DOJ shines a light on Russian use of conservative influencers

A Justice Department (DOJ) indictment revealing Russia’s use of conservative influencers to peddle its viewpoints has shined a light on its newest tactics for tapping into existing right-leaning media to push its agenda.

An indictment unsealed by the department last week shows two employees of RT, formerly known as Russia Today, contracted with conservative Tenet Media to offer lucrative contracts to its band of influencers, including Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson.

Those influencers have mirrored the DOJ’s language, calling themselves unwitting participants in the scheme and in some cases victims of the operation.

The State Department on Friday indicated RT’s efforts were even broader than those revealed by the DOJ, noting the outlet similarly hired a French influencer to push its viewpoints there.

But the episode shows how the conservative media landscape is ripe for being co-opted by Russia, raising questions about the extent to which the U.S. adversary has sought to steer existing media.

Laura Thornton, senior director of global democracy programs at the McCain Institute, said the plot marked the first time the “DOJ has exposed these direct linkages.”

“We’ve seen Russian state media amplify existing narratives and use their bot farms or other sites to spread that information. But in terms of directly paying for an American media company to produce content on their behalf, this is quite unusual,” she told The Hill.

“Given that a lot of the false information and pro-Russia narratives actually come from within, it’s much easier to just throw a flame on those tinders,” she added. “The influencers themselves are claiming that they didn’t really change their content, which to me is almost even more alarming. They’re not being paid to change things because they already are [broadcasting] pro-Kremlin, pro-Russian disinformation narratives.”

The DOJ didn’t identify the players involved, but details in the indictment make clear some identities, including that of Tenet Media, which like the company listed in the filing describes itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.”

Its owners, Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, took in some $10 million in contracts from sources they referred to in internal communications as “the Russians.” 

The two relayed the name of a fake investor, Eduard Grigoriann, to influencers who were paid handsomely for a series of videos that were in fact funded by the Russian government through two employees of RT.

One of those employees, Elena Afanasyeva, later “edited, posted, and directed the posting … of hundreds of videos” at Tenet.

Some of the content reviewed in the indictment promoted key Russian talking points, including a video of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson visiting a Russian grocery store. Though one producer at Tenet initially raised concerns that it “just feels like overt shilling,” they acquiesced and shared the content the next day.

In another case, Afanasyeva wanted to promote the “Ukraine/U.S. angle” in the wake of a terror attack in Moscow, despite reports indicating ISIS had claimed responsibility for the attack. Nevertheless, one of the influencers said “he’s happy to cover it.”

Many of the influencers involved in the plot say they were unaware of the Russian involvement and never shifted their content. 

“Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show and the contents of the show are often apolitical,” Pool said in a statement on social platform X shortly after the indictment was unsealed.  

Pool and Johnson referred to themselves as victims of the plot.

“The FBI has notified me that I am the victim of a crime. [Attorney General] Merrick Garland said the same in his press conference. I am the only person who ever had editorial control of my program. Period,” Johnson said on X.

In another statement, he said he had been involved in a “standard, arms length deal, which was later terminated.”

But they’ve faced criticism for not being more skeptical of the high-dollar contracts they were offered, as well as questions about why their messaging was appealing to a U.S. adversary in the first place.

“They’re also claiming, of course, that they were themselves deceived, in which case, I guess the question really is, they should ask themselves why they were chosen — why their messaging is in such lockstep with Russian disinformation in the first place,” Thornton said.

“Why do we have this constituency in our country? And that, to me, is more concerning and makes life a lot easier for the Russians, because then they can just retweet what our own congressperson is saying or our own media.”

Ben Dubow, a fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis who studies disinformation efforts, said the large existing followings are a major part of the appeal for Russia. Johnson and Rubin have about 2.5 million followers on YouTube, while Pool has 1.4 million.

“I would not be shocked if there were other incidents of this. What attracts Russia to influencers like this is kind of the isolationism, which is very directly related to Russian interest. The other is just promoting cleavages within American society. And there are a lot of people on social media who make their living essentially doing exactly that,” he said.

But others see a severe lack of due diligence on the part of influencers who were receiving significant sums to make the content. One of the influencers was paid $400,000 a month while another was given $100,000 per video.

They were given a false profile of Grigoriann after asking about the source of financing, though the indictment notes there were little results on Google for anyone by that name and none associated with the bank he claimed to work with.

“I would love to be a victim of a crime where I get paid $400,000,” quipped A.J. Bauer, a professor at the University of Alabama who studies right-wing media.

“Even if they were unaware that Russia was the one providing the funds, if somebody’s giving you $100,000 per podcast episode, that should raise some questions, right? Who’s bankrolling this?”

He described the conservative media landscape as a highly entrepreneurial space that has long been funded by wealthy Americans seeking to influence public opinion — a legal activity when pushed by U.S. citizens.

He said there will likely be a lasting impact for the influencers.

“Among right wing folks there has been an increasing sympathy with Russia, but I still think that a lot of conservatives and right wingers don’t necessarily want to follow somebody who is overtly engaging in propaganda or who would be willing to, and so I think that’s probably going to damage their reputations mid-term,” he said.

“I would imagine that they can kind of rebrand themselves [in the long term]. They’ve done so multiple times already.”

The consequences have been most severe for Chen and Donovan, who have gone silent since the indictment dropped. The indictment notes that neither ever registered as a foreign agent, raising the specter that additional charges could be coming.

YouTube took down content from Chen and Tenet Media while Glenn Beck’s Blaze Media said it had terminated a contract it had with Chen. The YouTube channels for Pool, Johnson and Rubin were not impacted.

Tenet Media declined to respond to a request for comment. 

Russia has been ramping up its use of RT, which the State Department accused Friday of having ties to Russian intelligence. 

“We know that for over two years, RT has leveraged its extensive state funding to covertly recruit and pay social media personalities and provide them with unbranded content to disseminate and promote around the world while hiding RT’s involvement,” the State Department wrote.

It’s not clear, however, just how wide an audience the Russian-backed content reached. 

The indictment says the company posted about 2,000 videos since launching, generating about 16 million views. 

But Dubow said that’s not as much of a splash as one might think. He said advertisers expect to spend $10-$15 per every thousand views while content creators often get about $1 for every thousand impressions they generate. By either metric, Russia was spending orders of magnitude more than market rates to reach a relatively small audience. 

“It really does look like the influencers got the best of this deal, as opposed to Russia really achieving all that much with it,” he said.

But Thornton stressed that $10 million is a drop in the bucket for Russia, which has advanced its influence operations since 2016 and also faces its own internal unrest as it engages in war with Ukraine.

“Russia has never had more of an incentive to interfere with our elections than it does today,” she said.

“They are facing an existential threat, right? And the war in Ukraine and how it turns out for Russia is their entire future. And a lot of it is going to depend on who the next president of the United States is. So if ever they’ve had an incentive to get involved in our politics, I would say this is the year.”