Iran, Russia, and China have long been associated with the corporation that is developing Trump Media Tech.

 Two minor Northern Louisiana firms negotiated a multimillion-dollar contract with former President Donald Trump's Truth Social earlier last year, taking home a $155 million finders' fee in the process. A joint venture called WorldConnect Technologies was established by WorldConnect IPTV and JedTec to act as a go-between for Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) and Perception TV CDN, the company that was hired to construct the technological infrastructure required to support Truth Social's entry into the video streaming market.

To better understand the nature of TMTG’s burgeoning media holdings and the companies building it, Fortune examined dozens of business filings from the U.S. and abroad, and spoke to seven sources that previously worked with Perception’s cofounders, its current chair Matjaz “Matt” Vidmar and CEO John Mills.

What emerged from these sources was a “no questions asked” policy at Perception and previous companies connected to Vidmar and Mills that led them to work with Chinese and Russian state-backed propaganda networks, Islamist television channels, and Iranian corporations. TMTG chose to work with Perception despite the fact that in the past it did business with now-sanctioned entities.

Vidmar and Mills’ interests in the U.S. were represented by a tag-team of Louisiana salesmen, Jarret Flood and Von Boyett, who run WorldConnect IPTV, a company with no website. JedTec, the other half of the joint venture, is registered to James E. Davison—a powerful but reclusive Louisiana businessman and major Republican donor. Davison counts multiple Republican presidents as friends and has a reputation as a statewide powerbroker. Since 2014, Davison has made personal political contributions to the GOP of at least $2.8 million, according to Federal Election Commission data. In the 2024 election cycle, Davison made $465,000 in personal political contributions, according to data from OpenSecrets.Those involved claim that JedTec, which is registered in Davison's name, had no discernible involvement in the transaction. In an interview with Fortune, Vidmar stated, "We never even heard about that company." "I am aware of JedTec based on what I have read in the media and SEC documents." Several attempts for response from WorldConnect and the attorneys for Davison's businesses were not answered.

According to records submitted to the SEC, WorldConnect and JedTec received 2.6 million shares of TMTG in exchange for negotiating the July contract, with an additional 2.5 million shares available upon project completion. Additionally, TMTG will pay $17.5 million to WorldConnect for the source code for Perception.due over three years, as stated in a disclosure filed with the SEC at the time of the August closing.

A representative for TMTG dismissed a comprehensive set of inquiries on TMTG's commercial relationships with Perception, WorldConnect, and JedTec. 

They added, "This story is a textbook example of why Americans now dismiss the legacy media as a collection of politicized hacks, combining false allegations taken from other publications with nonsensical insinuations about our company and our partners."

" Just another customer" 

Perception was contracted by TMTG to create a "content delivery network" (CDN). In essence, these networks load content onto a user's device from servers located in data centers, allowing uninterrupted streaming from any location. In order to realize its goal of establishing a media company that would not be vulnerable to denials of service from the businesses that oversee the internet's plumbing, TMTG has made it apparent in recent months that it intends to construct its own CDN. In an SEC filing earlier this month, the business stated that the CDN was "created with the goal of rendering the service uncancellable by Big Tech."

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