The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday uncovered a Russian influence campaign and charged two RT employees with two counts of conspiracy in an unsealed indictment. Two employees of RT, a Kremlin-run media company, spent $10 million on right-wing media figures to poison American discourse, according to an indictment.
Two Russians, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, funneled money into a Tennessee media company to get the job done. The indictment does not name the company or the media personalities it employed, but it Not difficult Use clues in court documents to find everyone involved. The unsealed indictment cites the company’s description of itself on its website as an “unorthodox network of commentators focusing on Western political and cultural issues.”
Only one company in Tennessee has this sentence on its website: TENET Media. TENET Media is a media company that publishes content on YouTube and other social media. It paid for films by Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, David Rubin, Matt Christiansen and Lauren Southern, among others.
What kind of content did Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva get for spending $10 million? “As today’s indictment alleges, Russian state broadcaster RT and its employees, including the alleged defendants, solicited online commentators and targeted U.S. viewers through social media by offering them nearly $10 million to Spreading pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.
The most viewed video on TENET Media’s YouTube channel is a documentary about online dating from Southern. The second most popular is the South talking about the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Its latest video is Benny Johnson’s light-hearted 12-minute rant about Kamala Harris. It has less than five thousand views so far.
According to the indictment, Poole, Johnson and others made considerable money producing content for the site. In 2022, Tenet began searching for someone to serve as the face of the operation. “‘We are willing to pay approximately $1 million to $2 million per year for suitable candidates,'” they said, according to court records. That’s a lot of cash for a video that often has less than 10,000 views.
The founders contacted two commentators – believed to be Tim Pool and either Benny Johnson or David Rubin – and asked how much money they needed to fund the They work. “The founder – I advised the commentator – I said ‘it would take close to 5 million per year to make him interested’ and commentator 2 said ‘it would take 100k per week to make it worth his time’,” the complaint states. .
The indictment makes clear that Poole, Rubin, Johnson and others did not know they were being sponsored by the Russians. All three have issued statements in the past 24 hours claiming to be victims.
“We are disturbed by the allegations in today’s indictment, which clearly demonstrate that I and other influential individuals were victims of this alleged scheme,” Johnson said in a post on X.
“These allegations make it clear that I and other commentators were victims of this scheme,” Rubin said on X. “I know nothing about this fraud. Period.
Poole stressed that the charges are just accusations and that, like others, he says he is a victim. “That being said, we still don’t know what the truth is because these are just accusations,” Poole said in a post on X, which he later deleted. “Putin is a scumbag and Russia sucks.” Poole has been an outspoken opponent of U.S. support for Ukraine.
Three men made hundreds of thousands of dollars producing videos for Creed Media, according to the indictment. A creator can earn $400,000 per month in addition to a $100,000 signing bonus. Again, that’s a lot of cash for a film that no one is watching.
The unsealed indictment was just one of several coordinated statements released by Washington on Wednesday aimed at pushing back against Russian election interference. The U.S. Treasury Department said it would sanction 10 individuals and two entities as part of the effort. In addition to the indictment, the U.S. Department of Justice also announced the seizure of 32 Internet domain names, saying that these domain names used artificial intelligence to spread false information.
Disinformation campaigns are a staple of modern geopolitics. Countries such as the United States, China, Russia and Iran all spend money to manipulate the media of their friends and adversaries. In February this year, Reuters reported that the US military was spreading anti-vaccine propaganda in the Philippines during the epidemic with the purpose of undermining China. Earlier this month, Microsoft accused Iran of running a disinformation campaign in the U.S.
Disinformation campaigns are not always subtle and, if discovered, can undermine the intended message. Modern Russian campaigns, strange as they are, are often designed with the knowledge that they will be discovered. Russia is not always interested in convincing people of any one thing, it is more interested in making everyone paranoid and distrustful. The fact that RT and the Kremlin paid Poole, Johnson, and Rubin to produce films is inherently destabilizing, regardless of the content they generate.
Reuters contacted RT for comment on the indictment, and RT gave them a statement that could be read as either a flippant joke or a bizarre promise. “Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the US election,” RT told Reuters.
