Bluesky

It’s 2016 déjà vu all over again, with federal prosecutors bringing indictments against Russian operatives who allegedly are seeking to influence the outcome of the 2024 election. However, this set of initiatives is quite different than the shadowy confabs that Russian spooks purportedly held with senior officials of the first Trump presidential campaign; now, the new charges claim, the Russian government is directly setting up shop in the chaos-prone US mediasphere to generate support for its own preferred policy aims, and to sow suspicion of Russia’s critics.

The Department of Justice laid out its charges in an affidavit and an indictment. (A separate pair of indictments appeared the following day, charging former 2016 Trump campaign official Dimitri Simes and his wife, Anastasia, with a million-dollar money-laundering scheme for sanctioned Russian broadcaster Channel One.) The affidavit targeted an initiative called Doppelganger, allegedly headed up by Vladimer Putin’s domestic policy chief Sergei Vladelenovich Kireyenko, that created a network of websites disguised as well-recognized American news brands packaging Russian propaganda as straight news reports. One such offering appeared on a spoofed Washington Post site under the headline “White House Miscalculated: Conflict With Ukraine Strengthens Russia,” and reads in part, “It is time for our leaders to recognize that continued support for Ukraine is a mistake. It was a waste of lives and money, and to claim otherwise means further destruction.” The affidavit says that the United States has seized and shut down 32 such sites launched by the Doppelganger team.

The Doppelganger charges suggest a classic, Cold War–vintage exercise in propaganda; as the French philosopher Jacques Ellul wrote, the aim of state-sanctioned efforts to mold mass opinion is to simulate the tone and tenor of respectable elite discourse while delivering a counterfactual account of how the world works. But the federal indictment chronicles a more ambitious mode of propaganda outreach, under which executives with the state-owned news service Russia Today (RT) set up a channel of handsomely paid right-wing influencers to parrot a party line. The indictment alleges that, via a sprawling array of Russian-financed shell companies, RT officials Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva marshaled $10 million to fund a Tennessee-based media company to generate and distribute Putin-sympathetic content. Subsequent reports have confirmed that the company is Tenet Media, which launched to great fanfare on the right in 2022. Tenet is helmed by Lauren Chen, a former opinion writer at RT and a contributor for the hard-line Trumpist PAC Turning Point USA; she runs the company along with her husband, Liam Donovan. (After the Justice Department’s indictment was unsealed, Glenn Beck’s Blaze TV cashiered Chen from a hosting gig she had there.)

Since the indictment only brings charges against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, there’s good reason to suppose that Chen and Donovan are cooperating with prosecutors, especially given the damning level of detail in the indictment. Whatever the sources prosecutors marshaled behind the case, the charges have already lit up the mediasphere; the document spells out how the two RT officials recruited name-brand digital influencers on the right by lining up plum salaries and performance incentives under the aegis of a fictional Western investor. The two unnamed influencers in the indictment were paid $100,000 per video episode; the Russian funding supplied fully 90 percent of Tenet’s budget, according to prosecutors. While the exact identities of influencers cited in the indictment have yet to be fully confirmed, hardcore MAGA cheerleaders Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, and Matt Christianson are among the company’s lead broadcasters. Their content is steeped in Russia-friendly talking points and anti-Ukraine outbursts. (Though Tim Pool, for his part, has, as of yesterday, disowned his bellicose Ukraine-baiting past; a federal indictment, it seems, is the one thing that can concentrate the right-wing mind more powerfully than a generously padded vlogging salary.)

With this kind of money splashing around, the RT team was strikingly careless in covering its tracks. Just for starters, the pseudonym they gave their dummy investor, “Eduard Grigoriann,” is, with variant English-language transliteration, the name of a Soviet-era soccer star. And any time they had to rouse someone to impersonate him in meatspace, things seemed to go awry. For instance, the pseudo-Grigoriann turned up an hour early for his Zoom introduction to some prospective Tenet hires because he was evidently logging in from the Moscow time zone when he was supposedly in Paris. At another point, when Chen and Donovan were antsy about getting some invoices paid, one of them sent out e-mail appeals to their investors (whom they routinely referred to as “the Russians” in their own managerial communications)—and then promptly did a Google search to check what time it was in Moscow so that they’d know when to expect a reply. When one of the commentators requested more information about Grigoriann, the team sent a jury-rigged web profile for the fake investor, which listed, among other things, his work “advocating for social justice causes”—provoking outraged concern among recipients who had built their media brands around the rote denigration of such activities. Once, Afanasyeva, operating under one of her own sanitized work pseudonyms, slipped up and sent an influencer a document under Grigoriann’s name, and rushed, implausibly, to explain, “Eduard forwarded this email to me and asked me to replay [sic] on your behalf.”

Indeed, the slipshod character of the whole ruse—combined with the reliably cartoonish quality of the commentary offered by Poole, Johnson, et al.—tempts one to christen the whole scandal “Burn After Vlogging,” with apologies to the Coen brothers. Yet, in many ways, the shoddiness is the point—the aim of Russia’s propaganda efforts in other countries is to foment chaos, so the operational blundering and hair-trigger pomposity of Tenet’s commentary team fit that overall bill to a tee.

What’s more, the indictment also documents instances when a Tenet influencer undertook crudely misleading agitprop initiatives under Afanasyeva’s direction. After a deadly terrorist attack in a Moscow music venue last March, Afanasyeva told Tenet producers to cast doubt on the attackers’ actual affiliation with ISIS in favor of the stock RT narrative. “I think we can focus on the Ukraine/U.S. angle,” she wrote. “[T]he mainstream media spread fake news that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack yet ISIS itself never made such statements. All terrorists are now detained while they were headed to the border with Ukraine which makes it even more suspicious why they were going to Ukraine to hide.” The Tenet executive fielding the request said they’d get a commentator to serve up that line, and reported back that the influencer in question was “happy to cover it.” Given the array of commentators’ ideological predispositions, and the prospect of another quick 100 grand, what else would they say?

Also unsurprising was the apparent alacrity with which Tenet’s managers rallied to swat down any outburst of news judgment on their team. When Afanasyeva forwarded the now-infamous footage of Tucker Carlson marveling, in high Pravda tones of wonderment, at the luxe comforts of a Moscow supermarket, one producer on the team approached her supervisor with the understated objection that “it just feels like overt shilling.” That drew the predictable management reply that a fellow executive “thinks we should put it out there”—and thus the heir to the America’s Swanson TV dinner fortune was unleashed on the right-wing mediasphere marveling at a rival nation’s product lines.

Speaking of Carlson, he is an eloquent barometer of just how badly the American media ecosystem has degenerated into an untrammeled agitprop delivery system, under its own steam. This week, the stalwart producer of two-minute MAGA hates has plunged into a fresh round of controversy for admirably platforming revisionist Nazi “historian” Daryl Cooper, triggering a vile wave of Hitler apologetics among Carlson’s fan base. GOP vice-presidential hopeful JD Vance, who also follows Cooper’s Twitter account and has texted in the past with Holocaust denier Charles Johnson, has agreed to appear on Carlson’s “Live Tour” in Hershey, Pennsylvania, later this month, ostensibly to boost both their flagging brands, though it’s hard to see how either authoritarian stooge will come off looking better as a result. As the Tenet indictment shows, the tendrils of moneyed Russian influence have played a consequential role in advancing the hateful maunderings of Carlson, as well as the vast army of Vance enablers on the former alt-right. But the corrupt condition of our media and politics alike makes it all too plain that in setting up Tenet as its wholly owned subsidiary, Russia Today was knocking on an open door.