Charles C. Johnson

Charles C. Johnson (born October 22, 1988) is an American far-right media figure, self-described federal informant, and technology investor. The New York Times reported in March 2021 that Johnson played a pivotal early role in the founding of Clearview AI alongside Peter Thiel's seed investment. Johnson disclosed Thiel's status as an FBI confidential human source in 2023, per Business Insider reporting, and was sued in October 2024 for falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent while "running a fraud and extortion scheme."¹²³

The Far-Right Media Career

Johnson built his public profile through a series of far-right provocations across the 2013-2017 period. He operated the GotNews website and published The Truth About the IRS Scandal (2013), and he promoted a range of debunked conspiracy theories, including the false claim that President Obama's National Security Advisor Susan Rice had directed surveillance of the Trump campaign. Johnson was banned from Twitter in 2015 (one of the first high-profile permanent bans) after requesting funds to "take out" a Black Lives Matter activist.¹⁴

In 2017 Johnson announced he was "building algorithms to ID all the illegal immigrants for the deportation squads," which Byline Supplement reported as part of the Clearview AI prehistory. The work sits in the same identity-from-public-data category that Clearview AI would subsequently commercialize, and the Clearview founding in 2016-2017 overlaps with the period of Johnson's deportation-algorithm work.⁵

The Clearview AI Cofounder Claim

The New York Times reported in March 2021 that Johnson played a pivotal early role in the founding of Clearview AI alongside Peter Thiel, who provided the seed funding for the company before it was even named (the Smart Checker period). Johnson subsequently claimed cofounder status and sued Clearview for a share of its profits before dropping the suit in February 2025. The legal record of the suit, and its subsequent withdrawal, is documented in the Biometric Update reporting (February 2025) and the Yahoo Finance / Toronto Star coverage.¹⁶⁷

Johnson's relationship to Thiel extends beyond Clearview. Business Insider reported in October 2023 that Johnson had disclosed Thiel's status as an FBI confidential human source, and that Johnson himself was described in the reporting as "a tech investor and far-right agitator with long-standing ties to both Thiel and to the network."²

The Federal Informant Claims and the Fraud Suit

Johnson has stated publicly that he was a federal informant. The federal lawsuit against Clearview AI over Johnson's cofounder claim recorded his indication that he was a federal informant, and the Semafor reporting (October 2024) documented a separate lawsuit alleging Johnson was "running a fraud and extortion scheme" and falsely presenting himself as an intelligence agent. The suit was brought by a business partner and alleged that Johnson had used the false intelligence-agent presentation to extract payments and concessions.³⁶

The documented pattern combines three roles: the far-right media provocateur (the GotNews period), the technology investor and Clearview cofounder claimant (the 2016-2025 period), and the federal informant / intelligence-agent presenter (the ongoing period). The three roles overlap in Johnson's documented relationship with Thiel and in the broader network of far-right operatives, technology investors, and federal law-enforcement contacts that the Thiel network intersects.¹²³

The Jonathan Buma Thread

The Business Insider reporting on Thiel's FBI informant status referenced the Jonathan Buma case. Buma, the Los Angeles FBI counterintelligence agent who handled Thiel as a CHS from summer 2021, was arrested at JFK Airport on March 17, 2025 while attempting to board an international flight, charged with unlawfully disclosing confidential information. CBS News reported that FBI investigators assessed Buma may have compromised as many as 130 FBI files.²

Buma publicly accused the FBI of pro-Trump political bias and disclosed GRU targeting of Musk and Thiel. The Guardian reported Buma's claim in May 2025 that Russian-intelligence efforts to target Musk were "intense," and that the GRU operation exploited vulnerabilities including drug use, sexual entrapment, and luxury access. The Kurganov infiltration of Musk's inner circle (documented separately) is the concrete instance of the targeting Buma described.²

The Buma-Thiel-Johnson triangle involves three documented roles: Buma as the FBI handler who managed Thiel as a CHS, Thiel as the billionaire source whose FBI relationship Johnson disclosed, and Johnson as the far-right operative who connected the Thiel commercial network to the federal informant infrastructure and to the Clearview surveillance-technology founding. The full content of Buma's disclosures is part of the ongoing congressional and Inspector General review of the FBI's source program. A House Judiciary Committee document submitted January 22, 2026 references Thiel's CHS role.²