USA TODAY International Edition
BREITBART SET TO MOVE OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Bannon’s rise pushes conservative news site into new digs
Breitbart News WASHINGTON has stepped out of the fringes of American politics and is now, quite literally, moving out of the basement as well.
The bare- knuckled conservative news organization has moved its office out of the house where former chief Steve Bannon lived, has reluctantly begun to disclose its ownership and, in its quest for official recognition, might even go so far as to publicly declare who runs the place.
Breitbart has for the past several years operated, basically, out of Bannon’s home. He was the executive chairman of Breitbart News and the ideological engine behind the site’s bare- knuckled anti- immigration, anti- government ideology. He and the site both operated out of a townhouse on Capitol Hill a couple of blocks behind the Supreme Court. It became known as the “Breitbart Embassy,” site of lavish parties upstairs and a staff of young reporters downstairs, whom Bannon referred to as “the Valkyries.”
But then Bannon became Donald Trump’s campaign manager last summer and is now chief strategist in the White House.
Breitbart is rising with Bannon and trying to become a credentialed member of the Senate Daily Press Gallery, joining The New
York Times, USA TODAY and other mainstream news outlets. That would given it access to the Capitol on par with congressional staff and allow its reporters to participate in White House “pools,” providing coverage of events to the rest of the press corps when space is limited.
But membership in that club requires a level of transparency Breitbart News has long shunned. The office location is the first hurdle. Breitbart News has declared the Breitbart Embassy as its office address, but that’s not really true. The Embassy is still the official address of Breitbart’s Washington Bureau, but “since the summer we have been transitioning people out of the house,” said spokesman Chad Wilkinson.
One of the reasons for the move was security, he said: “Some of our employees just weren’t comfortable working at a Breitbart office there.”
Sometime this spring, Breitbart will have a regular office in downtown D. C., Wilkinson predicted. Meanwhile, most of the staff are telecommuting.
The Embassy is in a residential neighborhood where it is general- ly not legal to run an office.
Washington, D. C., property records show the building is owned by Moustafa El- Gindy, a former member of Egyptian Parliament who has been quoted in Breitbart news stories. El- Gindy is receiving a homestead deduction on the property, a $ 72,000 tax credit that requires the owner to maintain residence in the building. He could not be located for comment.
Breitbart CEO Larry Solov told the Senate press gallery that the company has a soon- to- expire lease in the building for corporate housing, offices and entertainment. But zoning rules there do not allow commercial leases.
“That area of Capitol Hill is zoned only for residential uses, with a very narrow set of ‘ home occupation’ exceptions,” said Mark Eckenwiler, longtime chair of the zoning committee for the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission.
The uses Solov described to the press gallery “appear to violate the D. C. zoning regulations applicable to that location,” he said. Because the lease is not public, it is impossible to know whether the terms meet the neighborhood’s restrictions.
When Breitbart does get a new office, it will presumably make the address more public than the current one, which appears nowhere on the Breitbart news site. The website also provides no way to contact staff.
Breitbart’s application for press credentials is also shining new light on the company’s management and ownership structure. The site offers no “masthead,” the roster of editors and managers.
The bigger question is who owns the site. Solov reluctantly told the Standing Committee of Correspondents in February that Breitbart is partly owned by the Mercer family, one of the largest sources of money behind committees supporting Trump’s campaign last year.
The Breitbart Embassy’s uses “appear to violate the D. C. zoning regulations applicable to that location.” Mark Eckenwiler, chair of the zoning committee for the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission