Nominee for FBI Director Paid for Documentary Linked to Kremlin
Financial documents reveal that Donald Trump's nominee for FBI director, Patel, received $25,000 for a documentary linked to the Kremlin. He criticized the FBI in the series that aired on Tucker Carlson Network.
According to financial disclosure documents, President Donald Trump's nominee for the role of FBI director was paid $25,000 for his participation in a documentary produced by Global Tree Pictures, a Los Angeles-based company run by Igor Lopatonok, a filmmaker with reported ties to the Kremlin.
As The Washington Post reports, Patel was compensated for his involvement in a six-part series titled All The President's Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump, which portrayed Patel and other members of the first Trump administration as victims of a conspiracy that "destroyed the lives of those who stood by Donald Trump in an attempt to remove the democratically elected president from office." The series aired last year on the Tucker Carlson Network.
In the series, Patel -- credited as an executive producer -- criticizes the "corrupt" FBI. "I'm the guy that's going to tell you they need major reforms," Patel states about the federal law enforcement agency he now hopes to lead. "I'm 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."
The series was directed by Sean Stone, who had previously hosted a show on the Russian state-funded network RT America until the network's shutdown in 2022 following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. (Sean is the son of Oscar-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone, who has also collaborated with Lopatonok.)
Lopatonok's other productions include the controversial Ukraine on Fire, featuring Oliver Stone interviewing figures such as Vladimir Putin regarding the Maidan Revolution, claiming it was a coup d'état orchestrated by the United States.
A report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project highlights that Lopatonok has plans to produce films celebrating controversial pro-Russian figures like Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko and Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan.
Patel's financial disclosure also unveiled connections to other foreign entities, including the Embassy of Qatar and up to $5 million worth of unvested stock in Elite Depot, the Cayman Islands-based parent company of e-commerce giant SHEIN.
