The Biden administration’s announcement this week that the Justice Department is taking action against alleged Kremlin-run websites and Russian state media employees as part of an effort to crack down on Russian “misinformation” ahead of the election should raise red flags — huge, obvious red flags.
The biggest red flag is the timing of the indictment and accompanying announcement, just as mail-in ballots in some states are sent out and two weeks before in-person voting begins in some states. The only possible reason for the DOJ to announce this now, and to frame it as a Russian election meddling scheme designed to boost former President Donald Trump, is to paint Trump and his supporters as agents of a hostile foreign power, or at the very least to imply that Trump’s support is fake, paid for by Moscow.
In other words, the timing of the indictment itself represents an egregious form of election meddling by our own Justice Department, whose longstanding policy is not to file indictments that could potentially influence an election. Yet that’s the entire purpose of the indictment announced this week.
We’ve seen this playbook before from Democrats. Hand-waving about “Russian disinformation” and “election interference” by the DOJ and the U.S. intelligence community is of course a well-worn election interference tactic — and arguably a far more potent than anything that’s ever come from Moscow.
First it was the outlandish claim in 2016 that Donald Trump was actually a secret Russian agent and that he colluded with Moscow to win the White House. An entire FBI investigation was based on the discredited and patently ridiculous Steele dossier. The initial election meddling allegation was based on nothing more than $100,000 or so in Facebook ads purchased by Russian entities with the aim of sowing division among the American electorate. And from that thin reed, an entire narrative emerged that Russia not only meddled in our election but that Trump colluded with Moscow in the effort.
The entire U.S. intelligence community was mobilized first against Trump’s campaign and then against his administration in what amounted to an Executive Branch rebellion against the duly elected president of the United States. For years, outlandish claims of Trump-Russia collusion hobbled the Trump White House before eventually fizzling out with the denouement of the Mueller investigation, which turned up zero evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
But Democrats and the deep state didn’t give up. Desperate to pry Trump out of office in 2020, the FBI and the intelligence community interfered in our elections yet again. First, they prepped social media companies like Facebook and Twitter that any negative stories about Hunter Biden in the runup to the election should be considered Russian disinformation or obtained via illegal hacking. When the New York Post broke the news of Hunter Biden laptop in October 2020, the big social media companies did as they had been told and throttled the story.
Not only that, but dozens of “former” intelligence officials (coordinated and cajoled by none other than the current secretary of state, Anthony Blinken) issued an open letter claiming the Hunter Biden story had “all the hallmarks” of a Kremlin disinformation operation — even though the CIA and FBI knew at the time, and had known for over a year, that the laptop and its contents were authentic.
Now they’re back with a warmed-over version of the same tired tactic. Call it the Russia collusion hoax 3.0. According to the DOJ indictment, the so-called “malign influence operation” involved two Russian nationals who worked for RT, formerly known as Russia Today, a state-run media outlet. These RT employees allegedly ran a series of “covert projects” that included funneling $10 million to a Tennessee-based company called Tenet Media, which was founded in 2022 by founded by Liam Donovan and his wife, Lauren Chen.
Chen is a right-wing Turning Points USA provocateur of sorts who made videos for The Blaze (which has since cut ties with her) and proffered what were meant to be edgy conservative takes on social media. The scheme Chen and Donovan allegedly ran was to fund other right-wing(ish) commentators like Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson without disclosing that their company was “funded and directed” by RT. Rubin, Pool, and Johnson all released statements Wednesday insisting they were deceived by Tenet and are victims of this Russia propaganda plot.
In the end, it appears that the scheme wasn’t all that successful. According to the indictment, the RT employees running the project grew frustrated that the social media influencers they had paid through Tenet weren’t sharing Tenet’s videos or promoting the company enough. According to Johnson, the contract his lawyers negotiated last year with Tenet was “a standard, arms-length deal, which was later terminated.”
But the details of the indictment aren’t the big takeaway from this story, even if the allegations prove true. The big takeaway is the timing of all this. Biden’s DOJ is once again promoting a false narrative of Russian election meddling designed to benefit Trump, and doing so in the runup to the November election. They want to portray Trump support online as fake, funded and directed by foreign enemies in Moscow, and thereby paint Trump as a Putin lackey — yet again.
Sorry, but we’ve seen this movie before. Yes, Moscow might have hatched a half-baked scheme to fund right-wing social media influencers without their knowledge, just as Moscow spent $100,000 on Facebook ads in 2016 to sow division. Foreign powers trying to meddle in our elections is concerning, but it’s also not earth-shattering. A lot of nations do it. None of it has ever amounted to much, and compared to what our own federal agencies have done, it doesn’t even rate.
What’s far more concerning is the way our own Justice Department and federal intelligence agencies are meddling in the election. The plain truth is that by announcing this indictment now, inserting it into the news cycle, and knowing the corporate media will do its part to portray online Trump support as inauthentic and funded by Russia, Biden’s DOJ is meddling in the election in a far more serious way than Tenet or RT or anyone in Moscow could ever hope to do.
