Did former President Barack Obama charge the Biden Administration $18 million a year for consulting? No, that's not true: The post spreading that claim originated on a Facebook page with a satire disclaimer and a warning that all the contents of the page are fabricated. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content. There is no evidence that it is real.
The claim originated in a post (archived here) published by the America's Last Line Of Defense Facebook page on April 8, 2025. The caption read "Obama has always been a crook". The meme read:
Obama Charged the Biden Administration $18 Million a Year for 'Consulting.' No Other Ex-President has Ever Charged a Fee to Offer Advice to Their Successor.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Jul 31 15:37:17 2025 UTC)
The claim continued to spread on social media without a satire label months after the satire was published.
There is no evidence that the claim is real. A Google search (archived here) for "Obama Biden $18 million consulting" found no evidence supporting the claim, only fact checks confirming it was false.
The account that shared the post is the creation of Christopher Blair, a self-professed liberal from Maine, who for years has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. He uses the nickname "Busta Troll." A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by foreign website networks trying to make money by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
