Russia Is Spreading Its Lies Covertly Now
The Tenet Media scandal should be a wake-up call.
Just days before the first ballots go out in this year’s election, the Department of Justice has revealed that several high-profile commentators were paid to spread illiberal Russian disinformation. Foreign influence is not new. (Even George Washington warned about it.) However, the DOJ indictment describes in detail how current covert Russian disinformation is working and suggests it may be the tip of the iceberg.
The DOJ has been very busy lately. The Tenet Media scandal is the one everyone is talking about. Also, the DOJ unsealed an indictment of another couple in Virginia that was charged with violating Russian sanctions by coordinating with Channel One Russia. Last week, the Treasury Department sanctioned ten specific individuals involved in spreading Russian disinformation as well.
It’s not hard to see what’s going on here.
Lest anyone forget, there was a general consensus in the intelligence community, as described in a 2017 report, that Russia meddled in the 2016 election. It stated that Putin ordered an influence campaign to affect the election and that the Russian government developed a “clear preference for President-elect Trump.” However, these new campaigns are more than just déjà vu.
In the indictment that implicates Tenet Media, the DOJ describes the new mission of Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT (formerly Russia Today): to continue the same disinformation campaigns covertly that used to be done overtly.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, most Western governments sanctioned Russian media, including and especially RT. It was an industry-wide effort, too. Apple stopped selling products in Russia, and Amazon stopped shipping to Russia. Similar responses came from Spotify, Google, and Meta.
RT America officially closed its doors for good. Without a means to directly influence American media, Simonyan began an “entire empire of covert projects,” according to the indictment. As a result, Margarita Simonyan was one of the ten individuals sanctioned this week by the Treasury Department.
Along with the indictment, the DOJ also seized 32 internet domains that the Russians have been using to disseminate disinformation. The program, called “Doppelganger,” involved Russian agents setting up websites to mimic real news outlets like The Washington Post.
Tenet Media was one of these covert projects, and it started with two RT employees—Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva. These two worked with commentator Lauren Chen (i.e., “Roaming Millennial”) and her husband, Liam, to deceive other influencers into participating in this covert project.
Kostya and Elena paid Lauren and her husband to secure contracts with well-known right-wing media personalities. Most of the nearly $10 million funneled through Tenet Media by the Russians went to “Commentator-1” and “Commentator-2”. They are believed to be Dave Rubin and Tim Pool, respectively.
According to the indictment, the commentators were deceived into believing that the money came from a European investor named Eduard Grigoriann, who does not exist. The contracts required the content creators to produce a certain number of videos.
The indictment also asserts that Kostya and Elena played a significant role in editing and disseminating this content. By June 2024, Elena was not only heading the editing team but also personally overseeing Tenet Media’s social media accounts. Tenet Media had become an actual puppet arm of the Russians that looked to everyone else like a homegrown American media company.
It’s wild to think that people like Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin did not see anything wrong with any of this while it was happening.
The European shell companies set up to make the investment money appear legit were selling things like car parts. Elena also posted many links—871 in total—to sites she wanted to share on Tenet Media’s social media. One such link was the infamous Tucker Carlson grocery shopping video, which even a producer thought amounted to “overt shilling.”
There is one question that everyone is asking: Did these commentators know they were working with the Russians?
Right now, they are all claiming plausible deniability. Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin have all put out statements. They all claim to be victims who did not know they were taking money from Russians in exchange for producing Russian propaganda.
There are only two possibilities: They did not know and were pushing Russian propaganda on their own without any help, or—of course—they knew the whole time.
One example demonstrating the latter jumps out.
Lauren Chen was given a talking point regarding the terrorist attack in Moscow earlier this year. Even though ISIS claimed responsibility for—and is widely believed by U.S. intelligence to be responsible for—the attack, the talking point was to avoid talking about ISIS at all. Instead, the Russians wanted coverage focusing on the “US/Ukraine angle.”
Chen responded to this request by saying that she would ask “Commentator-3”, who said the next day that he “would be happy to do it.” Commentator-3 is very likely Benny Johnson, and based on his coverage of the Moscow terrorist attack, he followed this talking point exactly.
The only mention of Islamic extremists in his coverage was when he quoted the U.S. intelligence statement that they thought an attack might be imminent. U.S. intelligence warned Russia because of their “duty to report” such things.
Johnson then pivoted to how this would affect Ukraine but offered no evidence that Ukraine had anything to do with this attack. This strange segue only makes sense if you realize that it’s Russian propaganda.
The question, again, is whether this is just how Benny Johnson sees these issues and is a useful idiot or if he knows he is pushing Russian propaganda. If that’s his story and he’s sticking to it, then good luck to him.
Unfortunately for liberals, the impact of this scandal on neo-reactionary, anti-democratic grifters and disinformation agents may be negligible. Many of their viewers simply won’t believe it, or they won’t care. Consumers of Russian disinformation will not accept that their favorite source of information and opinion might be knowingly deceiving them. This is true even when there’s proof.
When Dominion sued Fox News for lying about its voting systems, it was discovered that Tucker Carlson knew that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. He continued to perpetuate the Big Lie. The big question is why.
Maybe he just didn’t want to lose viewers by telling them a truth they didn’t want to hear. Maybe he’s just following Donald Trump’s lead. Or maybe it’s because he’s being paid by the Russians to say it. We don’t know for sure, but it’s more disturbing to realize that Tucker’s audience probably won’t care no matter what the reason was.
There are likely many other commentators like Tim Pool and Benny Johnson–some with even deeper ties to the Russians–that are seeking to influence the election. Uncovering all of them may be a bit like playing Whack-A-Mole, and the pace at which the DOJ is moving is nothing less than glacial. It may be too late to prevent whatever effect these covert campaigns might already be having on the election.
Still, Lauren Chen has been fired from Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV, and YouTube removed all her channels, including Tenet Media.
There is now one less disinformation agent pushing divisiveness and chaos for the sake of Kremlin politics. Hopefully, it will not be the last.