Key Findings of the Investigation:
There are (so far) five FARA-registered agents with documented outreach and meetings with the Tucker Carlson Network: El Salvador, Turkey, Republika Srpska, Qatar, and Venezuela.
Damian Merlo’s firm made eight contacts with Carlson’s team before the Bukele interview, paid $520,000 by El Salvador’s president’s office in that window. The same firm arranged Tucker’s interview with Argentinian President Javier Milei.
The Washington D.C. office of Turkey’s ruling party, AKP, met virtually with Neil Patel (Daily Caller co-founder, now Tucker Carlson Network CEO) in March 2026.
Former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, whose firm RRB represents Srpska, appeared twice on Tucker’s show over the last 2 years, once before the firm’s Srpska contract even existed.
Qatar paid Lumen8 Advisors to help arrange the Qatari Prime Minister’s interview with Carlson, as previously reported.
Robert Amsterdam, another guest on Tucker’s show, was representing Venezuela’s attorney general at the time of his appearance, around when Tucker began speaking positively about Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Amsterdam had also represented Nigeria’s former Kaduna State governor and explicitly denied the genocide of Christians in Nigeria on air during Tucker’s show.
Tucker Carlson can’t help but entangle himself in international politics. The public has known that since his sympathetic interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin, which ran on his podcast over two years ago.
What the public may be less aware of, however, is that Carlson’s show has become a preferred venue for registered foreign agents looking to promote their principals’ interests. We already know about Lumen8 and Qatar, and about Robert Amsterdam and Nigeria / Venezuela. Over the last two weeks, digging through the Justice Department’s FARA database, I found three more.
Let’s start with the most straightforward one.
El Salvador’s Paper Trail to Tucker Carlson
First on the list is the registered lobbyist for El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele. Damian Merlo, a Miami-based operative who has spent years connecting Latin American leaders to the American right, runs the FARA-registered Latin America Advisory Group. Between March and June 2024, his firm logged eight separate contacts with the Tucker Carlson Network.
Lexi Ciccone twice by text, in March and April. Benno Kass by text on May 25. A meeting with Tucker Carlson himself on June 1, the day of Bukele’s inauguration, which Carlson attended as part of an unofficial MAGA delegation. Then emails to Elizabeth Llebenow, Samantha Ottimo and Marina Schaberg on June 4 and June 6.
Carlson announced the Bukele interview on June 4 and published it the next day. Merlo’s firm took in $520,000 from the Office of the President of El Salvador during that same six-month window, part of more than $1.5 million it had received from Bukele’s office since 2022 by the following year. Merlo had already pulled this off once before, arranging Javier Milei’s 2023 Carlson interview while advising his campaign.
Erdogan’s Cousin and the AKP’s Washington Operation
Next up: Turkey.
The country’s ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, maintains a registered office in Washington run by President Erdogan’s cousin, Halil Mutlu. In a recent FARA filing, it logged roughly 85 political activities over six months, many of them described in nearly identical boilerplate language.
One of those entries records a virtual meeting on March 12, 2026 with Neil Patel, who co-founded the Daily Caller with Carlson in 2010 and is now Carlson’s co-founder and CEO at the Tucker Carlson Network. The filing describes the purpose simply as a “discussion of U.S.-Turkiye relations.”
In response to my reporting on the meeting, which neither Patel nor Carlson had previously mentioned, Patel responded on X that “I meet with all sorts of people every week to try to figure out what’s really going on in an increasingly complicated and dangerous world.” He did not explain what, beyond the filing’s generic description, was actually discussed.
Rod Blagojevich and Republika Srpska
Now for the most interesting of the three new FARA ties to Tucker that I discovered.
In 2011, Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, was convicted on federal corruption charges, including conduct surrounding Barack Obama’s vacated Senate seat. He served eight years of a fourteen-year sentence before Trump commuted it in 2020, and then granted him a full pardon in February 2025.
The following month, Blagojevich signed on as a lobbyist for Republika Srpska, the Serb-run entity inside Bosnia and Herzegovina whose dominant political figure, Milorad Dodik, has been one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies in the Balkans. Blagojevich’s firm, RRB Strategies LLC, has since collected $1.325 million from Srpska across two reporting periods — $625,000 in the first and $700,000 in the second.
That second filing contains a detail that is more significant than I first realized. In Item 12, the section requiring a registrant to disclose political activity undertaken on behalf of a foreign principal, RRB lists an October 8, 2025 appearance on the Tucker Carlson Show. But this was not Blagojevich’s first appearence on Carlson’s show. On October 30, 2024, five months before RRB’s contract was signed with Srpska, Blagojevich sat down for a long interview with Carlson in the leadup to the 2024 presidential election. During the last 20 minutes of the episode, Blagojevich launched into a bizarre tirade about Serbia, Kosovo and Slobodan Milosevic.
Blagojevich complained that Serbs had been demonized over Kosovo and said that “they were calling ethnic cleansing genocide,” which he called “another lie.” Carlson then suggested that the American attacks on Nagasaki, Iraq, Syria, Serbia, and Gaza (which the U.S. never bombed) were part of an intentional American campaign against Christians. Blagojevich said he had not thought about it that way, then largely agreed with the framing.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that Blagojevich penned an op-ed at the Daily Caller in April 2025 arguing that Dodik, then still president of Republika Srpska, was the victim of European lawfare. Tucker Carlson co-founded the Daily Caller in 2010 and sold his stake in 2019. It’s now run by Neil Patel, his co-founder at the Tucker Carlson Network.
The Rest of the Pattern: Qatar and Venezuela
None of these FARA discoveries should surprise anyone who’s been paying attention to Carlson’s descent into Black Pill Groyper territory, nor his warm embrace of Islam.
As Robert Schmad, then writing for the Washington Examiner, reported back in 2025, Qatar’s Washington D.C. embassy paid Lumen8 Advisors for the firm to help facilitate Tucker’s March 2025 fawning sit-down with Qatar’s prime minister. Carlson later interviewed the same prime minister on stage at the Doha Forum and said he planned to buy a home in Qatar.
Then, in November 2025, Carlson hosted professional lobbyist Robert Amsterdam, who took the time during the episode to deny the genocide of Christians in Nigeria. At the time, Robert’s firm Amsterdam & Partners remained registered under FARA for Reinaldo Munoz Pedroza, the attorney general of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Tucker has himself on multiple occasions praised Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. Carlson has described Amsterdam as one of the people he speaks with most off camera about Christian persecution
Amsterdam has also previously represented Nasir El-Rufai, the former governor of Nigeria’s Kaduna State, whose record has drawn accusations from Christian-persecution groups.
What the Filings Show and the Broadcasts Don’t
Five foreign principals, one media ecosystem, and a recurring gap between what is visible in the Justice Department’s files and what the audience sees on screen.
None of this is to say that Tucker is somehow secretly benefiting, financially or otherwise, from foreign governments (though it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest). But it’s highly suspect that registered foreign agents keep mysteriously finding their way onto the Tucker Carlson Network, is it not?
FARA exists so Americans can know when people and firms are acting on behalf of foreign principals. The filings are public, but the disclosure regime falls mainly on the agent, not on the media outlet that gives the message an audience. An independent host is not automatically required to stop an interview and explain that a guest or intermediary appears in FARA records. So a foreign government can pay an American firm to pursue media access, the firm can disclose that activity to the Justice Department, and millions of viewers may still never hear a word about it unless they go looking through PDFs themselves.
The Justice Department is now considering a final rule rewriting the FARA regulations, the first serious overhaul in decades. DOJ says the anticipated changes will expand the availability of exemptions commonly relied upon by corporations and law firms, clarify digital-media labeling and reduce regulatory burdens.
That may make compliance easier, but may also do little to solve the problem these filings keep exposing: disclosure can exist on paper while remaining almost invisible to the audience it is supposed to inform.
Let’s hope the opportunity isn’t wasted.