Insider's Mattathias Schwartz reports that billionaire passport collector Peter Theil is an FBI informant; Thiel started snitching on his milieu in 2021.
In the summer of 2021, Insider has learned, Thiel began providing information as a "confidential human source," or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who specializes in investigating political corruption and foreign-influence campaigns. Charles Johnson, a longtime associate of Thiel's and a notorious figure in the far-right movement that Thiel has subsidized for a decade, told Insider in a statement that he helped recruit the billionaire as an informant by introducing him to Buma. … Many of the politicians that Thiel has bankrolled — including Trump, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, and Blake Masters, a former Arizona senatorial candidate — have repeatedly attacked the bureau and its leadership in public. In 2022, Vance, whose campaign and affiliated PACs received a total of $15 million from Thiel, falsely claimed that the FBI had illegally wiretapped Trump's phone. Vance accused the bureau of "harassing faithful Christians" and pledged to block all of President Joe Biden's Department of Justice nominees in retaliation for the Trump prosecutions. (Most but not all of Thiel's donations occurred in early 2021, before the launch of Vance's campaign and the many false claims he made over the course of the race.)
There's something very funny about this. The far-right guys hanging around with Thiel, founder of $37bn government surveillance giant Palantir and various other deep statey startups, and he's smiling and encouraging and listening intently as they talk about revolution. That said, the story specifies that Johnson "believes that Thiel's reporting to the FBI was largely limited to foreign contacts and attempts by foreign governments to penetrate Silicon Valley." Notwithstanding Insider's other sources, Johnson is a notorious liar and holocaust denier who has repeatedly falsely accused people of things in the past.
