Useful idiots and Russian propaganda

Russian useful idiot Tim Pool reads the propaganda on YouTube Credit: The Status Kuo

You have no doubt heard by now that the Department of Justice has charged two Russian nationals, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, with violating U.S. money laundering laws and failing to register as agents of a foreign power.  The indictment lays out a complex web through which $10 million in Russian money was moved into an American bank account controlled by a heretofore little-known American company, Tenet Media, thence into the private bank accounts of several American right-wing “influencers,” chiefly Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and David Rubin.  The three have YouTube accounts with 2.1 million, 2.7 million, and 2.4 million followers, respectively.  The Tennessee company was founded by Liam Donovan and Lauren Chen to act as the “producer” of as many as 2,000 videos that have been distributed through YouTube and X-Twitter.  Pool and Johnson demanded to be paid $100,000 a week each as originators of the largely pro-Russia anti-Democratic Party “content” they produced. In addition, according to the indictment – which does not name them but refers to them only as “Commentor-1” and “Commentor-2.”  The two were paid $100,000 signing bonuses at the beginning of the contract, which according to the DOJ indictment, originated in Moscow.

If today’s indictment sounds like a round-about way to get at Russian efforts to influence the presidential election, it is.  Tim Pool, one of the YouTube “creators” being paid Russian money through Tenet Media, interviewed Donald Trump on his YouTube channel in May when Trump went on a mini-campaign of “influencer” stroking. 

This afternoon, the DOJ filed a second indictment, this one of Dimitri K. Simes, an adviser to Donald J. Trump’s first presidential campaign, and his wife, Anastasia Simes, both of whom currently reside in Moscow.  Simes was charged with violating sanctions against a Russian media entity, Channel One, for whom he hosts a five-day a week television talk show.  His wife was charged with money laundering involved with being a straw-purchaser of antiques and art for a prominent Russian oligarch, Aleksandr Y. Udodov, which she kept at a home the Simes maintain in Northern Virginia.

Dimitri Simes emigrated from Russia to the U.S. in 1973 and became a prominent “Russia expert” in the world of Washington D.C. think tanks, at one point running a think tank, Center for the National Interest, that Richard Nixon set up after leaving office.  During the 2016 presidential campaign, Simes introduced Donald Trump at the only foreign policy speech he gave during the campaign at a gathering of international affairs experts in Washington, D.C.  Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, who along with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, was the first foreign visitor to the Oval Office after Trump took office.  On that day, Trump bragged to others about sharing top-secret intelligence about Israel and Iran with the two Russians.

The emigration of Simes from Russia to the U.S. is classic placement of a Russian intelligence agent undercover in a foreign country.

The DOJ indictment spells out the complex journey the $10 million of Russian money took on its way to the Tennessee company that pays Pool and Johnson.  The money went from RT, the Russian television network, through a Canadian front-company to a Czech shell company to an entirely fictional “investor,” Eduard Grigoriann. From there, the money went by wire transfer to three Turkish shell companies, three additional shells in the United Arab Emirates, and one phony company in Mauritius, an island nation in the Indian Ocean about 1,000 miles off the coast of East Africa.  From there, the money made its way to a bank in New York controlled by Tenet Media founders Laren Chen and Liam Donovan.  The Washington Post reported that Chen is “affiliated with” the right-wing Republican “youth” group, Turning Point U.S.A, run by Trump’s pal, Charlie Kirk, at whose recent Washington D.C. conference Trump was the keynote speaker. She is a former contributor to the Russian media company RT.  According to CNN, “A Twitter account for Donovan identifies him as the president of Tenet Media and his Instagram account describes Donovan as Chen’s husband.”  The names of both Chen and Donovan appear on Tenet Media business records on file in Tennessee.

A press release from the DOJ accompanying the indictment put it this way about Tenet Media, called “U.S. Company-1”: “U.S. Company-1 never disclosed to its viewers that it was funded and directed by RT. Nor did U.S. Company-1 or its two founders register with the Attorney General as an agent of a foreign principal.”  For those keeping score, the “founders” in the DOJ press release would be Chen and Donovan.

I don’t know about you, but if a great big shoe was about to drop, when it dropped it would sound like the words in the last sentence of the DOJ press release.

The DOJ indictment of the two Russian nationals describes an intelligence influence operation, and it’s a classic one. In the first instance, Russian intelligence sought out several “useful idiots,” as they are referred to by intelligence professionals.  They didn’t have to look very hard.  The right-wing mediasphere is overrun with ambitious jerks sitting in their basements or bedrooms looking into the eye of an internet camera spewing garbage about subjects near and dear to Russian hearts such as the legitimacy of Russia’s war against Ukraine and how the U.S. should not be involved in supporting Ukraine with money and military hardware. 

These are common talking points on the Right.  Republican Vice-Presidential nominee JD Vance has been spewing pro-Russian anti-Ukraine garbage in speeches and on X-Twitter for years.

The rest of the right-wing slurry of lies and gutter trash trafficked in by Pool and Johnson and their brethren involved the evils of the Democratic Party, Republican talking points about Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz, lies about rising crime rates that in reality are falling, and…well, you fill in the blanks.

Pool and Johnson, contacted by the New York Times, described themselves as “victims” of the Russian scheme and claimed they knew nothing about their company, Tenet Media, being funded wholly and completely by the Russian government.  There are hints, however, that this line of bullshit has a few holes in it.  The indictment describes an exchange on the instant-messaging app Discord between Tenet Media “Founder-1” and “Persona-1,” believed to be one of the RT employed Russians posing as the fictional Grigoriann.  The exchange of messages involved an invoice submitted by Tenet Media for payment.  When “Founder-2” didn’t receive an immediate answer, he did an internet search for “time in Moscow,” later communicating with a Tenet partner saying, “Hey @[Persona-1], just wanted to follow up and see if your finance department has any update on the transfers.”  Founders 1 and 2 are Chen and Donovan.

These would presumably be the wire transfers that flew around the world previously described above.

In another classic exchange laid out in the indictment, one of the “founders” sent a message to one of the “commenters” containing tape of Tucker Carlson in a Moscow supermarket stupidly exclaiming over how much better and cheaper Russian produce and meat are than equivalent American products. The message said, “they want you to post this.”  The YouTube commenter, who appears to have recognized Russian propaganda when he saw it, responded, “but it feels like overt shilling.”  The Tenet Media founder wrote back that his partner “thinks we should put it out there.”  The YouTube commenter, finally acquiesced: “Alright, I’ll put it out tomorrow.”

Here is where we enter the land of the Big Squiggle, currently being engaged in by YouTube commentators Pool and Johnson, as well as Tenet Media founders Chen and Donovan.  Chen and Donovan could not be reached by either CNN or the New York Times for comment.  But Pool and Johnson are squawking like stuck ducks, taking the position that they are “victims” of this dastardly Russian scheme to fool them into thinking they were working for a legitimate “investor” called “Eduard Grigoriann” whom the DOJ identifies as an entirely fictional creation of the two Russians in the indictment.  There is another word for “victim” in the world of intelligence:  It is “useful idiot.”

It’s a very short distance between useful idiot and intentional idiot.  My friend Malcolm Nance, in his absolutely essential Substack column, “Special Intelligence,” where he covers the world of covert intelligence and terrorism, identifies the status of useful idiots as “Unwitting Assets,” and describes this category of fools as “people who financially, or personally benefit from the association with a foreign agent, but really do not know the origin of those benefits.”

But when people running a company incorporated in Tennessee are googling “time in Moscow” trying to figure out why their chats on Discord aren’t being answered immediately by their partners they refer to as “the Russians,” it looks more and more like the people in the indictment who are called “Founders” and “Commentators” 1 and 2 respectively may find themselves in the even more tenuous category of what Malcolm Nance calls a “Witting Asset…an individual, who is well aware that the money comes from a hostile government and accept it for their own benefit.”

Donald Trump’s media empire, Truth Social, is losing tens of millions of dollars and its stock has been dropping precipitously even though its founder is a candidate for President of the United States, which would seem to be a benefit to the company rather than a drag on its earnings.

But little Tenet Media down in Tennessee is healthy and profitable.  According to the indictment, $8.7 million was transferred to the accounts of right-wing commentators Pool and Johnson and Rubin.  The remaining $1.3 million was presumably used to pay Chen and Donovan as founders and managers.

And whoop-dee-doo!  They didn’t have to pay a cent to Eduard Grigoriann because he exists only as a figment of the imagination of the Russian handlers in Moscow who have been running Tenet Media all along.