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Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s choice to be director of the FBI, appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 30.J. Scott Applewhite\/AP<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Fight disinformation: Sign up<\/a> for the free Mother Jones Daily<\/em> newsletter and follow the news that matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Last year, Kash Patel<\/strong>, the MAGA provocateur whom Donald Trump has nominated to head the FBI, received $25,000 from a Russia-linked production company to participate in a documentary in which he assailed the FBI and called for closing its headquarters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In November, Tucker Carlson\u2019s online network released a six-part series called All the President\u2019s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump <\/em>that purported to chronicle the familiar MAGA conspiracy theory that a Deep State plotted against Donald Trump while he was a presidential candidate in 2016 and when he was president. The fourth episode focused on Patel and his years-long crusade to depict the Trump-Russia scandal\u2014Moscow\u2019s attack on the 2016 election and Donald Trump\u2019s efforts to cover up its existence\u2014as nothing but a total hoax orchestrated by nefarious Democrats and rogue government operatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this film<\/a>\u2014which credits Patel as an executive producer\u2014he offers a blistering attack on the FBI. He calls it a \u201ccorrupt\u201d enterprise and claims it has been on the Democratic Party\u2019s \u201cpayroll.\u201d He says, \u201cI\u2019m the guy that\u2019s going to tell you they need major reforms. I\u2019m going to tell you to shut down the FBI headquarters building and open it up as a museum of the Deep State the next day. Seriously, you need 50 guys in Washington running the FBI.\u201d He pushes the false claim that the FBI launched its Russia investigation in 2016 on the basis of the infamous and unconfirmed Steele memos. And he insists that the FBI and the rest of the US intelligence community that investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election \u201cknew it didn\u2019t exist.\u201d He also asserts that \u201cglobalists\u201d have been working with Al Qaeda to make a profit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The series was produced for Carlson, who is featured in the final episode, by Global Tree Pictures, a Los Angeles-based firm run by Ukrainian-American-Russian filmmaker Igor Lopatonok<\/a>. He and Russian-born film director Vera Tomilova<\/a>, the chief financial officer of Global Tree Pictures, who holds a US green card, are listed in the film\u2019s credits as its producers. Global Tree raised the financing for the series, according to a contract<\/a> filed in Rudy Giuliani\u2019s bankruptcy proceedings. (Giuliani also starred in the documentary.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/a><\/a><\/a>Lopatonok has ties to Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In recent years, he has helped lead a Kremlin-financed effort to persuade Westerners to move to Russia. In 2023, he chaired<\/a> a competition dubbed \u201cTo Russia With Love\u201d that invited bloggers to produce content that would show the \u201cmost appealing side of Russia\u201d<\/a> and encourage people to emigrate there. This project was funded<\/a> by the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives<\/a>, a state entity that Putin created in 2021 to \u201csupport projects in the field of culture, art and the creative industries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of Lopatonok\u2019s colleagues<\/a> in this project was John Mark Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who received political asylum in Russia and who has been a key player in Russia\u2019s disinformation operations<\/a> against the West. In May, the New York Times<\/em> reported, \u201cDougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites<\/a> that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.\u201d Dougan was listed<\/a> on material as a member of the \u201cExpert Council\u201d of the \u201cTo Russia with Love\u201d project and as a \u201cmentor\u201d for the winners.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lopatonok has worked with <\/a>famed director Oliver Stone on two documentaries on Ukraine that were widely described as pro-Kremlin, One of these films, titled Revealing Ukraine<\/em> and released in 2019, was apparently financed in part by Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk, according<\/a> to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Vlast.kz, an independent media outlet in Kazakhstan. The film prominently featured Medvedchuk, a long-time ally of Vladimir Putin who was sanctioned by the United States<\/a> in 2014 in response to Russia\u2019s annexation of Crimea. (Medvedchuk was arrested<\/a> in Ukraine in 2021 and charged with treason; he was later traded to Russia in a prisoner swap.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, according to Patel\u2019s own financial disclosure statement<\/a>, he pocketed $25,000 from a production company operated by a filmmaker associated with a Kremlin-subsidized propaganda project, a pro-Putin oligarch, and a pro-Kremlin disinformation agent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Lopatonok also appears to have been doing business\u2014or trying to do business\u2014 in Russia. Last year, he and Tomilova set up a company<\/a> there called Global 3 Pictures, according to Russian corporate records. This is the same name as a corporation they established<\/a> in California in 2011. The Russian firm, according to the records, intended to produce films and television shows. The corporate listings note that the firm maintained a bank account at state-owned VTB, a bank subject to US sanctions<\/a>. The records also note<\/a> that Global 3 Pictures failed to submit a tax return.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mother Jones<\/em> sent Lopatonok and Patel each a list of questions and a request for comment. Neither responded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The All The President\u2019s Men <\/em>series was loaded with Russian connections. Its director, Sean Stone, a son of Oliver Stone, hosted a show on RT America, the Russian state-funded network until it was shut down in 2022 after Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. For this docuseries, Stone conducted the on-air interviews with Simona Mangiante, the wife of George Papadopoulos, a Trump foreign policy adviser who pleaded guilty to making false statements to FBI agents during the Russia investigation and served 12 days in federal prison.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In another Global Tree Picture film released last year, Hunter\u2019s Laptop<\/em>\u2014Requiem for Ukraine<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>a documentary about alleged Biden corruption in Ukraine, Mangiante interviewed<\/a> Andrii Derkach, whom the US Treasury Department sanctioned<\/a> in 2020 for serving as a \u201cRussian agent\u201d and spreading disinformation to influence the American election that year\u2014that is, disseminating false stories about then-candidate Joe Biden. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence later noted<\/a> that Putin \u201chad purview over\u201d Derkach\u2019s activities, meaning Moscow was running an operation to discredit Biden and help Trump. With this film, Lopatonok and Mangiante amplified the phony assertions peddled by an identified Russian agent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The scriptwriting team for All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> included Lopatonok, Tomilova, and George Eliason, an editor at a website called Intelligencer<\/a><\/em> that posts<\/a> conservative and Putin-friendly material. Lopatonok and Tomilova are on its editorial board.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n All the President\u2019s Men<\/em> featured the usual assortment of Trump champions who have for years pushed the Deep-State-is-after-Trump conspiracy tale, including Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, and Papadopoulos. It\u2019s full of paranoia and debunked claims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Despite Carlson\u2019s backing, Lopatonok and Tomilova\u2019s series didn\u2019t register much on the media landscape. But it has one intriguing piece of information: Patel\u2019s financial relationship with a production company tied to Russian propaganda and disinformation activity. That is hardly a reassuring credential for an FBI chief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The documentary was produced by a filmmaker tied to Russian propaganda efforts. February 7, 2025 (MotherJones.com) Kash Patel, President Donald Trump’s choice to be director of the FBI, appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 30.J. Scott Applewhite\/AP Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news… Continue reading