[11] In 2019, Politico journalist Eliana Johnson, described by Ben Smith as "a leading political reporter" assumed the editor-in-chief position from the WFB's founding editor Matthew Continetti.

[12] Jack Hunter, a staff member of Senator Rand Paul's office, resigned in 2013 after a Free Beacon report detailing his past as a pro-secessionist radio shock jock known as the "Southern Avenger".

[13] From October 2015 to May 2016, the Washington Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS to conduct opposition research on "multiple candidates" during the 2016 presidential election, including Donald Trump.

[20] Bill Gertz, a senior editor until October 2019, took 100,000 US dollars from Guo Wengui, a conspiracy theorist, without disclosure,[21] wrote stories citing him and introduced him to Steve Bannon.

[21] In 2023 and 2024, The New York Times credited the Free Beacon with breaking, together with Chris Rufo,[24] and subsequently expanding, reportage on the plagiarism accusations against Harvard President Claudine Gay,[25] who resigned shortly thereafter.

"[5] In May 2024, the Free Beacon reported that the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA has continued to evaluate applicants based on race rather than qualifications despite the practice of race-based affirmative action being illegal in California since 1996.

[31] Ben Howe wrote in The Daily Beast that The Washington Free Beacon established "itself as a credible source of conservative journalism with deep investigative dives and exposes on money in politics", but after Trump's election it was "producing less actual reporting" and moved "more towards the path of least resistance: spending their time criticizing the left and the media, along with healthy doses of opinion writing".

[32] McKay Coppins in the Columbia Journalism Review wrote in September 2018 that while the website contains "a fair amount of trolling… it has also earned a reputation for real-deal journalism… If a partisan press really is the future, we could do worse than the Free Beacon".

Smith continued that the Free Beacon's hard news reporting differentiated it from other conservative outlets which were either opinion focused or did not produce journalism which met mainstream standards.