The Bulwark reports:

The Trump administration is sending aggressive signals about launching a potential federal investigation into the company that owns Politico and Business Insider as retaliation for an article scrutinizing Donald Trump Jr.’s business interests.

In a Tuesday-night story little noticed outside of right-wing media, Breitbart reporter and Trump administration favorite Matthew Boyle wrote that the White House was furious at German media conglomerate Axel Springer. At issue was a Business Insider story titled “Don Jr. is the new Hunter Biden.” In the 1,500-word-long item, reporter Bethany McLean focused on Don Jr.’s venture-capital fund, 1789 Capital, primarily via a collection of quotes from some ethics experts and an anonymous Wall Street investor concerned that the fund could present a conflict of interest.

The story was relatively anodyne, certainly in a world where the president is poised to receive a $400 million luxury jet from a foreign country and boosting a meme coin by offering White House access. And Business Insider isn’t the first media outlet to compare Don Jr. to Hunter Biden.

But Boyle wrote that the Business Insider article had opened up Axel Springer to a “massive” federal review of its ownership, quoting an unnamed outside White House adviser as calling Politico and Business Insider a “German Influence Operation.”

“Talk about your all-time backfires,” Boyle wrote. “Instead of landing a major hit on the president’s son, a German-backed publication has drawn massive federal attention onto its foreign ownership structure and lobbying activities before the federal government.”

The idea that the White House is only now discovering that two major digital media outlets are owned by a German company—purchases that were well-covered in the business press at the time—is ridiculous. Less so is the possibility Boyle’s piece raises: that the Trump administration might retaliate against Axel Springer. [Continue reading…]