Fergie Chambers is in a cafe in Tunis, Tunisia, on February 8, 2024. Chedly Ben Ibrahim/AP
Last week, Spanish authorities arrested far-left activist Fergie Chambers in Ibiza after the US Department of Justice called for him to be extradited on international money-laundering charges. His family has denied the charges and claims that Chambers is a victim of political persecution. “Fergie is being jailed because he uses his wealth to support Palestine and those suffering genocide in Gaza,” Chambers’ partner, Stella Schnabel, wrote in a statement reported by the Guardian. “In short, he is facing political persecution for having dedicated his life to building a better society, rather than exploiting people and profiting from war.” If convicted, Chambers could face up to 30 years in federal prison.
According to reports in multiple news outlets, the indictment, which is currently sealed, accuses Chambers of transferring $7.5 million to bank accounts in Tunisia, where he lives, with the alleged intent of providing support to organizations designated as terrorist groups by the US government. Chambers’ legal team and family maintain that these funds were not used to aid terrorist groups, but instead for the work he has supported in Palestine, which is humanitarian in nature.
As I reported in 2024, Chambers’ fortune comes from his father’s family’s company, Cox Enterprises, a global conglomerate with automotive and media holdings worth nearly $30 billion. In July 2023, Chambers divested from the family business because of political differences. He told me he received $250 million and will get an undisclosed additional sum in the coming years.
To convict Chambers, the Trump administration will have to make a convincing case that he intended to use the money he transferred to his accounts to support terrorist groups. On social media and in the press, where Chambers is a notorious firebrand, they will find ample evidence of his support for the Palestinian military group Hamas, a US-designated terrorist organization. On October 14, 2023, seven days after Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel, he posted on X, “No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done *anything* wrong.” Eight days later, he wrote in another post that “Israel has no right to exist.”
In the past, Chambers has also supported radical activist groups such as Palestine Action, now known in the United States as Unity of Fields, which celebrated Hamas’ October 7th massacre. Activists associated with these groups have been convicted of criminal damage, including using a van to ram through the fence of a defense technology company in 2024 and defacing the property of companies, universities, and private residences.
When I interviewed Chambers in 2024, he was characteristically frank about his political views:
While the broader Cox family’s political reputation is squarely centrist, Chambers’ is somewhere in the vicinity of Chairman Mao. When we spoke—after a few weeks of phone tag that involved me missing some pre-dawn calls back from Chambers—he seemed to relish defying mainstream orthodoxy, calling Russian President Vladimir Putin “one of the better statesmen of our century,” and describing Hamas’ October 7 attack as “a moment of hope and inspiration for tens of millions of people.” While he denies a recent claim in Los Angeles Magazine that he chants “death to America” every day, he allows that the idea is more or less true. “I think the most important thing for the prosperity of humanity is the destruction of the US,” he told me.
When we spoke, Chambers had recently converted to Islam and moved to Tunisia. There were, he told me at the time, “definitely murmurings of the FBI looking at me.”
