Russia's useful idiots
The MAGA influencer ecosystem is even shadier than we thought.
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On Wednesday, the Department of Justice indicted two employees of RT, formerly Russia Today, a Russian state-run media outlet, for covertly shoveling millions of dollars at MAGA influencers happy to do Russia’s bidding.
This has led to the delightful specter of high-profile rightwing commentators loudly insisting they were too stupid to know that Russian money was behind the wildly exorbitant sums they received for producing content.
While watching Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson scramble is hilarious, the indictment is no joke.
Indeed, it confirms that Russia continues to manipulate American politics via willing right-wingers — the exact thing Trumpers have long insisted isn’t happening.
Russian propaganda through MAGA mouthpieces
The indictment names Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, aka Kostya, and Elena Afanasyeva, aka Lena, as the RT employees who laundered close to $10 million through foreign shell companies, ultimately raining all that money down on an unnamed American media company, US Company-1, who then passed it along to unnamed commentators 1-6.
Though unnamed, the company and several commentators are easily discernible to anyone paying attention to the rightwing media grift. The company is most definitely Tenet Media, and its founders are most definitely Lauren Chen, who was also at BlazeTV until the indictment dropped and they fired her, and her husband, Liam Donovan.
And the commentators? Tenet’s ridiculous website describes them as “heterodox commentators” and “creators who question institutions that believe themselves to be above questioning.” That would be Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Lauren Southern, Matt Christiansen, and Tayler Hansen.
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Kostya and Lena are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). Anyone acting as an agent of a foreign country must register with the attorney general if they are engaged in certain activities, such as politics, on behalf of a foreign country. This ensures the American public doesn’t fall victim to covert foreign influence. The key here is the covert part. There’s no prohibition on publications from foreign governments overtly and transparently attempting to shape American opinion. The idea is just that Americans have the right to know.
Kostya and Lena are also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, as the $10 million they gave to Tenet was sent through a truly staggering maze of shell entities in the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Mauritius, the Czech Republic, and Hungary. They also lied about what the money being sent to Tenet was for, with the indictment noting that the wire transfers to Tenet often referred to the purchase of electronics rather than paying for media services. The indictment alleges that all that shuffling around of money was done with the intent to violate FARA.
Make FARA Violations Great Again
FARA has been on the books since 1938, but had only been enforced seven times up until 2016. What changed in 2016? Trump. Nothing more, nothing less.
Numerous Trumpworld denizens violated the law by failing to register. Trump’s onetime campaign manager, Paul Manafort, pleaded guilty to failing to register as an agent of the Ukrainian government back when Ukraine was controlled by pro-Russian then-president Viktor Yanukovych. Trump’s first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, admitted to taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to work on behalf of Turkey’s government but did not register. Flynn has also taken RT money to the tune of $45,000.
Elliott Broidy, a major Trump fundraiser and the former deputy finance chair of the Republican National Committee, pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent for Malaysia and China, taking millions to covertly lobby the Trump administration on behalf of those countries. Trump, of course, pardoned all three. And earlier this year, the DOJ indicted Barry Bennett and Douglas Watts, both of whom worked on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, for their failure to register and disclose they were lobbying on behalf of Qatar.
Media companies are exempt from registering if they’re organized under the laws of any US jurisdiction, are at least 80 percent owned by US citizens, are run by US citizens, and are not “owned, directed, supervised, controlled, subsidized, or financed by any foreign principal or agent.”
So, if Tenet had been genuinely financed and controlled by Chen and Donovan, there would be no problem here, even if they had some relationship with RT. The issue is that it appears Tenet was wholly financed by RT in secret, Chen and Donovan knew it, and the RT employees got to shape coverage.
What was in it for the Russians? Rants like the below one from Pool about how “one of the greatest enemies of our nation right now is Ukraine … we should rescind all funding and financing, pull out all military support, and we should apologize to Russia.” (Video via @DrewPavlou on twitter.)
Besides the fact that laundering pro-Russian, anti-Ukraine content in secret through willing American talking heads allowed Russia to pretend that sentiment was homegrown, RT had another reason for going through Tenet: RT itself was dropped by American cable distributors, banned in Europe, and RT America went out of business in March 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine.
The indictment explains that both Chen and Donovan worked directly for RT before this, with Chen having a contract between her unnamed Canadian company and ANO TV-Novosti, RT’s parent organization, and Donovan working directly for RT. Chen incorporated Tenet around January 19, 2022, right as Russia was massing troops on the border of Ukraine. It wasn’t until December 2022 that Chen began negotiating with an entirely fictitious person, Eduard Grigoriann, about launching a new YouTube channel.
And now we arrive at the part where all of these right-wingers can only get out from under these allegations by claiming they are very dumb.
Dave Rubin and Tim Pool made a fortune from Russia
From the details in the indictment, it’s impossible Chen and Donovan didn’t know their money was coming from Russia via shady means.
First, the Russians, through the imaginary Grigoriann and two other unnamed nonexistent personas, sent Chen a proposed contract run through a Hungarian shell entity as the purported client, a company that had no publicly available website. Later, one of the unnamed personas asked Chen to submit an invoice through a Czech shell company, which at least had a website, albeit one where it ostensibly sold auto parts. Chen later signed another contract sent to her by one of the Russian personas that was an agreement not with Grigoriann, not with the Hungarian shell company, and not with the Czech shell company, but instead with a UK shell entity with no website.
The indictment makes clear that despite all the shell companies, Chen and Donovan knew their money was coming from the Russians. They also knew that the Russians ran the show, with messages asking the Russians about hiring a producer and the Russian persona approving the hire. Kostya was also presented to Tenet as an outside editor, allowing him to monitor internal communications and edit Tenet content without disclosing he worked for RT.
Chen then solicited Commentator-1 — Dave Rubin — and Commentator-2 — Tim Pool— to work for the imaginary Eduard Grigoriann, drawing from a shortlist of candidates sent by one of the Russian personas. However, both Rubin and Pool demanded a lot of money. The indictment alleges Rubin wanted close to $5 million per year to create content for Tenet, and Pool wanted “100k per weekly episode to make it worth his while.” Chen warned the Russian persona that it would not be profitable to employ either of them, but the persona responded that they would love to move forward. In other words, Chen knew full well that their backers were willing to throw large sums at right-wingers with no hope of achieving a profitable return, a move that would be very odd for an actual business.
For a brief moment, it looked like Rubin might have been smart enough not to work for a completely unknown entity with cash to burn. The indictment shows that he inquired more than once about who Eduard Grigoriann was and wanted to know about the company and who he would be working with. However, he did not need much convincing, as there was no particularly robust effort to make Grigoriann’s existence believable.
The Russians created a one-page profile, reproduced in the indictment, with Grigoriann’s alleged career highlights. The profile refers to Grigoriann’s time at an unnamed bank, one which has no record of ever employing him. Additionally, a Google search turned up no results at all for that name in conjunction with the bank, despite the profile saying Grigoriann had high-level private banking and investment roles.
Despite this shoddiness, Rubin’s only concern was that the profile used the term “social justice,” which he had a problem with because they were trying to create a conservative network.
Rubin ultimately agreed to a monthly fee of $400,000 and a $100,000 signing bonus to produce four videos weekly. Pool got $100,000 per video. Both Rubin and Pool, along with Benny Johnson, are now saying that they are the real victims here and that they were deceived. They’re getting help pushing that talking point from the likes of Marco Rubio, who went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show last night and dismissed the indictment’s revelations about rightwing influencers.
“We're talking about preexisting political opinions in the United States,” Rubio said. “They legitimately believe in the views they're espousing. They were victims." (Watch below.)
But buying that requires believing that at no point did Pool, Johnson, and the others think it odd that a small Tennessee company could pay them six figures per video. Rubin, meanwhile, is apparently able to be convinced of someone’s existence with a one-page fake profile and no other data.
In conjunction with this, the DOJ sanctioned several Russian individuals and entities, and Putin has already howled that Russia’s response will make “everyone shudder.” It’s all part of the DOJ’s fight against election interference and an open acknowledgment that the Kremlin favors a Trump win. It’s a more aggressive approach, thankfully, than Obama took in 2016, and will hopefully lead us to a better election result this time around.
That’s it for this week
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Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
These men are definitely Russia’s useful idiots and I struggle to think they were truly innocent, given that they were the ones who asked for the huge sums of money per video rather than merely accepting huge amounts of proffered cash and failing to ask questions.
All I can say is just imagine what Fox and MAGA would be doing if some left leaning influences had been found to be accepting money from China and had been prominent supporters of reducing aid and assistance for Taiwan. Can’t see them calling such (non-existent) money grubbers ‘sincere in their beliefs’ and ‘victims,” Come to think of it what if Hunter Biden had done this????
Marco Rubio is not in politics to benefit Americans; he is in politics to benefit Marco Rubio. He is a hollow man who goes whichever way the wind blows. Rubio can be charming, but he’s not real bright. It was disappointing to see him reelected when he ran against Val Demings, who would have made an excellent member of the Senate, & would have improved the lives of Floridians.