Last year, Kash Patel, 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.
In November, Tucker Carlson’s online network released a six-part series called All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump 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—Moscow’s attack on the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s efforts to cover up its existence—as nothing but a total hoax orchestrated by nefarious Democrats and rogue government operatives.
In this film—which credits Patel as an executive producer—he offers a blistering attack on the FBI. He calls it a “corrupt” enterprise and claims it has been on the Democratic Party’s “payroll.” He says, “I’m the guy that’s going to tell you they need major reforms. 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.” 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 “knew it didn’t exist.” He also asserts that “globalists” have been working with Al Qaeda to make a profit.
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. He and Russian-born film director Vera Tomilova, the chief financial officer of Global Tree Pictures, who holds a US green card, are listed in the film’s credits as its producers. Global Tree raised the financing for the series, according to a contract filed in Rudy Giuliani’s bankruptcy proceedings. (Giuliani also starred in the documentary.)
Lopatonok has ties to Russian propaganda and disinformation efforts.
In recent years, he has helped lead a Kremlin-financed effort to persuade Westerners to move to Russia. In 2023, he chaired a competition dubbed “To Russia With Love” that invited bloggers to produce content that would show the “most appealing side of Russia” and encourage people to emigrate there. This project was funded by the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives, a state entity that Putin created in 2021 to “support projects in the field of culture, art and the creative industries.”
One of Lopatonok’s colleagues 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’s disinformation operations against the West. In May, the New York Times reported, “Dougan has built an ever-growing network of more than 160 fake websites that mimic news outlets in the United States, Britain and France.” Dougan was listed on material as a member of the “Expert Council” of the “To Russia with Love” project and as a “mentor” for the winners.
Lopatonok has worked with famed director Oliver Stone on two documentaries on Ukraine that were widely described as pro-Kremlin, One of these films, titled Revealing Ukraine and released in 2019, was apparently financed in part by Ukrainian oligarch and pro-Kremlin politician Viktor Medvedchuk, according 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 in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. (Medvedchuk was arrested in Ukraine in 2021 and charged with treason; he was later traded to Russia in a prisoner swap.)
So, according to Patel’s own financial disclosure statement, 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.
Lopatonok also appears to have been doing business—or trying to do business— in Russia. Last year, he and Tomilova set up a company there called Global 3 Pictures, according to Russian corporate records. This is the same name as a corporation they established 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. The records also note that Global 3 Pictures failed to submit a tax return.
Mother Jones sent Lopatonok and Patel each a list of questions and a request for comment. Neither responded.
The All The President’s Men 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’s 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.
In another Global Tree Picture film released last year, Hunter’s Laptop—Requiem for Ukraine, a documentary about alleged Biden corruption in Ukraine, Mangiante interviewed Andrii Derkach, whom the US Treasury Department sanctioned in 2020 for serving as a “Russian agent” and spreading disinformation to influence the American election that year—that is, disseminating false stories about then-candidate Joe Biden. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence later noted that Putin “had purview over” Derkach’s 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.
The scriptwriting team for All the President’s Men included Lopatonok, Tomilova, and George Eliason, an editor at a website called Intelligencer that posts conservative and Putin-friendly material. Lopatonok and Tomilova are on its editorial board.
All the President’s Men 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’s full of paranoia and debunked claims.
Despite Carlson’s backing, Lopatonok and Tomilova’s series didn’t register much on the media landscape. But it has one intriguing piece of information: Patel’s financial relationship with a production company tied to Russian propaganda and disinformation activity. That is hardly a reassuring credential for an FBI chief.
