2 weeks Ago By The Daily Beast
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 paid for his participation in a six-part series titled All The President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump , which positioned 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—who is credited as an executive producer—lashes out at the “corrupt” FBI. “I’m the guy that’s going to tell you they need major reforms,” Patel says of the federal law enforcement agency he now hopes to run. “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 worked with Lopatonok.
) Lopatonok’s other productions include the controversial Ukraine on Fire, which featured Oliver Stone interviewing subjects such as Vladimir Putin about the Maidan Revolution that took place in Kyiv in 2013. The documentary presented a pro-Russian narrative, claiming that the revolution was a coup d'état orchestrated by the United States. According to a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Lopatonok has also planned to produce films that would celebrate controversial pro-Russian figures such as Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko and Ilham Aliyev, the president of Azerbaijan.
Patel’s financial disclosure also revealed ties 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 behemoth SHEIN..
