He was charged with encouraging or assisting offenders and five counts of taking part in an unnotified public procession due to his part in the protests. At a subsequent court appearance Dowson and some of his co-defendants dressed in Islamic-style clothing. Dowson joined Willie Frazer at the 2013 LaMon Hotel press conference at which the Protestant Coalition, a political party launched on the back of the flag protests, was officially established. He subsequently claimed that he left the party to Frazer and Rab McKee after a few months and bemoaned the failure of the group to make any impact on local politics. Dowson relocated to Budapest, Hungary, and has been observed in several eastern European countries with his latest venture, the Knights Templar International (KTI), along with the former BNP leader Nick Griffin and a Hungarian anti-abortion campaigner Imre Teglasy. Dowson's last sighting, according to the "Daily Mirror", was on the Turkey-Bulgaria border with the KTI supplying equipment to a vigilante paramilitary group, the Shipka Bulgarian National Movement, to hunt down asylum seekers. Dowson was subsequently reported as having developed close links with Russian extremist Aleksandr Dugin, with Dugin aiding Dowson in the establishment of a Belgrade office for his internet activity in support of the "alt-right". In May 2017, it was reported by Hope not Hate that Dowson had been stopped from entering Hungary after the Hungarian Immigration Authority declared him an "undesirable individual" and barred him from entering the country in future. The move came as part of a wider crackdown by the Ministry of Interior on far-right individuals from across Europe using the country as their base, after Horst Mahler had been arrested trying to escape charges of Holocaust denial in Germany by entering Hungary. In May 2018 BBC News reported that Dowson has been fronting the Knights Templar International company with Dowson's sister-in-law Marion Thomas named as one of its directors. In July 2016, Dowson established the "Patriot News Agency" to help elect Donald Trump as President of the United States. Dowson described his strategy as spreading "devastating anti-Clinton, pro-Trump memes and sound bites into sections of the population too disillusioned with politics to have taken any notice of conventional campaigning." The site published an article alleging that Trump's opponent Hillary Clinton was involved in "Satanism, pedophilia," murder, and "other conspiracies." According to the "New York Times", postings on this site and others connected to Dowson, as well as Facebook pages "linked to him", were "viewed and shared hundreds of thousands of times".