Radio host Ari Hoffman of KVI AM 570 news radio fired the first shot Aug.18 in a barrage of complaints to the state government that allege “the legacy media” is cheating on Washington’s campaign finance laws.
His target? The Seattle Times and its opposition to a failed 2024 ballot measure to repeal a new industrial carbon emissions law.
He filed his complaint against the Times and its Climate Lab with the Public Disclosure Commission, which regulates political campaign finances in Washington.
On Aug. 24, Hoffman filed a second PDC complaint regarding the Times’ project homelessness coverage, which has at least two reporters funded by donations from homeless institutions. He claims this coverage improperly boosted a Seattle housing property tax levy in 2023, which successfully replaced an expiring 2016 levy.
Hoffman declined comment. “I do not give comments to anti-American antisemitic rags like the Stranger,” he wrote in an email.
Essentially, Hoffman’s Climate Lab complaint to the PDC claims that liberal groups sent money to the Times through the Seattle Foundation—an 80-year-old philanthropic organization that provides grants and investment money to a wide range of causes and ventures, including donations it funnels to the Seattle Times’ Climate Lab project—so the paper would write stories and editorials to sway readers to vote against a 2024 ballot measure that would repeal the state’s new Climate Commitment Act (CCA). The CCA, a quarterly state auction of carbon carbon emissions credits to polluting industries which pays for numerous global warming mitigation programs, survived by a 62-percent-to-38-percent margin.
The Seattle Foundation and some of the Climate Lab donors also make political donations.
According to Hoffman’s complaint, The Seattle Times and donor organizations should be investigated for potentially violating Washington campaign finance reporting requirements by not reporting the financial value and sponsor identification for political advertising, expenditures, contributions, and in-kind support associated with opposing 2024’s ballot measure.
The complaint claims the Climate Lab, a team of four climate reporters whose 2024 coverage specifically addressed the carbon emissions credits law only a handful of times, differs from normal newsroom operations because it is funded through donations and not from the paper’s normal revenue.
Hoffman wants the PDC to interview the Times’s Climate Lab reporters and editorial board members. Plus, he wants the commission to examine all of the Times’s stories and editorials, as well as all finances and emails involving the Times’s relations with the Seattle Foundation and its climate-related donors.
The Seattle Times and the Seattle Foundation both declined comment.
Hoffman, a right-wing commentator, does not present any specific details that prove that the Times’s climate change coverage is not factually based, accurate, nor objective.
This practice of using donations to bolster news coverage has become more common among newspapers, whose revenues have dramatically shrunk due to advertising drying up
The Spokesman-Review is one such paper. Its longtime owners—the Cowles family—recently transferred ownership to a new Spokane non-profit corporation, Comma Community Journalism Lab. Comma’s list of donors is public.
Also, the Washington State Standard is part of States Newsroom, a nationwide non-profit collection of newsrooms funded by roughly 1,200 donations of more than $1,000 for it to cover state governments. Conservative interests have accused States Newsroom of liberal biases, which the national organization denies having. The liberal Hopewell Fund largely bankrolled States Newsroom from 2017 to 2019 until the organization got on its feet. Several liberal interests are among the national group’s donors.
The Washington State Standard has the biggest statehouse news operation in Olympia, and is a neutral workhorse whose stories are reprinted by several state papers.
Another relatively new Olympia news operation funded solely by donors is The Center Square. The conservative Franklin News Foundation (formerly the Franklin Center) funds The Center Square in numerous states. Most donors to the Franklin News Foundation are anonymous. The Center Square (formerly Watchdog) concentrates on business and tax issues, although it has stretched into other matters.
Philanthropy.org, a nationwide donation-tracking Web site, says that Project 42, a leading Washington conservative funding operation, donated $3.1 million to the Franklin News Foundation from 2021 to 2024.
Redmond hedge fund manager Brian Heywood leads Let’s Go Washington, which has three initiatives on the November ballot – banning transgender girls from girls sports, revoking the millionaires’ income tax, and a parental rights measure.
Heywood also helps control the pursestrings of Project 42, whose subsidiary Future 42 is a regular advertiser on Brandi Kruse’s podcast. Kruse is also an official “ambassador” of Future 42, which translates to being a very vocal supporter.
Meanwhile, right-wing podcaster Kruse says she soon plans to file PDC complaints similar to Hoffman’s against the Times, the Tacoma News Tribune, The Stranger, her former employer KIRO Newsradio, and the independent Black outlet Converge Media.
Kruse and Hoffman are not coordinating their complaints. “Ari Hoffman did that all on his lonesome. I learned about it after the fact,” she said about his first complaint in an email to The Stranger.
Hoffman’s and Kruse’s PDC filings are apparent payback for a group called Washingtonians For Ethical Government (WFEG) filing a complaint against Let’s Go Washington in May. That complaint alleged that the conservative initiative organization Let’s Go Washington has not properly filed campaign documentation related to Kruse’s podcast, unDivided, being a major supporter of the organization’s November 2026 ballot measure to ban transgender girls from girls sports.
The WFEG complaint alleges 159 instances of Kruse boosting the measure on her podcast from September 2025 to February 2026, plus two times she led political rallies on the same topic. The complaint alleges that Kruse’s support crossed the line from commentary to at least $345,000 in free advertising. Kruse still discusses this measure on her podcast several times a week.
The PDC recently decided to launch a formal investigation into this claim—roughly 90 days after it was submitted. A couple Seattle television newsrooms noted that launch.
On her Aug. 18 podcast, Kruse pointed to the PDC not terminating the May complaint, which she contended unfairly tainted her and Let’s Go Washington with a bad image.
She believes that the PDC is deliberately not resolving the May complaint by now. “The PDC’s decision to allow (the Washingtonians For Ethical Government complaint) to linger is a political decision,” Kruse said.
As the PDC investigates the complaint against Let’s Go Washington, it will have to parse legal and semantic differences between commentary and free political advertising. A 2007 Washington Supreme Court ruling that declares radio host commentary is not political advertising will also likely be a factor in the PDC’s investigation. The commission will also likely examine financial and organizational ties between Kruse and Brian Heywood, sponsor of the anti-trans Let’s Go Washington measure and two others on November’s ballot.
Kruse is angry that her podcast is receiving bad publicity from this matter because Let’s Go Washington is accused of the actual insufficient campaign reporting – with her podcast not being required to report to the PDC. “I have a First Amendment right to support any initiative I choose,”she wrote in her email.
On her Aug. 18 podcast, Kruse said she would “assemble an army” to be paid with her own money to compile detailed information on the advertisers, stories and finances of The Seattle Times, The Stranger, The News Tribune, KIRO News Radio and Converge Media to send detailed complaints to the PDC.
Meanwhile, Kruse wrote in her email: “I selected a wide array of media outlets to make a point: it’s not about politics, it’s about equal treatment under the law. If the PDC chooses to erode my First Amendment rights, then they must also go after those who are similarly situated – including dear friends of mine. Anyone who engaged in commercial advertising while also engaging in opinion on candidates or campaigns is impacted.”
After the first five complaints are filed, Kruse plans to continue submitting similar complaints regarding other Washington news operations.
“I will spend every waking hour burying the PDC in bullshit over this,” she said on her Aug. 17 podcast.
Kruse and Hoffman ally themselves with right-wing activist Jonathan Choe. The trio routinely participate in conservative political activities. Kruse also is paid to speak at Republican functions, and she campaigned for free for GOP gubernatorial candidate David Reichert in 2024.
Months ago, Kruse and Cho attended an Antifa roundtable at the White House where Kruse told President Donald Trump that her support for his second term made her feel more attractive—a remark out of sync with accepted press professionalism.
The three are co-plaintiffs in a federal lawsuit to be declared journalists so they can get access to the Democratic side of the Capitol’s House chamber in Olympia. They already have access to the entire Senate chamber and to the GOP side of the House chamber by various means. The judge in charge of that litigation told them that their chances of prevailing in that lawsuit are slim.
While this is technically a separate issue from the PDC matter, Kruse has loosely co-mingled the two in a few podcasts.