WASHINGTON — Alex Jones is not surprised that the media is reporting that Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a fan of his Infowars website, he told BuzzFeed on Tuesday.

"It's just standard," Jones said. "Anyone you talk to is familiar with my show. When I go out in public, half the people I meet in this country, and in other countries too, say they listen to my show. The show is bigger than the mainstream media admits."

Jones — whose site has peddled conspiracy theories about the Boston Marathon bombing and suggested that Tsarnaev is innocent — conceded that Tsarnaev "may have actually been a listener."

"He could be a listener," Jones said. "It could be true. I've talked to the family and most of them are listeners. My show is anti-terrorism and my show exposes that most of the events we've seen have been provocateured."

The AP reported on Tuesday that Tsarnaev "took an interest" in Infowars and was also interested in getting a copy of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the anti-Semitic fraud that purports to show a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world.

"I've seen this before," Jones said. "The federal government trying to connect me to tragedies. That's the media and the government's own conspiracy theories."

Jones compared the situation to when Richard Andrew Poplawski, a Pittsburgh man who killed three police officers in 2009, was shown to be a conspiracy theorist who frequently visited the Infowars website.

"It's standard for them to talk to people, go through computers, and any time someone's done something bad, they connect it to us," Jones said. In the case of Poplawski, he said, Infowars eventually showed they had nothing to do with him: "We went and showed that he was a white supremacist who hated me and was attacking me."

Jones said that he had spoken with an aunt of the Tsarnaevs on the record and other family members off the record.

"They're scared to death," he said. "That whole family is genuinely shocked."

"They think it's a setup," Jones said, adding that "the State Department openly funds radical Islam in Dagestan."

Jones said the bombing was one of a number of plots "hatched" by the FBI, and Chechen militants, among others, have seized on his claims, which are not supported by evidence, to make the case for a sweeping conspiracy behind the deadly blasts.

He also claimed that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's throat wound had been inflicted by the authorities, calling it "that special throat surgery they did."