Two so-called whistleblowers have come forward to accuse Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Democratic vice presidential nominee, of sexual abuse. Both claim to be former students at Mankato West High School, where Walz taught from 1996 to 2006, and accuse him of groping and touching them inappropriately. The claims are not only unsubstantiated, but appear to be a product of a Russian-based propaganda campaign, Storm-1516.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a report Tuesday tracing the allegations to a Russian scheme. “Russian influence actors manufactured and amplified inauthentic content claiming illegal activity committed by the Democratic vice-presidential candidate during his earlier career,” U.S. intelligence revealed in the report.
Darren Linvill, a co-director of Clemson University’s Watt Family Innovation Center Media Forensics Hub, and his team first uncovered the Russian propaganda network in December 2023. Both Clemson researchers and, independently, Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center—which detects and analyzes digital threats across the internet, and first shared concerns about Storm-1516 in April—found the Russian network initially pushed narratives that sought to undermine support for Ukraine and its president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But the network has recently switched its focus to the 2024 U.S. election. Since August 2023, Linvill and his team have linked 54 manufactured narratives to Storm-1516.
On October 5, a right-wing internet personality, Zak Paine—a self-described “citizen journalist” and “corruption detector”—hosted an anonymous whistleblower on his video stream, Red Pill News. The guest—identified only as “Rick”—joined the stream by phone, with Paine distorting his voice to protect his anonymity. The whistleblower claimed to have been a foreign exchange student from Kazakhstan studying at the Minnesota high school in 2004 and 2005 when Walz allegedly groped him.
He alleged he was a participant in the U.S. State Department’s Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX) Program. However, records from the State Department dispute that claim, as NewsGuard, a group that monitors news sites and misinformation, first reported. “We have no record of any FLEX student from Kazakhstan or Tajikistan in Mankato area schools from 2000 through 2020,” a State Department spokesperson told The Dispatch Fact Check.
Paine and the supposed whistleblower were joined by John Dougan, a former deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida, who now resides in Moscow and is linked to more than 150 fake news websites that impersonate local media outlets. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that it had reviewed Russian documents obtained by a Europe-based intelligence agency that show Dougan has accepted payments from an officer with Russia’s foreign military intelligence agency, and communicated with figures linked to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime.
Dougan later provided The Dispatch Fact Check with images of what he said were the whistleblower’s U.S. visa and FLEX program certificate. Both images were heavily redacted, and Dougan declined to share unredacted versions of the documents. He explained that the alleged whistleblower “works for an American based company in Kazakhstan,” and that exposure of his identity would pose “significant risk.”
The link to the livestream was later shared by several prominent social media accounts. John Basham, a former city councilman of Reno, Texas, tweeted out the link detailing “unconfirmed allegations” that Walz abused a former student. Another prominent X account shared the video in a tweet, and wrote, “A foreign exchange student from Kazakhstan has shared allegations of an improper grooming relationship involving Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.” The tweet then outlined the allegations, but referred to the whistleblower by the wrong name—“Jack,” instead of ‘Rick.”
Then, on October 16, another alleged whistleblower stepped forward in a video message posted to social media. The whistleblower identified himself as Matthew Metro, a former Mankato West High School student, and claimed that Walz, who allegedly taught him during his senior year, sexually assaulted him in 1997.
The video was quickly circulated across social media. “If this is true, she’s done,” one X account with more than 10,000 followers tweeted with the video. “The Kamala Harris/ Tim Walz combo is done. America doesn’t need a pedophile as vice president.” Another prominent account tweeted the video with nearly identical text. “If this is true, she’s done. The Kamala Harris/ Tim Walz combo is done. It’s over.” Each post has accumulated more than 1 million views.
While there was a student named Matthew Metro at the school during that time, that was not the same person detailing the sexual assault allegations. “It’s obviously not me,” the real Matthew Metro told the Washington Post on Monday. “The teeth are different, the hair is different, the eyes are different, the nose is different.” Metro added that Walz was never his teacher. Semafor’s David Weigel also noted that the person in the video mispronounced Mankato, Minnesota. “It’s man-KAY-toh,” he tweeted. “The AI video says man-CAT-oh.”
The video appears to be footage of a person using Metro’s identity. Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley and member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Lab, said that video does not appear to be AI-generated. “I think it is more likely that this is a cheapfake in which someone is simply impersonating another person,” Farid told The Dispatch Fact Check. According to Farid’s analysis, the person’s face has no signs of generative AI, and he found “only minor evidence” that the audio used AI technology, “but not overwhelmingly so.” While there is some visual distortion around his mouth and teeth, Farid attributed that to video compression, indicating the video file was converted into a smaller size.
However, the X account that first posted the video on October 16 went to great lengths to impersonate the real Metro. The profile image appears to match the real Metro, and not the person in the video message. Moreover, the account user set his location to Hilo, Hawaii, where the real Metro resides, per the Washington Post. Past activity of the X account, which was created in October 2023, includes retweets of dog videos and former President Barack Obama’s book recommendations.
The Metro scheme is in line with a strategy often deployed by the Russian propagandists. “Oftentimes, they will start with a video that is placed on either Twitter or YouTube, on some kind of newly created account, or an account with very limited history,” Linvill told The Dispatch Fact Check. “The video is often from somebody with a story to tell—some whistleblower of some kind.”
And these narratives tend to follow a consistent pattern. “There’s a lot of similarities with the videos that they’re making,” he said. One common tactic is to create videos using hired actors. “Depending on the narrative,” Linvill added, “they might use Russian actors or West African immigrants that are … likely in the St Petersburg area.”
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