Conservative writers caught in paid propaganda scam

I've been a bit burned out on BuzzFeed lately, but Rosie Gray posts the bombshell revelation of the day. That being conservative opinion leaders paid to shill for foreign governments and at least in Josh Trevino's case, lying about it for years.

The payments to conservative American opinion writers — whose work appeared in outlets from the Huffington Post and San Francisco Examiner to the Washington Times to National Review and RedState — emerged in a filing this week to the Department of Justice. The filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act outlines a campaign spanning May 2008 to April 2011 and led by Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit, who received $389,724.70 under the contract and paid smaller sums to a series of conservative writers. [...]

Trevino's subcontractors included conservative writer Ben Domenech, who made $36,000 from the arrangement, and Rachel Ehrenfeld, the director of the American Center for Democracy, who made $30,000. Seth Mandel, an editor at Commentary, made $5,500 (his byline is attached to the National Review item linked to above). Brad Jackson, writing at the time for RedState, made $24,700. Overall, 10 writers were part of the arrangement.

You may recall Ben Domenech was the first token conservative WaPo elevated to their opinion pages who was fired shortly thereafter when it was discovered he plagiarized a large bulk of his work.

Wingnut welfare. Lucrative work if you can live with your conscience, or if you don't have one at all, I guess.