Glenn Beck Paid $1 Million By FreedomWorks To Say ‘Nice Things’ About Tea Party

Glenn Beck was paid $1 million dollars by FreedomWorks, a conservative non-profit organization, to say “nice things” about the Tea Party on his radio show.

That revelation comes from a surprising source: former FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey, who now says that the payments to Glenn Beck provided “too little value” for money. Speaking to liberal group Media Matters, Armey explained:

“The arrangement was simply FreedomWorks paid Glenn Beck money and Glenn Beck said nice things about FreedomWorks on the air. I saw that a million dollars went to Beck this past year, that was the annual expenditure.”

Armey’s remarks came after Mother Jones posted a leaked Tea Party document containing data for its Winter 2012 board of directors meeting. The document refers to “media programs” for fundraising that feature both Glenn Beck and fellow conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh. Together, Beck and Limbaugh are said to have helped raised funds totaling nearly $1.3 million in 2012.

However, Armey now thinks that the payments to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh did not offer the best value:

“If Limbaugh and Beck, if we were using those resources to recruit activists and inform activists and to encourage and enthuse activists, that’s one thing… If we are using these things to raise money; one, it’s a damned expensive way to raise money; and two, it makes raising money an end on to itself not an instrumental activity to support the foundation work that our organization does…

“It is like federal budgeting… We count the receipts we get from people who have sent in money, and we – meaning they, I am not a part of it anymore – do not count what the funds that are laying out are. They don’t say, we paid Beck a million dollars and we had this program where we raised $300,000, you had a net cost of $600,000, or whatever the numbers are.”

Calling the move a “mistake,” Armey added:

“I put it down now as basically as paid advertising for FreedomWorks by Beck.”

Armey, who left FreedomWorks in the fall of 2012 after a dispute over its internal operations, said he was not aware of the exact financial arrangements between FreedomWorks and Limbaugh.