(Ken Silva, Headline USA) It’s election season, so you know what that means.
The Biden Justice Department held a press conference Wednesday about Russian influence in the upcoming U.S. presidential election, unsealing criminal charges against two employees of a Russian state-run media company and seizing internet domains used by the Kremlin to purportedly spread disinformation.
The measures represented a U.S. government effort were immediately recognized by conservatives as a repeat of the same tired “Justice Democrat” talking points that have been repeated since 2016. That’s despite fact that Special Counsel John Durham found last year that the FBI for launched a baseless and politically charged probe into possible links between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign—despite having no evidence of any such links.
One criminal case announced Wednesday accuses two employees of RT, a Russian-state funded media organization that was forced by the Justice Department to register as a foreign agent, of covertly funding a Tennessee-based content creation company to publish nearly 2,000 videos containing Russian propaganda. The defendants, who remain at large, used fake identities and the company was unaware it was being used by Russia, the DOJ claimed.
Seriously is this a joke? pic.twitter.com/0cXlobIxqN
— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) September 4, 2024
“Russian state broadcaster RT and its employees, including the charged defendants, co-opted online commentators by funneling them nearly $10 million to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Wednesday in a press release.
“The Russian state broadcaster RT orchestrated a massive scheme to influence the American public by secretly planting and financing a content creation company on U.S. soil,” added U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York.
“The instruments of the scheme were RT employees Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who managed the operation from Moscow using fake personas and shell companies, and the victims of the scheme were the American people, who received Russian messaging without knowing it,” he said.
In the other action, officials announced the seizure of 32 internet domains that were used by the Kremlin to spread Russian propaganda and weaken global support for Ukraine.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the actions relate to Russia’s use of state media to enlist unwitting American influencers to “spread propaganda and disinformation.”
RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan reportedly responded to the DOJ’s charges by telling her colleagues on Telegram: “great job, team!”
“If they kick us out completely, how will they conduct the next elections?” she wrote in a follow-up post on Telegram, according to RT.com. “They don’t have any other strategies except to scaremonger about the almighty RT.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
