Putting the 'Ass' in 'Russian Asset'
Ex-FBI Agent exposes Elon Musk as a security threat, gets shunned by media
Last week, whistleblower and former FBI agent Johnathan Buma came forward to tell the world that Gas Pains Incarnate Elon Musk had been successfully targeted by a Russian Intelligence campaign to recruit Silicon Valley techbros who were raised in South Africa. From the interview:
“Musk and his susceptibility to promiscuous women and drug use, in particular ketamine, and his gravitation toward club life and activities such as the desert rave party Burning Man, and gambling and adult types of entertainment… certainly was seen by Russian Intelligence Service as an entry point”
This interview was featured in “Putin’s Helper,” a documentary released by German public TV broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF).
Scott Horton, Buma’s attorney known for his human rights work, was also featured in the documentary. As he explained in a recent radio interview:
The documentary focuses on a very large and well resourced operation that was run by the Russian Intelligence Services… which specifically targeted South African entrepreneurs who had emigrated to the United States and were active in the Silicon Valley. Three very prominent names in the group… were Elon Musk, Peter, Thiel, and David Sacks. The Russians, based on psychological profiling they had done, appear to have reached the conclusion that these people would most likely not be loyal to the United States and would be easy recruiting targets for the Russian Intelligence Service… [The operation] was evaluated as highly successful
This should be front page news, yet I’ve seen next-to-no coverage from the press — and not just the mainstream press, the English speaking press:
Where’s The New York Times? The Guardian? The Washington Post? The BBC?
Not only are the sources for this story credible, but none of the information exposed by Buma is far-fetched. In fact, much of it was already a matter of public record.
Yet this revelation that the Three Stooges of Apartheid were considered easy marks by an apparently successful Russian Intelligence campaign — during a time when these goons have outsized influence in American politics — has been received with deafening silence.
“Is Your Source On This Reliable?”
Johnathan Buma was a 16-year FBI veteran who specialized in Russian counter-intelligence. In 2023, he filed an official statement with congressional investigators alleging that the FBI had silenced and punished him for bringing his superiors evidence that Moist Toupee Rudy Giuliani (Trump’s then-lawyer) had extensive ties to Russian Intelligence, mobsters, and oligarchs.
From Buma’s 2023 whistleblower statement (note: “RIS” stands for Russian Intelligence Services):
They really just said the quiet part out loud.
After being pushed to the brink by intense workplace retaliation and investigative suppression, Buma became a whistleblower — at which point the FBI promptly raided his home. They found nothing, but continued to harass him with things like baseless reports to Child Protective Services, according to Buma’s attorney Scott Horton.
Back in 2023, press outlets from Newsweek to The New Yorker to Salon all considered Johnathan Buma’s story to be credible enough to report on.
And this should come as no surprise, since Rudy’s extensive ties to Russian and former Soviet Bloc criminals had been publicly documented for decades before his Ukraine-related corruption became headline news in 2021:
In the 1990s, one of Rudy’s biggest campaign donors was Semyon Kislin, a wealthy Ukrainian businessman who was tracked by the FBI due to his Russian mob connections. While Kislin donated to other American politicians, Rudy was the only one to reward the creep by appointing him to the New York City Mayor's Council of Economic Advisors
In 2004, Rudy met with Yury Luzhkov, Moscow’s then-Mayor known for massive corruption involving the Kremlin and Russian organized crime
Rudy had such extensive business ties to the Kazakhs who were found guilty of running a massive criminal organization that a human rights group had reason to believe that his law firm was involved in their multi-billion dollar money-laundering scheme
By the time Special Agent Buma expressed concern that Human Wet Sock Rudy Giuliani may have been compromised by Russian Intelligence, pointing to a 2017 incident when he accepted $300,000 from the wealthy Russian-Ukrainian criminal Pavel Fuks, the fact that America’s Mayor and Fuks were working together had become public knowledge.
Despite all this, the only recent news coverage Johnathan Buma has received was in March 2025, when he was arrested and charged with printing and sharing confidential FBI files. All the articles I could find just mindlessly parroted the Justice Department’s accusations, leaving out his lawyer’s defense that Buma only printed out his own unclassified field notes.
But even that kind of one-sided reporting would be preferable to the total silence currently surrounding Buma’s credible disclosure that Joyless Husk Elon Musk has been successfully cultivated as a Kremlin asset.
Elon Musk is a bag of dicks, but a Kremlin Asset?Come on
The idea that Elon and his South African cronies in Silicon Valley were targeted — and in some cases, successfully recruited — by Russian Intelligence isn’t much of a stretch, actually.
Gawker Killer Peter Thiel became an FBI informant after being approached by Kremlin operative Daniil Bisslinger at a party in 2018 — and Special Agent Johnathan Buma became his official handler.
According to the Business Insider article (emphasis mine):
After some small talk, Bisslinger made a pitch to Thiel… Bisslinger would arrange for him to meet privately with Putin. […] Putin perceived correctly that the same carrot-and-stick techniques he'd used to such political advantage on Russia's oligarchs could be deployed on a global scale to push Russia's interests with Western billionaires. He had some success with Elon Musk
According to the ZDF documentary “Putin’s Helper,” (important note on my interpretation in the footnotes1), the FBI warned high profile techbros that Russian Intelligence was actively targeting them, but Human Hair Plug Elon Musk didn’t take them as seriously as his former PayPal business partner did.
Instead, this castaway from a failed Danish colony agreed to speak at the 2021 “New Knowledge” forum, which was organized by Znanie, a USSR-era organization relaunched by Putin in 2015 to provide Kremlin-approved education to Russian children.
He also started posting Putin’s propaganda on Twitter2 :
Elon has also praised Russian state propaganda outlets while firing the Twitter staff in charge of combating online Kremlin propaganda campaigns.
And he has been in direct contact with Putin since at least 2022:
Elon Musk… has been in regular contact with Vladimir Putin for the past two years, according to a report in the US. […] The implications of a secret channel of communication between Musk and Putin are enormous for western security. The Tesla tycoon is a key player in the US space programme and has a high-level security clearance. His company SpaceX launches US national security satellites, his Starlink satellite communications system is critical to the war in Ukraine, and he runs one of the world’s biggest and most influential social media platforms, X, which has provided a vehicle for Russian disinformation campaigns.
So no, it’s not far-fetched to claim that this fuckboy heir to a collapsed emerald mine is a Kremlin asset. One of the very first things Elon did as head of DOGE was “[feed] USAID into the wood chipper,” as he put it, an unconstitutional act that was immediately praised by corrupt Putin lackey Dmitry Medvedev, for chrissakes!
And yet the vast majority of news outlets have reacted to whistleblower Johnathan Buma’s exposure of this massive national security threat with deafening silence.
There are many possible reasons for this refusal to act — cowardice, quiet agreement with the Trump ghouls, incorrectly believing that capitulation to fascism will protect them from the horrors to come, and so forth. Regardless of the specific motivations, their choices can be summed up in one word: complicity.
This is why I write, honestly. If I can spread information that the chucklefucks in charge don’t want you to see, then we haven’t lost yet.
To paraphrase Choose Democracy’s What Can I Do page, we will not succeed because one person does a million things right, but because millions of people do a few things well.
Thank you so much for reading! Big shout out to all my subscribers, especially Damon Savage for becoming a Paid Subscriber! I’m sorry for missing the last two weeks of updates, I was super sick and this piece took longer than usual due to the lack of resources in English. If you want to support what I do, become a Free or Paid Subscriber today! It really helps :)
As of this writing, there are no English subtitles available for the ZDF documentary “Putin’s Helper.” While the interviews were conducted in English, they were dubbed over in German (aside from the one interview I quoted at the beginning of this piece). I went through the documentary with the aid of the best translation I could find, but without an official — or even professional — English translation, it’s entirely possible that I misunderstood some of the material. This is also why I couldn’t include as many direct quotes as I would have liked — the German dubbing made it impossible to hear every word and I wanted to avoid possibly misrepresenting the sources. Therefore, while based on my best understanding of the material, any references to the information conveyed in “Putin’s Helper” should be understood with these caveats.
I’ll call it “X” when Elon stops deadnaming his daughter Vivian.