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By Joe Brucker
Chuck Johnson is a figure who’s elicited quite a bit of intrigue. Media Matters has just over a full page of pieces on him, and when House Democrats investigated connections to election interference from Russia, he was on their interviewee list. Even his ban from Twitter, invitation to the State of the Union, and old texts with the Vice President alone have been enough to generate news for several days.
Johnson’s trolling casts a cloud over whether his words or actions are serious, and that murkiness itself has had consequences: at the center of a recent RICO case, an investor accused him of bullying startups into forking over ownership by claiming to be on a two-man team of “intelligence agents or assets of U.S. government agencies” who could “sabotage the companies’ contracts or funding.” That RICO case resulted in a judgment of just over $70 million.
He’s appealing, but seems to be taking it in good spirits. He told me he’s “disappointed he only took the bronze” for the third largest judgement of its kind.
I attended recent related court proceedings, where he’s suing a company in which that same investor who sued him is part-owner: Clearview.
Clearview AI, a facial search engine that sells mostly to law enforcement, has been demanding he fork over communications and comply with court-ordered sanctions and has said that his “contumacious conduct [has] only worsened” throughout the case. Last month, Johnson visited Manhattan for a hearing to explain his “refusal to comply with the Court’s orders.”
Johnson showed his characteristic recalcitrance in the hearing, while we spoke afterwards, and in response to a Twitter thread.
To begin the hearing, Johnson parted ways with his lawyer. He told me after that he’d expected it to play well with the judge, who was chief counsel in the Southern District of New York’s Office of Pro Se Litigation.
She listened to him intently for the duration of the hearing as he told the court he was unable to comply but willing to hand himself over to US Marshals that day.
She seemed to believe him—the judge even asked Clearview’s attorneys if it was in Clearview’s interests to spend resources asking Johnson for anything, making it clear she didn’t expect his compliance whatsoever.
Clearview, which sent two junior attorneys rather than partners, claimed it didn’t know but needed to know how much damage Johnson had done in his exchanges with journalists.
After the short hearing, Johnson spoke with me and another man in attendance, Matt Forney. I asked him what he thought about the litigation, how he got here, and whether he was still working with federal law enforcement.
Johnson gave similar impressions to what one might get from the trail of incensed court documents and the journalist’s curious but skeptical notes trailing behind him: confidence in his outlook, a grand worldview punctuated by shots at former counterparties, and amusement at circumstances that would seem to draw seriousness or panic from most.
“I’m perfectly happy to go to jail over this stuff, frankly. I kind of welcome it,” he tells me after court, excitedly. “I would love to have a mug shot—it’s something I look forward to. I’m all for it, I want the full experience.”
In this piece, Johnson’s text messages have been lightly edited only to correct grammar or misspellings.
He’s taking the $71 million judgement seemingly in stride—though it froze his banking and credit cards, he’s appealed, so for now “everything mostly has been thawed.”
He maintained his criticism of Clearview in our conversation. In court documents, the company has been claiming he broke their contract through his negative public statements. He originally sued them in this matter, claiming they haven’t paid him the quarter million or so sum they owe him. But, Johnson tells me, that’s not what he, or they, are fighting over.
“I don’t even really want the money, like, I’ll just give the money to my daughter,” Johnson explained, adding, “I’m defending my fourth and fourth [sic] and first amendment rights.”
He says he couldn’t comply if he wanted to, but Clearview doesn’t need the information it’s asking for. “My emails were hacked about a year, almost two years ago now […] I think a lot of this is a fishing expedition to parallel construct what they had already seized.” Clearview, he says, is just “seeking to harass both people who associate with me, and to leak it to the media and to cause trouble, and all that kind of thing. That’s a standard operating procedure of the company.”
“They’re trying to claim that I somehow can induce federal officers not to give Clearview contracts,” Johnson explains, dismissing the complaint, continuing that, no, the real issue in his telling is that their “code base is probably Chinese.”
Clearview, he maintains, is actually breaking the law, skirting around the issue, and skirting their investors.
“They’re afraid that I’m telling the truth, right, and I am telling the truth, so they should be afraid, right, I want them to get in compliance with the federal law, I want them to pay me what they say they owe me, not what they actually owe me.”
The hearing, and Clearview’s legal actions against him generally, he says, show the company is asleep at the wheel, lying to their stockholders, and even criminal.
“I’m accusing you guys of committing a federal crime! I’m saying it repeatedly, I’m saying it to anyone who will listen.” “I’m saying it not only [on] the record, I’m saying emphatically, with italics.”
Referencing the judge’s questions to Clearview over whether it was worth it to be pursuing Johnson as aggressively as they had been, Johnson says, “They’re committing shareholder fraud right now,” adding that “What they’re doing — if you’re an investor of Clearview — what they’re doing is a violation of their fiduciary obligations.”
In Johnson’s telling, Clearview is responsible for the issues it claims he caused. “They believe that I have the ability to affect federal contracting, I do not,” he explains. “So when federal law enforcement calls me and they say ‘hey what do you know about this?’ and I say ‘here are all my files on it, have at it, it’s yours to review,’ federal law enforcement can decide, by the way, to overrule me.”
Rather, they overestimate his influence, claiming that “a contracting officer has discernment. That’s their job.”
“Now, unfortunately, Clearview has given them no indication they’re gonna comply with the law. So they’re stuck as a contracting officer,” he adds.
Clearview’s behavior and affiliates are fumbling if not illicit, he believes, in summary. Johnson is confident that in this and in his appeal over his RICO case, he’ll be successful.
“I expect to have the judgment overturned in Texas, I expect to get a federal lien against Clearview for the amount money that they owe me either in New York or in or in Chicago, I don’t expect to sit for deposition, I don’t expect to turn over any any other additional material.”
As far as financial sanctions he’s faced with—the judge in that hearing, for instance, issued a $10k penalty for his noncompliance—he’s not concerned but claims to be moved by greater priorities: “My attitude on this is money comes and goes, sure, but what’s interesting to me is making sure that the public is protected and making sure that true information comes to light.”
Criticism of tech companies and investors has been a consistent focus of Johnson’s Substack, X posts, and public comments. He criticizes Palantir, Facebook, Instagram, and even Juul. Acknowledging he hasn’t taken a route most would, he sees it as causal to his success: “And maybe the reason I have all these resources now is — maybe it’s fate or the universe or whatever you wanna say. It’s not normal to like put a bunch of money into bitcoin in 2011. It’s not a normal thing.”
Clearview, he tells me, came about because of his openness and curiosity when “white nationalists” approached him to talk about “physiognomy.”
“Wait you can mathematically model people’s faces?” he’d ask them. “Tell me more about that.”
“People came to me with ideas because I was a weird dude, and I had money, right? and then ‘oops, created Clearview.’”
Even if Johnson does lose, he’s not worried, explaining that “the worst case scenario is I’m broke again,” adding, “yeah, okay. I like kind of like being broke, like riding my bicycle to the library, reading books, eating burritos, trying [to] pick up women for no money […] That was fun. I enjoyed that. That part of my life was fun.” As far as what his opponents would recover, he’s skeptical: “Most of my stuff is on trust, so good luck. I get, like, an allowance, yeah, from my trust if [sic] that right.”
His focus is elsewhere, including authoring a new book. He tells me it’s “a roman à clef about the murder [of] Andrew Breitbart, and about the murder of Jeffrey Epstein.” He didn’t wish to share his own views on their deaths at this time, keeping it brief: “The short version is I believe both men were murdered, I knew both men, and it’s unfortunate that they were both killed.”
I asked Johnson whether he was still working with the federal government, a subject of intrigue for both his legal dealings and public intrigue. He left that door open. In a press-conscious tone, he offered, “I would say it’s a big federal government, so now I’m happy to do my part to clean up compromised companies.”
No further answers today!
As for all the documents he lost along with his laptop, that ball is also in the air, he says. “I had a girlfriend recently, yeah, we had a dispute, and some of my effects may have become her effects. We may resolve that dispute, we may not.”
He continues that he’s even lost his own notes, but that the records are out there, musing that he “had some people come over and take all my books and digitize some of them — my notebooks as well, just to have it all. A record of everything I’ve kind of written [by hand], in case I should run for office. So some of the things that were in my home, may no longer be in my home. I don’t know.”
Where are his effects now?
“No idea.”
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