Two registered foreign principal campaigns, one run through a Delaware LLC and the other by a former Trump campaign manager, draw on a hasbara budget that grew twentyfold in late 2024.
Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs registered two distinct campaigns with the U.S. Justice Department in September 2025, and the paperwork now spells out an architecture that the early wire summaries of the leak only partially captured. One disclosure, filed on September 26 by a newly formed Delaware LLC, itemizes up to $900,000 in payments for 75 to 90 social media posts by a cohort of 14 to 18 American creators. A second registration, filed eight days earlier, names Brad Parscale, the digital operative who managed Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, as principal of a $1.5 million-per-month operation built to generate roughly 100 ads and 5,000 variations each month using artificial intelligence tools. Both campaigns are coordinated through the same intermediary, the German arm of the global advertising firm Havas. Both draw on a hasbara budget that Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar grew from roughly $7 million to $150 million as part of the coalition deal that kept Benjamin Netanyahu in office in late 2024.
The $900,000 line, internally referred to in the filings as the “Esther Project,” is run by a company called Bridges Partners LLC, formed in Delaware in June 2025 and owned 50/50 by two Israeli consultants, Uri Steinberg and Yair Levi. Within weeks of incorporation, the LLC received nearly $200,000 from Havas Media Group Germany to begin recruiting U.S.-based creators. The contract runs through November and calls for onboarding three to six influencers at a time in phases, with each creator expected to produce 25 to 30 pieces a month across Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms, and to be “matched” in later phases with Israeli content partners and U.S. marketing agencies. The widely repeated “$7,000 per post” figure is a calculation, not a stated rate. Responsible Statecraft divided the roughly $552,946 that Bridges Partners had left for creator fees, after administration and production, by a post count that ranges from 75 to 90. The resulting per-post figure is between $6,143 and $7,372. The range is the honest version of the number. The round figure is a public-relations shorthand.
The Parscale operation is structured differently and at a different scale. Clock Tower X LLC, Parscale’s firm, registered as a foreign agent for Israel’s Foreign Ministry on September 18, 2025, with Havas again listed as the U.S. paymaster. The contract value, $1.5 million a month, is roughly twice the entire six-month ceiling of the human-influencer program. The stated tools include MarketBrew, an SEO platform, and efforts to shape the outputs of GPT-based chatbots. The framing in the FARA paperwork, per the JTA review of the filing, is “strategic communications” aimed at combating antisemitism. The volume, 100 ads and 5,000 variations a month, is closer to a programmatic ad-tech operation than to a creator-marketing campaign, and the use of generative AI is the reason the two disclosures are worth reading together.
The financial backdrop is the part of the story that the FARA paperwork does not document directly, but the timing is hard to ignore. The $150 million hasbara line item that Sa’ar negotiated into the coalition agreement in December 2024 was about twenty times the previous public-diplomacy budget, and the ministry began drawing on it in May 2025. By the time the Bridges Partners and Clock Tower X registrations landed in September, the U.S. polling picture the spending was responding to had already moved substantially. A New York Times/Siena College poll conducted in September 2025 found that 51 percent of American voters opposed additional aid to Israel, that 68 percent of voters under 30 held that view, and that 40 percent believed Israel was deliberately targeting civilians. Those figures are reported secondhand through IMEMC and should be cross-checked against the original NYT publication before they are load-bearing in any other story. The point is not that the polls caused the registrations, since the registrations were already in motion. The point is that the money was being spent against a documented collapse in public support.
Two adjacent cases round out the picture. SKDK, the New York public relations firm, held a $600,000 contract to promote the story of the Bibas family, the Israeli hostages whose deaths in Gaza drew sustained American attention; the firm terminated the deal early in September 2025 after the outlet Sludge reported on it, a signal of the reputational risk now attached to Israeli government PR work. Separately, the Israel365 organization received roughly $86,000 from the Foreign Ministry to bring a cohort of up-and-coming MAGA-aligned influencers to Israel in mid-2025, per Haaretz and JTA. Neither engagement is named in the September FARA filings, but both are part of the same hasbara architecture and both are now on the public record.
The disclosures themselves are the news. A registered foreign-principal campaign is not an allegation. It is a filing, and the filings name the LLC, the owners, the intermediary, the dollar figures, and the deliverables. The September FARA packet is the legal spine of the story. The underlying documents surfaced by the leak, attributed by IMEMC to WikiLeaks but not independently retrieved in this research pass, supply the contracts. The Justice Department’s own copy is what makes the dollar amounts, the dates, and the corporate ownerships checkable rather than contested. What remains genuinely uncertain is the list of the 14 to 18 creators in the Esther Project cohort. The filings do not name them, the Bridges Partners invoices describe the population in aggregate, and the names that have appeared in coverage of Netanyahu’s separate September meeting with pro-Israel creators in New York, including Lizzy Savetsky, Ari Acker, Zach Sage Fox, Miriam Ezagui, Joyce Chabb, and Shay Szabo, are attendees of a different event, not a confirmed roster of paid contractors. The Heritage Foundation has separately stated that its own “Project Esther,” published in October 2024, is unrelated to the Israeli Foreign Ministry program beyond the name. Until the contractor list is matched to specific posts, the human-influencer line is a documented spend on an undisclosed group of American creators, and that distinction matters for how the story ages.
The Parscale line, by contrast, will scale in a way the creator program cannot. AI-driven ad variation, search-engine optimization at platform scale, and attempts to influence chatbot outputs are not bounded by the number of available influencers, and the monthly price tag of $1.5 million puts the program in the same financial neighborhood as a U.S. Senate race. The September FARA paperwork is the first public look at that line item. It is unlikely to be the last.