
Washington Post
The Washington Post is a major American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington metropolitan area and widely read around the country. The newspaper has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes. It employs around 800 journalists and had a 2015 daily circulation of 356,768. Its digital circulation was 1,000,000 in 2018.
Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013. Tensions between he and the newsroon have continued; in 2024 and 2025, multiple personnel resigned over the paper's non-endorsement of Kamala Harris and editorial changes advanced by Bezos.
“The faster the better,” the workers were told at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, as the little-known financial technology company Blueacorn raced to review small businesses that sought federal loans.
Speeding through applications, Blueacorn employees and contractors allegedly began to overlook possible signs of fraud, according to interviews and communications later amassed by investigators on Capitol Hill. The company weighed whether to prioritize “monster loans that will get everyone paid,” as the firm’s co-founder once said. And investigators found that Blueacorn collected about $1 billion in processing fees — while its operators may have secured fraudulent loans of their own.
The allegations against Blueacorn and several other firms are laid out in a sprawling, roughly 120-page report released Thursday by the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Crisis, a congressional watchdog tasked to oversee roughly $5 trillion in federal pandemic aid. The 18-month probe — spanning more than 83,000 pages of documents, and shared in advance with The Washington Post — contends there was rampant abuse among a set of companies known as fintechs, which jeopardized federal efforts to rescue the economy and siphoned off public funds for possible private gain.