Far-right blogger Chuck C. Johnson is reportedly helping pick members of President-elect Donald Trump’s administration. According to Forbes, multiple anonymous sources say Johnson is working with Trump transition team members — including Facebook board member and de facto Silicon Valley ambassador Peter Thiel — to help suggest and vet candidates. If correct, Johnson’s involvement may be a sign that the Trump team hasn’t distanced itself completely from its far-right, white nationalist fans, with whom Johnson is aligned.
The exact extent of Johnson’s involvement with the transition team isn’t clear. Johnson reportedly told Forbes he had “no formal role,” then stated in a later interview with blogger Stefan Molyneux that he had been “doing a lot of vetting for the administration and the Trump transition.” Forbes writes that he has pushed “at least a dozen potential candidates to Thiel,” including conservative net neutrality opponent Ajit Pai for head of the FCC.
It’s also unclear how close his relationship actually is with Thiel; Johnson claimed they had “only a passing familiarity,” though they had “some of the same enemies.” This was apparently a reference to Gawker Media — Thiel funded the lawsuit that ended up driving the news organization into bankruptcy in 2016, while Johnson filed a presently unsuccessful defamation suit in 2015. (It’s worth noting that the authors of today’s Forbes report, Ryan Mac and Matt Drange, also broke the story of Thiel’s involvement.)
In 2014, Gawker called Johnson “the web’s worst journalist,” pointing to a number of false or thinly sourced reports and vindictive attacks on, in particular, black victims of police violence. (He was suspended from Twitter in 2015, after tweeting a request for money to help with “taking out” Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson.)