Russia sought ways to infiltrate Donald Trump’s administration as early as his first term, using its well-established tactic of corrupting officials and individuals within the president’s inner circle who could be appointed to key positions in the U.S.
According to The Washington Post, citing financial disclosures, in 2023, Kash Patel, a candidate for the position of FBI director, received $25,000 from Global Tree Pictures, a company owned by filmmaker Igor Lopatenok. Lopatenok, in turn, was funded by the Russian Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives and reportedly submitted his project for approval to Dmitry Peskov. The project aimed to halt U.S. aid to Ukraine.
Global Tree Pictures paid Patel for his participation in Lopatenok’s documentary series All the President’s Men: The Plot Against Trump. The series portrayed Patel and other members of Trump’s first administration as victims of a conspiracy designed to destroy those who supported Trump and remove a democratically elected president from office. The series was released on Tucker Carlson’s platform in November. The film’s narrative aligned with the Kremlin’s expectations, as Russian leadership viewed Trump as a pro-Russian candidate for the U.S. presidency.
Lopatenok resides in Los Angeles but holds Russian citizenship. In 2019, he co-directed the documentary Revealing Ukraine with Oliver Stone, who had previously interviewed Vladimir Putin. Lopatenok has been involved in psyops operations in the interest of Russia’s military intelligence.
In 2022, he began promoting a new project aimed at stopping arms shipments and financial aid to Ukraine from the U.S. and its allies. He submitted this project for approval to Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov. Lopatenok also worked on films featuring Oliver Stone to rehabilitate the reputations of Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. Another of his films, Revealing Ukraine, was allegedly funded by Viktor Medvedchuk.
▪️ In 2023, Lopatenok joined the expert council for the blogging content competition To Russia with Love, which was supported by the Russian Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives.
Patel has advocated for firing FBI employees who do not align with Trump’s views and stripping the agency of its intelligence-gathering role. “The biggest problem the FBI faced came from its intelligence services. I would eliminate that component. I would shut down the Hoover FBI building on day one and reopen it the next day as a Deep State museum,” he said in September. He also proposed relocating 7,000 FBI employees from the headquarters across the U.S. to focus on crime enforcement, stating, “Go be cops. You are cops. Go be cops.”
Patel’s proposals to weaken or eliminate the FBI’s counterintelligence functions would have significantly eased Russian intelligence operations in the U.S. These plans are particularly suspicious given the administration’s recent discussions of a personnel purge in the CIA, NSA, and DIA.
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We are convinced that Russia sought to infiltrate Trump’s circle and create conditions for blackmail using compromising information to recruit key figures. This suggests that, even during Trump’s first term, Russian intelligence gathered information about potential future appointees and worked to establish leverage for recruitment or coercion.
In this context, in 2024, U.S. Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Italy at the expense of the Clementy Foundation, owned by Belgian businessman Pierre Louvrier. During this trip, she engaged in discussions with Russian representatives. Louvrier is a business partner of Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, who is affiliated with Russian military intelligence. Weakening the FBI’s counterintelligence operations would help ensure the security and untouchability of Russian assets in the U.S.
