Time: Trump Campaign Manager Ran Online Campaign to Deep-six Memorandum of Understanding With Iran

U.S. President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager is an Israeli agent whom the Israelis paid big money to run a campaign against a U.S. peace pact with Iran.

Brad Parscale, manager of Trump’s 2020 failed campaign until he was demoted, says he was paid to combat “antisemitism” and boost Israel’s reputation “among young conservatives.” He claims he did nothing to prolong the illegal war.

That isn’t what Time magazine reported this week. The website claims Parscale’s consultancy was behind an influence campaign to wreck the memorandum of understanding that would end the unconstitutional Iran war.

Combating “Antisemitism”

As The New American’s Veronika Kyrylenko reported last month, Parscale is a foreign agent — a term some think is a euphemism for “spy” — in Israel’s pay. He seized control of The Charlie Kirk Show after the young conservative was murdered.

Now, Time has explained just how Parscale is attempting to brainwash young Americans on behalf of his Israeli controllers.

The Israeli influence campaign began in September when “the global ad agency Havas hired Parscale’s firm, Clock Tower X, to conduct a digital campaign on behalf of the State of Israel, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings reviewed by TIME,” the website reported.

Kyrylenko noted that deal was inked just after Kirk was murdered That put Kirk’s popular show under Parscale’s control. That not insignificant fact aside, “Parscale’s operation would produce 100 original pieces of content each month, with at least 80% aimed at Gen Z audiences across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and podcasts,” Time continued:

In a Services Agreement draft included in the filing, Parscale also pledged to amplify the campaign across social media and through “integration of narrative messaging into Salem Media Network properties and aligned distribution channels,” referring to the Christian conservative broadcasting and publishing company where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer. Parscale vowed the effort would produce at least 50 million digital impressions per month, as well as influence how AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini characterized Israel and the war. For all this, Israel agreed to pay Clock Tower X $1.5 million per month.

Publicly, the campaign was framed as an effort to combat rising antisemitism online. An Israeli Foreign Ministry official familiar with the arrangement says there was another strategic aim: preventing young conservatives from turning against Israel. According to the official, Parscale presented himself as uniquely positioned to improve Israel’s reputation among young conservatives. He stressed his experience at the helm of Trump’s political operation, with a grasp of both the architecture of the modern internet and the political movement Trump had built. His position at Salem — whose radio stations, websites, podcasts, and digital properties were part of the conservative media ecosystem he promised to mobilize — was a boon as well.

All that sounds innocuous enough. But then an influence campaign involving an unrelated subject — sugary drinks, of all things — uncovered by independent journalist Nick Sortor tipped off White House officials.

Suspicious Timing

The Israelis, Time reported, aren’t just a little disappointed with Parscale’s effort to improve the rogue state’s reputation. They’re downright angry. After Parscale began his work, polling showed that more and more Americans were fed up with Israel. “He was supposed to make things better,” an Israeli official told Time:

We have paid him lots of money. But what did he do with it? Things have only gotten worse.

But the White House was less worried about Parscale’s failed brainwashing campaign than about something else.

The effort to polish Israel’s reputation “had evolved into an influence campaign that was colliding with the President’s political interests as Trump’s and [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s war aims diverged, led by a figure trading on the perception that he remained close to Trump,” Time reported:

They believed the very media ecosystem Parscale had promised to activate was now helping to circulate arguments that undercut Trump’s effort to end the war. “We’re talking about American influencers who are being paid by a foreign country, then trying to build momentum to change the President’s view, or the views of others around him,” says a senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly. “It can’t be dismissed as inconsequential by any means.”

That’s where Sortor comes in.

He published screenshots of “an undisclosed [social media] campaign on behalf of the soda industry,” which in turn “caught the attention of the U.S. official monitoring the online debate over Israel and Iran.”

That official “began noticing the same patterns” as the soda campaign, Time reported, consisting of

similar language appearing across seemingly independent accounts in rapid succession. “You have a person who is farming out this influencing task, who is being paid by a foreign element to the social media space,” the official tells TIME. “To me, this is a very, very dangerous thing.”

What that official noticed became clear given that his White House colleagues expected the conservative social media “ecosystem” to celebrate Trump’s memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Iran. That isn’t what happened:

Online influencers in Trump’s MAGA movement were excoriating it on social media. One shared an Israeli op-ed titled, “You Could Have Been the Greatest President of All—But You Failed.” Several posted the same video of Qatar’s prime minister appearing to snub Vice President J.D. Vance in Israel, arguing it showed regional powers dismissing the Trump Administration’s “naivete.” Others accused Trump of surrendering before achieving his stated objective of eliminating Iran’s nuclear program. Many of the posts appeared almost simultaneously, with similarities in language and tone. 

The official began collecting screenshots, and came to believe it wasn’t a coincidence. Tracing tweets by prominent members of the online right, the official came to believe there was an unlikely figure at the center of all this criticism: Trump’s former presidential campaign manager and digital guru, Brad Parscale.

Parscale told Time he wasn’t involved in any such effort.

“I have never funded, organized, or participated in any effort to undermine President Trump — ever — including his MOU or ceasefire proposal,” he told the website:

The claim that I am coordinating an effort to prolong the war is completely false. The only people manufacturing a conflict between President Trump, Israel, and me are anonymous officials using background quotes to make me the bogeyman.

Parscale is right. No one could possibly imagine that a foreign agent for Israel — which wants the U.S. at war with Iran — created an influence campaign to undermine the memorandum of understanding that would end the war with Iran.