Have you noticed a penchant of influencers to accuse other media personalities and podcasters of being “Russian agents”? On April 24, 2023, neocon icon Bill Kristol said of Tucker Carlson, “Carlson is a major asset for Putin. Will Putin abandon him now?” On June 2, 2026, Laura Loomer (who previously accused numerous rivals of being Russian agents, including Candace Owens) wrote, “The left wasn’t entirely wrong when they called some people Russian puppets… Now I’m just wondering how long some of these people I’ve known for years have been activated as foreign agents and who their handlers are.” Max Boot, David Frum, Anne Applebaum, Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro, James Lindsay and others have all abruptly adopted the tactic of accusing others in the conservative sphere of being “Russian agents.”
Is this just paranoia, or is there a coordinated pattern?
FISA Section 702
Let’s start with Section 702, which is a provision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). By accusing someone of being a “Russian agent,” you can make it possible to surveil an otherwise law-abiding political opponent in breach of U.S. law and Fourth Amendment-protected rights. President Barack Obama is accused of doing it to Donald Trump to dodge legal accountability for the wiretapping of his political opponents by first accusing them of being “Russian agents.”
In April 2022, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court quietly issued an opinion confirming that the FBI has repeatedly turned a surveillance authority built for foreign spies against American citizens engaged in ordinary political life. Among the violations the court catalogued was a single “batch query” run against Section 702’s database for more than 19,000 donors to a congressional campaign — U.S. citizens and permanent residents, since that’s who is legally permitted to donate. The Justice Department later determined that only about eight of those 19,000 queries met the minimum foreign-intelligence-purpose standard required to justify them at all. The rest were run anyway, against a database Congress authorized specifically to monitor foreign threats.
The same opinion disclosed that FBI personnel had run similarly unjustified queries against sitting members of Congress, journalists, and a state court judge, part of a pattern the court itself called “persistent and widespread.” Government reports later put the total number of noncompliant Section 702 queries at over 278,000 in a single reporting period.
Additional FBI Abuses
The Twitter Files disclosures of 2022-23 documented, through the company’s own internal emails, that the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force maintained near-constant contact with Twitter’s Trust and Safety team, flagging accounts for suspension under the banner of “foreign influence.” Those accounts frequently turned out to be small, domestic, and often satirical. The bureau eventually reimbursed Twitter $3.4 million for the compliance work. A task force chartered to counter foreign interference had, by its own paper trail, become a domestic content-moderation pipeline.
This should come as no surprise. The 1975-76 Church Committee, convened after a decade of intelligence-agency abuses came to light, documented COINTELPRO, a formal FBI counterintelligence program that targeted political dissidents, anti-war activists, and other domestic groups the bureau deemed subversive, in part by cultivating cooperative journalists to plant discrediting stories. In the 1990s, they created a program targeting conservatives called PATCON, short for “Patriot Conspiracy.” The CIA ran a parallel program, later dubbed Operation Mockingbird in press accounts, in which the Church Committee found roughly 50 journalists maintaining secret official relationships with the agency.
The FBI still runs an Office of Public Affairs and strategic-communications operation today, and it still recruits and manages confidential human sources. As part of the bureau’s continuing interest in narrative management, Pam Bondi in February 2025 briefed a stable of handpicked influencers on Jeffrey Epstein so they could spread the messaging she wanted deployed. Jack Posobiec, Liz Wheeler, Mike Cernovich, and Mark Steyn were among those favored by the FBI to execute its mission.
A Realistic Proposition
Is it therefore unrealistic to ask whether the FBI utilizes a stable of select podcasters and influencers to engage in James Comey-style “Russian agent” accusations to help the bureau manufacture consent to spy on political opponents via Section 702?
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