Two Registered Agents of Israel Are Working for Mike Rogers’ Senate Campaign

When Democratic US Rep. Haley Stevens announced her stunning flip to endorse Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers on Sunday, she did so with two registered agents of the Israeli government standing behind her, according to a report from Drop Site News.

The person who opened the press conference outside a Detroit church was Abigail Ronson, a spokesperson for the Rogers campaign, whom Drop Site found had registered as an agent working on behalf of the Israeli government under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) on May 18, 2026.

The registration lists Ronson as a part-time contractor for Clock Tower X, a communications company owned by Brad Parscale, a former campaign manager for President Donald Trump.

In May, Responsible Statecraft and The Intercept reported that through Clock Tower X, Parscale has run a multimillion-dollar operation funded by the Israeli government aimed at influencing American public opinion, which has turned dramatically against Israel amid its genocidal assault on Gaza and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank.

This campaign reportedly involves producing and distributing pro-Israel content aimed at younger Americans, particularly conservatives and evangelical Christians, creating articles meant to influence artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to give answers favorable to Israeli narratives, and conducting text messaging campaigns to direct Americans toward pro-Israel content.

Ronson, who works for the Republican consulting firm Convergence Media, was one of 14 employees at the firm working on Parscale’s pro-Israel influence operation. Convergence’s chief of staff, Jesse Stokes—who registered as an agent of Israel in October 2025—is also part of the Rogers campaign. The campaign has separately paid millions of dollars to Convergence.

Both Ronson and Stokes have been involved in campaign activities. Ronson helped organize the launch of the astroturfed "Democrats for Mike Rogers" campaign, an alleged "grassroots" coalition of Democratic voters who said they supported Rogers over his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed. The funding for the initiative overwhelmingly came from Republican-aligned sources, as well as Rogers' own campaign, and many of the supposed "Democrats" had long-standing GOP ties, according to a previous Drop Site investigation.

Stokes has no official title with the Rogers campaign. But metadata reviewed by Drop Site shows that he wrote the email launching Rogers' Senate campaign in March 2025, about seven months before he registered as an Israeli agent. Since then, he is shown to have written numerous other press releases for the campaign.

In June, after Ronson posted an AI-generated image of a “buff” Mike Rogers on social media, the campaign denied that she was a staffer. But she’s since acted as an official voice of the campaign in comments to several media outlets, including Reuters, Fox News, and The New York Times. In those comments, she defended Rogers’ attacks on El-Sayed’s Muslim background and accused the Democrat of fueling “anti-Israel hate.”

On Sunday, before Stevens (D-Mich.) suddenly abandoned her months of support for El-Sayed to back Rogers, Ronson told NBC News that “Mike welcomes her.”

Questions about the influence of the Israeli government and pro-Israel donors have hung over Michigan's Senate race since it began. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) spent an unprecedented $30 million in a failed effort to help Stevens defeat El-Sayed in August's Democratic primary, the pro-Israel lobbying group's single largest expenditure ever in a congressional race.

Israel was also at the center of Stevens’ widely reviled decision to flip against El-Sayed less than 48 hours before Election Day. After months of expressing support for her primary rival, Stevens called on El-Sayed to denounce an advertisement by an outside political action committee that blamed rising grocery prices on US support for Israel, which helped to push Trump toward launching a war with Iran. She also called on him to take back other critical statements he’d made about Israel.

Stevens’ fiancé, Jason Turkish, an outspoken pro-Israel Democrat, announced last week that he’d be supporting Rogers and appeared at a Republican Jewish Coalition event with Rogers and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). He also accused El-Sayed of fueling “death threats” against Jewish Americans by describing Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a “genocide,” a description that has been used by United Nations experts and leading human rights organizations.

After days of giving behind-the-scenes assurances that she’d continue to support the Democratic nominee, Stevens abruptly shifted her support on Sunday, appearing with Rogers. She said she made the decision after being disinvited to a campaign event with El-Sayed and because of El-Sayed’s association with the pro-Palestine left-wing streamer Hasan Piker, who she said was fomenting “hate.”

In a CNN appearance that night, she struggled to explain her decision to endorse Rogers, who has routinely trafficked in explicitly Islamophobic rhetoric during the campaign and whom she’d described months earlier as a “rubber stamp for Donald Trump’s dangerous agenda.”

According to a friend of Stevens' who spoke to The Washington Post, the congresswoman's decision came after Turkish had spent days "working her over" to abandon El-Sayed and back Rogers and telling her that she'd "betrayed" Jewish supporters by standing by the progressive Democrat.

Stevens’ romantic relationship with Turkish reportedly began during the Democratic primary, and the two became engaged in May, though the engagement was not announced until after Stevens’ primary loss. One former Stevens staffer told CNN that the congresswoman became increasingly defensive of Israel and AIPAC in May, after her engagement to Turkish, at the expense of other issues such as Michigan’s economy and manufacturing. This was despite AIPAC growing increasingly toxic among Democratic voters and becoming a target of attacks from El-Sayed.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), whom Stevens had reassured on Saturday night that she had no intention of flipping to Rogers, said he was "dumbfounded" by her decision the following day.

"Something doesn’t compute about this whole sequence of events," he said.

On MS NOW’s “Morning Joe” Monday, journalist Pablo Torre brought up the reporting on Rogers’ ties to Israel as a possible factor worth investigating when trying to make sense of Stevens’ reversal.

“This is one of the questions around corruption,” Torre said, noting that Stevens’ own pinned post on X spoke about the importance of “defeating Mike Rogers” at the time she endorsed him.

Torre said it was worth asking “whose country are we actually prioritizing” and examining “whether or not there’s a there there around following the money into foreign interests.”