Russian Influence Scheme Targets Right-Wing Media Site

Happy Friday! Look, we’re willing to tolerate a lot of opinions from New Yorkers about the proper way to eat pizza, but former Mayor Bill De Blasio angrily dumping coconut on his New York slice is simply a bridge too far.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Ukrainian parliament voted on Thursday to approve the appointment of nine new cabinet-level ministers, including Andrii Sybiha—a former adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—as the country’s new foreign minister, replacing Dmytro Kuleba, who resigned from the position on Monday. “Government institutions must be set up in such a way that Ukraine will achieve all the results we need,” Zelensky said this week in defense of the reshuffle—the largest since the beginning of the war. 
• The Nicaraguan government, led by authoritarian President Daniel Ortega, released 135 Nicaraguan citizens on Thursday who had been held as political prisoners. The group, whose release followed negotiations by the Biden administration, included 13 pastors and attorneys affiliated with Mountain Gateway—a Christian ministry headquartered in Texas—who, according to U.S. officials, had been unjustly detained since December. The White House arranged for the transportation of the freed political prisoners to nearby Guatemala, where they will then be able to apply as refugees for legal entry to the U.S. and other countries.
• Local law enforcement officials on Thursday arrested the father of the Barrow County, Georgia, high school shooting suspect. Colin Gray has been charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter, charges that Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Chris Hosey said resulted from Gray “knowingly allowing his son to possess a weapon.” An aunt of the shooting suspect told the Washington Post that the gunman had been struggling with mental health and “was begging for help from everybody around him.” Officials also released the names of the four victims killed in Wednesday’s shooting: 14-year-old students Christian Angulo and Mason Schermerhorn, 39-year-old math teacher and high school football defensive coordinator Richard “Ricky” Aspinwall, and 53-year-old math teacher Christina Irimie. 
• Boko Haram terrorists killed at least 170 people on Sunday in Mafa, a small village in northeastern Nigeria, government authorities confirmed on Wednesday. The terrorists arrived in the village aboard motorcycles before opening fire on residents and burning down buildings. Locals told the New York Times that, although most of the village’s population fled last month in response to Boko Haram threats, many of them returned two weeks later at the order of a local government official who assured residents they were safe to return. However, that official—Baba Umar Zubairu—denied issuing the order. 
• U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Thursday and met with Haitian Prime Minister Garry Conille to discuss the country’s top priorities—including food scarcity, youth unemployment, and health insecurity—and ongoing efforts to clear Haiti of the gang violence plaguing its citizens. A United Nations-backed multinational task force led by Kenyan police officers began deploying to Haiti in June to help local authorities combat powerful gangs terrorizing the region. However, only a small share of that task force has arrived in Haiti thus far. 
• Hunter Biden pleaded guilty on Thursday to all nine federal felony charges related to tax evasion—reversing his previous plea—but did not agree with federal prosecutors on a sentencing recommendation to offer the judge. The younger Biden initially sought to replace that plea with what’s known as an Alford plea, in which Biden would have pleaded guilty in light of the strength of the case against him while maintaining his innocence. Federal prosecutors, who are advised to oppose Alford pleas “except in the most unusual of circumstances,” objected to the move, and Biden entered an open guilty plea that leaves his sentencing up to the judge. Sentencing is scheduled for December 16, where Hunter could face up to 17 years in prison and more than $1 million in fines. 

‘It Just Feels Like Overt Shilling’

In early June 2023, the founder of a new media startup backed by a low-profile, Paris-based businessman was trying to convince a political commentator to come on board. 

One of the founders of the Nashville-based Tenet Media and the assistant to the prospective employee were scheduled to have a meeting with Eduard Grigoriann, who was supposedly financially supporting the project. 

Grigoriann had set the meeting for 5 p.m. France time. 

At 3:58 p.m. in Paris, he sent an email telling the participants he was ready for the call. Though he was an hour early for a 5 p.m. meeting in France, he was right on time in Moscow, which was an hour ahead. After a quick Google search for “time in Paris,” Grigoriann emailed again: “Sorry, wrong hour,” he told them. “Didn’t sync the calendar.” 

But Grigoriann—the elusive, deep-pocketed financial backer—was a total fabrication. Indeed, according to a Justice Department indictment unsealed on Wednesday, he was one of four made-up “personas” working with the founders of Tenet Media, in addition to two real-life Russians employed by RT, formerly Russia Today. 

Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva—employees of the state-owned Russian broadcaster—were charged with conspiring to act as unregistered foreign agents and conspiring to launder nearly $10 million to Tenet to support a Russian malign influence operation via the right-wing website. The scheme was meant to spread views that are “often consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions,” prosecutors alleged. The indictment was accompanied by Treasury Department sanctions on many RT employees in a multi-agency effort to counter Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election.

Tenet claims to be a “network of heterodox commentators” founded in 2022 by Canadians Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan—though crucially, not the Liam Donovan occasionally cited in these pages who had, well, a really weird day on Wednesday. Chen is a populist YouTuber who, like her husband, had an existing relationship with RT, which was forced off of U.S. and Canadian airwaves following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

In consultation with the “personas”—characters purporting to represent Grigoriann and the man himself—set up by undisclosed elements in Russia, Chen and Donovan started a YouTube channel that grew into Tenet. But in the process, whoever was behind the made-up characters apparently couldn’t keep track of who they were pretending to be at any given time: In addition to getting their time zones mixed up, the indictment says that on at least one occasion, they signed emails with the wrong fake name. 

The founders, as the indictment refers to Chen and Donovan, connected with two online commentators to convince them to join their network, offering one influencer $400,000 a month with performance bonuses. The project was, of course, being bankrolled by Russia—a fact the founders knew, prosecutors allege, and conspired to conceal from the commentators they brought on board, though Chen and Donovan are not charged in the indictment. 

The prospective employees were told Grigoriann was providing the eye-wateringly large sums of money being offered for their content, but Grigoriann had no online presence at all. When one of the commentators insisted on seeing more information about him, one of the “personas” purporting to represent Grigoriann sent one of the founders a one-page CV that suggested he was an experienced international banker and included what appears to be a stock image of a white man sitting on a private jet. 

Over the course of several months, Chen and Donovan brought on six right-wing influencers with existing social media followings and millions of YouTube followers between them: Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, and Matt Christiansen. In a trailer for the site on the website, they call themselves “free-thinking.” The commentators are generally pro-Trump—Pool recently interviewed the former president—and frequently post about the threat of “wokeness,” illegal immigrants, and other culture war issues. Pool tweeted with bizarre regularity about the prospect of a civil war in the U.S. that he said was either already ongoing or about to begin. 

Several members of the Tenet crew were also vocally against U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia. “This is psychotic,” said Pool in a video in August as he banged a table and gritted his teeth. “Ukraine is the enemy of this country.” Since the indictment, Pool has tweeted—seemingly ironically—in support of Ukraine. 

Johnson, meanwhile, called Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas an “unhinged scumbag” for supporting aid to Ukraine. And in a tweet featuring a picture of GOP Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah with his family, Johnson said, “I’ll take Mitt Romney seriously on Ukraine War funding when he sends a *single* one of his many, many kids or grandkids over to the frontlines to fight.” 

Among the team’s congressional allies is Sen. Mike Lee: Johnson was apparently among those who convinced the Utah Republican—a strident isolationist who opposes aid to Ukraine—to start his “@BasedMikeLee” Twitter account. 

The indictment suggests that these influencers—who were paid by Tenet but posted on their own channels and accounts and had their content promoted by the company on its feeds—did not know their work was being funded by the Kremlin, and, indeed, several have said they are the “victims” of fraud and have been contacted by the FBI. “These allegations clearly show that I and other commentators were the victims of this scheme,” Rubin said. “I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”

Tenet’s stated mission was to “support creators who question institutions that believe themselves to be above questioning”—unless, according to the indictment, that institution is the Russian government. Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, the RT employees, apparently had ever-larger roles in shaping the editorial output on Tenet’s social media channels, including publishing clips from other sources. Afanasyeva was particularly strident when it came to having pro-Russia content pushed out on their accounts. 

One conversation between Afanasyeva and the U.S.-based producers at Tenet—not the influencers—appears to reference former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s trip to Russia in February. In clips from the trip, Carlson marveled at a Russian supermarket, including the low prices and shopping carts locked together with coins—as can be found, it should be noted, at Aldi and Lidl grocery stores all over the United States. When Afanasyeva told a producer to publish the clips on social media, the producer complained to one of the founders: “It just feels like overt shilling.” Chen and Donovan told the producer to post it anyway. 

In another moment where the Russian propaganda was front-and-center, the indictment alleges Afanasyeva requested one of the “creators” publish content suggesting—baselessly—that the U.S. or Ukrainian governments were responsible for the March terrorist attack on the Crocus City Hall venue in Moscow. Among the Kremlin’s main talking points was that the attackers had fled to the Ukrainian border, a line Afanasyeva repeated in her discussion with Tenet staff. In messages with the founders, she falsely said that it was “mainstream media fake news” that ISIS had claimed responsibility for the attack. According to prosecutors, one of the founders replied that one of the commentators would be “happy to cover it.”

The content creators involved have maintained they had editorial independence over their videos and podcasts—similarities to Russian talking points notwithstanding. But they have not said whether they’ll keep their ill-gotten gains—to the tune of millions of dollars—now that they know where they came from. 

As Nick Catoggio pointed out in his column yesterday, the revelations of the alleged payoff also prompt other questions: “If the Kremlin is willing to spend $100,000 a week on a replacement-level propagandist like Benny Johnson, how much is it willing to offer someone with real clout?” he asked. “And, among that group, how likely is it that everyone who’s been approached has said no except Tenet Media?”

For their part, Afanasyeva and Kalashnikov are still at large, perhaps in Russia. According to the indictment, they’ll be liable for “any proceeds traceable to the commission of the offense,” though it’s not clear if, when, or how they’ll be apprehended. 

The indictment was part of a larger, multi-agency effort to clamp down on Russian influence operations. Also on Wednesday, the Treasury Department announced new sanctions on RT executives as well as a Russian nonprofit it says uses artificial intelligence to develop disinformation campaigns. And on Thursday, a former adviser to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Dmitri Simes, was indicted, along with his wife, for allegedly violating sanctions against a Russian broadcaster prohibited from operating in the United States. To Moscow, the perpetrator of malign influence operations in the U.S., FBI Director Christopher Wray said Wednesday: “Knock it off.” 

But Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida offered a sort of defense for the duped influencers: “They already had these opinions,” he told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “They already believed in these things. They legitimately believe in the views that they’re espousing. They were victims.” 

Worth Your Time

• Might some Medicare recipients not be as sick as the government claims? “The trick is lucrative,” Charles Silver and David Hyman reported in the Wall Street Journal. “The Journal recently reported that insurers took $50 billion from Medicare over three years by adding fake illnesses to patients’ diagnoses. Criminals and legitimate providers—hospitals, physician groups, drug manufacturers, pharmacy benefit managers and insurers—raid the Treasury in other ways too. Within the past few weeks, it was reported that crooked brokers and insurers are helping five million ObamaCare enrollees enjoy $20 billion a year in premium subsidies by misrepresenting their incomes, and that half or more of Medicaid’s annual $217 billion budget for long-term care goes to people wealthy enough to cover their bills,” they wrote. “The government can’t tell which claims are legitimate, so it pays them all and occasionally chases fraudsters after discovering it has been robbed. By failing to audit bills before paying them, the federal government squanders hundreds of billions of dollars every year. As long as it controls how healthcare dollars are spent, fraud will persist and services will cost more than they should.”
• Fishing is generally a leisurely, relaxing, serene activity. But not always, Tyler Austin Harper—a fisherman who swims out into rough seas at night to catch a big one—wrote in The Atlantic. “The wave comes, throat-high and hungry,” he wrote. “I manage to keep hold of my fishing rod, and I’m reeling in lost line and treading water and trying to forget all the stories I’ve heard about sharks as a second large wave begins sucking me up its face. … Wetsuiting is a form of saltwater fishing that involves wearing a wetsuit and wading or swimming out to offshore rocks—almost exclusively at night, often during storms—to access deeper water or faster currents than can be reached in traditional waders.” The secret to such gumption? “Wetsuiters are all mad, and they always have been. Spending sleepless night after sleepless night up to your chest in the riotous Atlantic, hunting fish the size of a preschooler, isn’t a hobby that people who are psychologically grounded pursue. … More than a few have lost marriages and jobs in their desperate quest for this fish. Some have lost their life.”

Presented Without Comment

Reuters: Trump Says He Will Tap [Elon] Musk To Lead Government Efficiency Commission If Elected

Also Presented Without Comment

The Hill: Putin Quips That He ‘Supports’ Harris, Citing ‘Infectious’ Laugh

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Washington Post: Water Buffalo Escapes Slaughter, Evades Police, Becomes Local Celebrity

In the Zeitgeist

In this world, nothing is certain except death, taxes, and a new Star Wars spin-off. Star Wars: Skeleton Crew, set to premiere on Disney+ in December, will follow four kids traveling the galaxy, searching for a way to their home—the perfect recipe for  … checks years-old English literature notes … a bildungsroman space opera?

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Mike and Sarah provided an update on Hunter Biden’s criminal tax evasion case, Will highlighted the troubling legal issues with California’s new bill regulating artificial intelligence, and Nick considered (🔒) just how motivated right-wing media is by cold hard cash. 
• On the podcasts: Sarah, Steve, and Jonah are joined by Reason’s Nick Gillespie on The Dispatch Podcast roundtable to discuss whether conservatives (and libertarians) would be better off with a Trump or Harris win in November.
• On the site: Kevin revisits Trump’s role in the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, and Alex Muresianu dives into Kamala Harris’ proposed tax policies. 

Let Us Know

Do you think the influencers’ claims of victimhood are credible?