Key ABC witness Peter ­Alexander Priest is a serial conspiracy theorist

A key witness in the Four Corners story on QAnon is a serial conspiracy theorist who admits he took part in the ABC TV program to ‘damage Scott Morrison’.

Peter ­Alexander Priest has twice been detained by the fixated persons unit of Queensland Police. Picture: Facebook

A key witness in the ABC’s Four Corners story on QAnon is a ­serial conspiracy theorist who has twice been detained by the fixated persons unit of Queensland Police and who admits he took part in the TV program to “politically damage Scott ­Morrison”.

The man introduced by the program as “Eliahi Priest” and described as “a self-styled online anti-corruption crusader” has a long history of making bizarre claims, which the ABC failed to mention. His real name is Peter ­Alexander Priest, a jeweller who works in his parents’ jewellery store on the Sunshine Coast but claims to be the designate consul to the Democratic Republic of Congo and to have infiltrated a CIA front company involved in an alleged $US15 trillion fraud linked to Australia’s failed Nugan Hand Bank.

Mr Priest has formed his own right-wing political party, the ­Remembrance Party, which he says has 650 members, with membership increasing on the back of his appearance on Four Corners. In 2018 he addressed a Brisbane rally organised by the far-right True Blue Crew, railing against “the deep state” and “the sodomites in our universities”.

He has described himself as “a world peace diplomat with a UK, US and Australian government-accepted and recognised cosmic (off-planet) security clearance in my Australian passport”. Mr Priest has recounted on video his own experience of helping an “extra-terrestrial craft” land in Scotland after learning the correct “communication protocols”. But the claim that would land him at the centre of Australia’s own QAnon scandal is even more out of this world.

For years, Mr Priest has put forward a theory linking an ­alleged hidden $US15 trillion fortune – supposedly gained from CIA drug trafficking – to the now defunct Australian Nugan Hand Bank. The Sydney merchant bank collapsed in 1980 after the apparent suicide of one of its founders, Frank Nugan, and the disappearance of co-founder ­Michael Hand, amid claims of drug-smuggling, arms dealing and CIA connections.

Mr Priest says it was Morrison’s failure to investigate those claims that led him to leak damaging text messages between himself and Morrison’s family friend, Tim Stewart, to Four Corners. The texts appear to show Mr Stewart – a follower of the discredited QAnon conspiracy ­theory – boasting that he convinced the Prime Minister to insert the coded message “ritual sexual abuse” into a speech.

Mr Priest says he was never a follower of QAnon – the cult-like group which believes the world is run by a cabal of blood-drinking, child-sacrificing Satanists – but simply wanted Mr Stewart to hand the Prime Minister his dossier on the Nugan Hand plot.

When neither pursued the case, Mr Priest became angry and ­decided to “air all the QAnon in Kirribilli dirty laundry”.

“I burned Stewart to fairly and politically damage Scott Morrison to put the Prime Minister on notice and to hold him to­ ­account,” Mr Priest says in a statement posted on his Twitter account after the ABC program aired. But he says his intervention didn’t end there.

Mr Priest claims he was responsible for a cyber attack on Australia’s security and intelligence agencies on February 7, 2019 using “inside knowledge” inadvertently provided by Mr Stewart. The then head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre, Alistair MacGibbon and then Australian Signals Directorate director-general Mike Burgess were called to Parliament House after MPs were warned parliament’s systems were the subject of a cyber-security “incident”.

The attack forced the Prime Minister and all MPs to change their passwords. The security agencies said “a sophisticated state actor” was responsible for the attack. But Mr Priest alleges he performed the phishing exercise as a “harmless penetration exercise” to push Mr Morrison to investigate his Nugan Hand Bank claims.

Four Corners did not detail Mr Priest’s background or claims of involvement in the cyber attack, saying only he “was questioned by counter-terrorism police after social media posts where he said he’d successfully hacked the Prime Minister’s office”.

Mr Priest says he was asked “two short questions” about the hacking incident by counter-terrorism police but was then reported to the Fixated Threat Assessment Centre (FTAC), a joint operation of the Queensland Police and the Queensland Forensic Mental Health Service.

After speaking with him, police issued a fixated order and Mr Priest was detained in a psychiatric unit for two days.

Mr Priest claims it was an attempt to silence him, telling The Australian: “It’s very easy for people to call me nuts, and it might be a bit crazy what I’m doing, but I feel it’s a very important activity, which is why I’ve persisted.

“They tried to peg me with paranoid delusions of grandeur, and my line to Queensland Health was – well give me one example that’s a delusion of grandeur – and they couldn’t.”

Mr Priest was detained a second time by the FTAC after claiming on social media he held 3kg of enriched uranium and stating: “I am no longer asking. I now command a seat at the table, regardless of whether ‘they’ choose to recognise it.”

Mr Priest says that was taken out of context and that he had been approached by a contact in Central Africa who knew of his connections in the US Department of Energy and wanted to sell some uranium.

“I didn’t mean it threaten­ingly, just that it was about time people took me seriously. I’m a world peace advocate,” he said.

One of the main platforms of his Remembrance Party is to “task the Governor-General to summon the current United Kingdom Prime Minister to Australia to answer questions about the $US15 trillion transaction into the Royal Bank of Scotland Global in 2009. Should they fail to come, the Queen (or king) would be asked to intervene.”

This transaction, he says, is “the key to unlocking the global debt facility, thousands of trillions [sic] of dollars.”

In fact the documents appear to be a version of an online scam known as the Riyadi/Saurin scam, so notorious that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York – one of the institutions said to be involved – devotes a full page warning on it.

An ABC spokesman said Four Corners “was aware of Priest’s background – Priest openly ­acknowledges it – and information is included in the story. The program used verifiable information provided by Priest, including messages from Tim Stewart’s mobile phone number and a photograph of Priest with Stewart.”