lines. She quoted an insider at Breitbart as saying that Rebekah Mercer "reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos," and wrote that in 2011 David Bossie, head of Citizens United, introduced Donald Trump to Bannon. She quoted the Trump campaign aide Sam Nunberg as saying: "Breitbart gave Trump a big role." Bannon told her: "The Mercers laid the groundwork for the Trump revolution."³

Mayer reported that after Paul Manafort resigned from the Trump campaign in 2016, Rebekah Mercer pushed for a staff shakeup that promoted three people funded by the family: Bannon to chief executive of the campaign, Kellyanne Conway to manager and Bossie to deputy manager. She also reported that Citizens United's foundation paid Bannon Strategic Advisors 300,000 dollars in 2012 for what it described to the Internal Revenue Service as fund-raising services; Bossie told her the filing must have been an error and that the payment was for Bannon's film development work.³

The Government Accountability Institute

Mayer reported that Rebekah Mercer joined the board of the Government Accountability Institute, a Tallahassee nonprofit Bannon had recently founded, in 2012; that the Mercer Family Foundation gave it 1 million dollars in 2013, 1 million dollars in 2014 and 1.7 million dollars in 2015, the last more than the institute's entire budget the previous year; and that the institute paid Bannon 376,000 dollars in its first four years while reporting to the Internal Revenue Service that he worked for it thirty hours a week, in addition to running Breitbart News.³

The institute's Form 990 for calendar 2016 lists Peter Schweizer as president and director with reportable compensation of 210,000 dollars, Rebekah Mercer as chairman of the board with none, Stephen Bannon as a board director with 61,539 dollars, and Wynton Hall as a key employee with 175,000 dollars. Part VI of the return states that Bannon, Schweizer and Hall "have a business relationship." The return reports contributions of 2,601,000 dollars.⁷ The Mercer Family Foundation's Form 990-PF for 2016 lists a grant of 2,000,000 dollars to the institute, alongside 2,000,000 dollars to the Media Research Center, 800,000 dollars to the Heartland Institute, 500,000 dollars to the Heritage Foundation and 100,000 dollars to the Gatestone Institute.⁸ The foundation's return was obtained from the Internal Revenue Service's bulk electronic filing archive; the ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer listing for the foundation has no 2016 document.⁸

Payments from Political Committees

Federal Election Commission records show two disbursements by the super PAC Make America Number 1 to Breitbart News Network LLC: 109,341.25 dollars on November 25, 2015, described as a list purchase expense, and 10,000 dollars on January 27, 2016, described as prepaid media. The committee, an independent-expenditure-only committee first filed on April 6, 2015, reported receiving 11,000,000 dollars from Robert Mercer on April 10, 2015, followed in 2016 by 500,000 dollars from him on February 26, 2,000,000 dollars on March 17 and 2,000,000 dollars on July 14. Its 2016 receipts also include 2,000,000 dollars from Bernard Marcus on September 6, 1,000,000 dollars from Cherna Moskowitz on August 23 and 1,000,000 dollars from Peter Thiel on October 26.⁹¹⁰

The committee's Schedule E independent expenditure line items for the 2016 cycle, 633 in all as returned by the Federal Election Commission's database, sum to 13,289,047.38 dollars in support of Ted Cruz between July 17, 2015 and March 31, 2016, 8,852,893 dollars in opposition to Hillary Clinton between July 17, 2015 and November 4, 2016, 4,489,236.14 dollars in opposition to Marco Rubio between December 10, 2015 and March 6, 2016, and 1,798,133.68 dollars in opposition to Donald Trump between January 14 and February 5, 2016.¹¹

Other committees reported payments to Breitbart entities: 18,150.06 dollars from Club for Growth Action to Breitbart.com, LLC on November 30, 2011 for internet advertising; 12,500 dollars from Scott Walker Inc. for online advertising on September 24, 2015; 100,000 dollars from Dave McCormick for US Senate on May 10, 2022 for a media buy; 60,000 dollars from the National Republican Congressional Committee on October 25, 2022 and 80,000 dollars from the National Republican Senatorial Committee on October 28, 2024, both for media; and 12,500 dollars from Make America Great Again Inc. on November 2, 2022 for digital advertising.¹⁰

Taken together, the Schedule B records for payees whose names begin Breitbart News, Breitbart.com or Breitbart alone list 32 disbursements from 20 differently named filers between October 2009 and October 2024, totaling 548,713.31 dollars; by filer the largest sums are 135,000 dollars from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (2020 and 2024), 119,341.25 dollars from Make America Number 1, 100,000 dollars from Dave McCormick for US Senate, 63,000 dollars from the National Republican Congressional Committee and 28,150.06 dollars from Club for Growth Action (2011 and 2023). Payments to advertising or list intermediaries are not captured by this query.¹⁰

Mayer also reported a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission by the Campaign Legal Center, which noted that at the end of the 2016 campaign the super PAC run by the Mercers paid Glittering Steel, a film production company sharing a Los Angeles address with Cambridge Analytica and Breitbart News, 280,000 dollars for advertisements attacking Hillary Clinton; that the super PAC also paid Cambridge Analytica about 5 million dollars, the company being incorporated at the same address as Bannon Strategic Advisors; and that Bannon, then chief executive of the Donald Trump campaign, appeared to have been paid nothing by the campaign. Brendan Fischer of the center said this raised "the possibility of the Mercers subsidizing Steve Bannon's work for the Trump campaign."³

London and Jerusalem

On Sunday, February 16, 2014 the company launched Breitbart London and Breitbart Texas. James Delingpole, formerly of The Daily Telegraph, and Raheem Kassam, formerly of TrendingCentral.com, were to lead Breitbart London with a staff of ten; Bannon called London and Texas "two fronts in our current cultural and political war."⁴ On November 17, 2015 it launched Breitbart Jerusalem under Aaron Klein, who had been senior reporter and Jerusalem bureau chief of WND.com since 2005 and whom, the announcement stated, Andrew Breitbart had approached before his death to run a Jerusalem bureau. Klein named Bannon, Solov and Marlow as the company's leaders.⁵

The Companies House register lists Breitbart News Network (UK) Limited, company number 09351324, incorporated on December 11, 2014 with a registered office in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, and the activity code for media representation services. Its two directors, both appointed on December 11, 2014, are Laurence Gregory Solov and a corporate director, Breitbart News Network Limited, registered in the British Virgin Islands under number 1850470 at an address in Road Town, Tortola. The persons with significant control, notified on April 6, 2016, are Solov (more than 25 and not more than 50 percent of shares and voting rights), an individual resident in the United Kingdom (more than 50 and less than 75 percent of shares and voting rights and the right to appoint directors), and the British Virgin Islands company, whose entry (shares and voting rights of 75 percent or more, and the right to appoint or remove directors) shows it ceased to be a person with significant control on the same day, April 6, 2016. The company status is active, with accounts filed to December 31, 2025. A first Gazette notice of compulsory strike-off was published on January 28, 2025 and the action was discontinued on February 5, 2025. No Mercer or Bannon appears among the officers or controllers.¹²

Yiannopoulos Emails

BuzzFeed News reported on October 5, 2017, from a cache of emails of the Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos, that in March 2016 he sent requests for contributions to an article on the "alt-right" to Curtis Yarvin, to Andrew Auernheimer and to an editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance; that on March 27 the co-bylined draft was sent to Bannon and to Breitbart's chief executive Larry Solov; and that Bannon wrote: "I need to go thru this tomorrow in depth...although I do appreciate any piece that mentions evola." Yiannopoulos told BuzzFeed that he is not a racist; BuzzFeed reported that Bannon, the other Breitbart employees named in the story and the Mercer family did not respond to multiple requests for comment.¹³

BuzzFeed also reported an email from Bannon to Yiannopoulos stating "for your eyes only we r going to use the mercers private security company," on which Bannon's co-producer at Glittering Steel, Dan Fleuette, was copied and who, BuzzFeed wrote, acted for months as the go-between for Yiannopoulos and the Mercers. After Breitbart dismissed Yiannopoulos, BuzzFeed reported, Marlow accompanied him to the Mercers' Palm Beach home to discuss a new venture, MILO Inc., and on February 27 an email arrived from a woman describing herself as Robert Mercer's accountant stating that a wire payment would be sent that day.¹³