Ryan Lizza’s Exit from Politico Gets Hostile After Company Lawyers Demand He Delete Substack Post

Screenshot via Politico on Facebook.

Ryan Lizza’s brand new Substack, Telos, is barely a day old and it’s already sparked a conflict with his former employer, Politico.

At issue is the former Politico Playbook co-author’s initial post in which he welcomed readers to his new site and lamented the current state of journalism in America.

The post, which went live on his Substack on Monday, began:

Some news: I recently left Politico, where I’ve served as the Chief Washington Correspondent since 2019.

The main reason? Their style of political coverage is not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic peril we are facing.

I know that sounds dramatic, but the gap between what is actually happening in Washington and how it was being framed and reported became much too wide.

This new publication, Telos, is my modest attempt to do things better.

I don’t mean to pick on my friends in the media. All the people and institutions on Trump’s enemies list are struggling with how to respond.

Lizza went on to discuss how he reached a “moment of extreme clarity” when he observed how major law firms like Paul Weiss were bending the knee to President Donald Trump, agreeing to provide hundreds of millions of dollars of pro bono work and change firm policies to meet his demands.

But what really struck him was how these firms were memory-holing content from their websites, deleting articles that bragged about their lawyers’ accomplishments and court victories — but these successes were against the president or his objectives.

“That is some 1984-level shit,” Lizza wrote, adding that seeing it “shook” him and he felt that there was “no way to capture that when writing for a place such as Politico,” where he “saw too many headlines that covered Trump’s assault on these law firms as if it were an intriguing tennis match, and it made me painfully aware that vast swathes of the media are ill-equipped to cover the current crisis.”

According to Lizza, later Monday evening he received a call from an unknown number and then a cease-and-desist letter from a Politico attorney with a “scary” subject line: “Notice of Violation of non-disparagement clause.”

The letter accused Lizza of disparaging his former employer, which he noted is a billion-dollar company, “and demanded that I delete, in its entirety, an 1800-word article I wrote yesterday announcing the launch of this publication, Telos.”

Lizza was defiant in a Tuesday post responding to the lawyer’s letter, arguing that the Monday post “was not about Politico.” Instead, Lizza wrote, his first article was “about the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on the media and what we as journalists should do to cover the crisis in Washington more responsibly.”

By asking him to delete the entire post, Lizza continued, Politico’s lawyers were not just asking him “to censor critical reporting about Politico, I was being asked to censor critical reporting about Trump,” and were “doing the bidding of the Trump administration by using a legal threat to assist the White House in stifling criticism of the president.”

“Frankly, that is much more concerning than anything I wrote yesterday about Politico,” he wrote, “which I only mentioned three times.”

He also took issue with the lawyer’s accusation that his post was disparagement, because “there is nothing disparaging about mentioning Politico as an example of the kinds of news organizations that don’t publish certain genres of writing. It is just a factual statement and Politico should not be sensitive about that.”

Writing that his former employer had “made a regrettable mistake,” wrote Lizza, was “the definition of respectful criticism,” and not the belittling or disrespectful criticism that would constitute disparagement.

Oliver Darcy offered a similar assessment in his Status newsletter Tuesday night. “While Lizza’s critique was pointed and mentioned POLITICO in a handful of posts, it notably did focus more broadly on the broader industry’s woes,” he wrote, adding that Lizza “rightly” objected to his former employer’s attempts to censor him.

Lizza concluded by declaring he was “not going to be censored or intimidated by legal threats,” and noting that not only was his allegedly disparaging post linked elsewhere on Politico’s website, the company had invited him to attend the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner and related events as its guest this coming weekend.

“I’m holding out the possibility that the letter was sent to me in a moment of pique by an otherwise well-meaning Politico attorney before the editorial staffers—many of whom I know would be appalled by this kind of a request—were informed,” he wrote. “I hope cooler heads prevail here, and I hope that my friends at Politico will think carefully about whether they really want to go around censoring journalists.”

Read Lizza’s post here.