Ben Domenech

In 2019, following staff of other American media companies unionizing, co-founder Domenech Tweeted that the "first one of you tries to unionize I swear I'll send you back to the salt mine". Domenech later claimed he was only joking. But the following year an NLRB judge ruled that Domenech had threatened staff illegally and required the company to post notices in its offices and email employees to inform them about their legal rights.

In May 2019, Domenech's wife Meghan McCain appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers, where she and Meyers discussed McCain's highly contested and controversial accusation that Rep. Ilhan Omar was anti-Semitic. Shortly thereafter, Domenech posted a number of crude tweets targeted at Meyers, saying that Myers was an "untalented piece of shit" who "only has his job because he regularly gargled Lorne Michaels’ balls." Domenech later deleted his tweets and apologized for "rage tweeting".

In contrast, in May 2018, Damon Linker of The Week described The Federalist as "a leading disseminator of pro-Trump conspiracies and up-is-down, funhouse-mirror distortions of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election meddling and potential Trump involvement."

On February 21, 2018, Domenech sparked outrage after he called survivors of a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School a "bunch of idiots". In July 2018, on the day that the Special Counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election indicted 12 Russian agents, Domenech spread information from a hoax version of the indictment documents. Domenech said that "Much of it [the indictment] is taken up by the numbers of times that people were posting memes on the internet," referring to a hoax that the indictment charged the 12 Russians with "shitposting" and using memes.

He became engaged in July 2017 to Meghan McCain, the daughter of the late U.S. Senator John McCain.

In November 2017, The Federalist, the publication of which Domenech is a co-founder and publisher, came under criticism from both conservatives and liberals for publishing an opinion piece by Tully Borland, an Ouachita Baptist University philosopher, defending Roy Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court justice, and then Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, for dating teenagers, some as young as fourteen years old, while Moore himself was in his late 30s, arguing that such behavior was "not without some merit if one wants to raise a large family." Borland also quoted a philosophy professor telling her that when Moore pursued relationships with the young girls It was a "different time" and that she was "sick to death of people imposing their own moral standards on people" by contemporary standards of things they did in the past. Noah Rothman of the conservative Commentary Magazine stated that the op-ed was "rationalizing away child molestation." Molly Roberts of the Washington Post wrote that the op-ed was "uniquely awful." Domenech defended The Federalist for publishing Borland's op-ed saying the magazine "remains avowedly committed to offering alternative views. For those that have a problem with this, the question is simple: what are you afraid of?"

He is the former managing editor for health care policy at The Heartland Institute and former editor-in-chief of The City. He created and hosted a daily free market podcast, Coffee and Markets, until 2014. In 2006, Domenech was hired as a blogger by The Washington Post, but resigned three days later after verified plagiarism in prior work.

The NRO column recapped political talk shows on television. "If there was a Top 10 list of young Loudoun County people to watch, he'd be on it," a Washington Post reporter wrote in a Loudoun County, Virginia regional section of the paper. "Domenech is a sharp writer with an obvious command of his national politics beat—especially considering that this is the first year he is eligible to vote".

In Politico, Reid Cherlin wrote in 2014 that The Federalist deserved praise for "seek[ing] to go deep on the issues and sway the conversation in Washington." Matt K. Lewis wrote in The Week that conservative online media was divided between "staid, august publications" and "a new generation of irreverent sites," and that "[s]ites like The Federalist try to bridge the gap by providing serious commentary that is typically written by young, pop culture–savvy writers."

Linker further wrote: "Itis only since the election that rabid Republican partisans in the administration, in Congress, and in the media have actively dispensed with such old-fashioned norms of public life like concerns for propriety, professionalism, and fair-mindedness — all in the effort to protect a thoroughly compromised president from having to face the legal scrutiny his personal behavior and business transactions rightly prompt.

Domenech was hired by the Washington Post's online arm to write a blog providing "a daily mix of commentary, analysis and cultural criticism". Media Matters for America criticized the choice, claiming that "[t]here [were], however, no progressive bloggers—and no one left of center with the credentials of a political operative—on washingtonpost.com to provide balance to Domenech." Instapundit founder Glenn Reynolds told the New York Times that Domenech's appointment attracted anger among liberals "because he was a conservative and he was given real estate at The Washington Post" and this spurred bloggers to find "something they could use to get rid of him," referring to disclosures only days after Domenech's appointment of his extensive plagiarism.

After disclosure of the payments, The Washington Examiner and The San Francisco Examiner removed Domenech's posts from their websites and replaced it with an editors' note saying that "the author of this item presented content for which, unbeknownst to us, and in violation of our standards, had received payment from a third party mentioned therein—a payment which he also failed to disclose." The Washington Examiner owned The San Francisco Examiner at the time and content was shared.

In September, 2013, Domenech, along with Luke Sherman and Sean Davis co-founded The Federalist; senior editors include David Harsanyi and Mollie Hemingway. Domenech wrote that The Federalist was inspired by the mission and worldview of the original Time magazine's editor, Henry Luce, which he described as, "[leaning] to the political right, with a small-c conservatism equipped with a populist respect for the middle class reader outside of New York and Washington, and an abiding love for America at a time when snark and cynicism were not considered substitutes for smart analysis."

In 2013, Domenech was involved in a journalism scandal that resulted in the removal of his work from The Washington Examiner and The Huffington Post when it was disclosed that he had received $36,000 from Joshua Trevino, a conservative pundit and lobbyist, to write favorable opinion pieces about the government of Malaysia without disclosing the relationship. The payments only came to light when Trevino registered as a foreign agent of the Malaysian government, and disclosed that Domenech was one of several young conservative writers who wrote articles favorable to the Malaysian regime to bolster its image in conservative media.

In a 2010 post written for CBS, Domenech wrongly described Supreme Court Justice nominee Elena Kagan as potentially the "first openly gay justice." He later added an addendum stating, "I have to correct my text here to say that Kagan is apparently still closeted—odd, because her female partner is rather well known in Harvard circles." In fact, however, numerous reports confirmed that Kagan was not gay, forcing Domenech to issue a public apology to Kagan "if she is offended at all by my repetition of a Harvard rumor in a speculative blog post."

During the 2008 election, Domenech wrote numerous columns for Human Events and for The Washington Times. During the 2012 election, Domenech commented extensively on social and economic issues related to Occupy Wall Street for The Heritage Foundation.

The Heartland Institute itself, during this time, was funded in part by tobacco companies: The Institute had worked with the tobacco company Philip Morris to question serious cancer risks to secondhand smoke. Starting in 2008, Heartland later organized conferences to question the scientific consensus on climate change. During the presidency of Barack Obama Heartland was among the main organizers of the September 2009 Tea Party protest march, the Taxpayer March on Washington.

In March 2006, Domenech was named as a blogger for The Washington Post, hired to contribute to the newspaper's opinion pages from the conservative point of view. But only three days into his appointment, on March 21, 2006, Domenech resigned his position when evidence surfaced that he had earlier plagiarized work that had originally appeared in The New Yorker , The Washington Post, the National Review, and numerous other publications. The Post said it did not know about his plagiarism when the newspaper hired him. Jim Brady, the-then executive editor of Washingtonpost.com, said he would have fired Domenech had he not first offered to quit because the allegations of plagiarism made it necessary to "sever the relationship."

Red America launched on March 21, 2006, but Domenech resigned three days later after having written only six posts, after his fellow bloggers posted evidence online that Domenech had plagiarized the work of other journalists from The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The National Review, the humorist P. J. O'Rourke, and that of several other publications and writers. O'Rourke denied Domenech's claim that the humorist had granted permission to use his words: "I wouldn't want to swear in a court of law that I never met the guy", O'Rourke told The New York Times, "but I didn't give him permission to use my words under his byline, no." Editors for Domenech's college newspaper, The Flat Hat, denied allegations by Domenech that one instance of plagiarism resulted from his editors having "inserted a passage from The New Yorker in an article without his knowledge," saying that "Mr. Domenech's actions, if true, [were] deeply offensive." In another instance, Domenech has plagiarized from a front page article in the The Washington Post, the very newspaper he was now going to work for. On March 24, 2006, the editors of National Review confirmed on its blog The Corner that Domenech appeared to have plagiarized for at least one article he had written for that publication.

Domenech was caught at least once for allegedly fabricating a quote. A June 20, 2002, Spinsanity.org entry demonstrated that Domenech made up a quote he attributed to Tim Russert in order to defend President Bush.

He attended the College of William & Mary between 1999 and 2002. After receiving a job offer from the United States Department of Health and Human Services, he left William and Mary before his senior year. Domenech was the youngest political appointee of the George W. Bush administration. His father, Douglas Domenech, held several mid level position in the Bush administration, as a political appointee, at the time. Ben Domenech subsequently worked as a speechwriter for Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.

Ben Domenech (born January 1, 1982) is an American conservative writer, blogger, and television commentator. He is the co-founder and the publisher of The Federalist, host of The Federalist Radio Hour, and writes The Transom, a daily subscription newsletter for political insiders. He also co-founded the RedState group blog.