DOJ Russia Indictment Exists To Associate Good Media With Putin

On Sept. 4, the Department of Justice indicted Russian nationals Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva for their covert funding of domestic media outlet Tenet Media. The media outlet deployed $10 million of Russian money, according to the indictment, which was reportedly used by right-leaning talent to create content for an American audience. The talent included Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin, among others, who all appear to have been unaware of the funding source. 

The indictment is odd for several reasons. First, prosecutors would have known early in their investigation that the defendants would never set foot in an American courtroom, with extradition from Russia being impossible. This raises the question: Why investigate and prosecute a case that will never be tried? Second, the DOJ announced the indictment with an unusual amount of fanfare, going so far as to coordinate the announcement with simultaneous press releases from the Treasury Department and State Department. In my career as a federal prosecutor, I never once saw that happen. That’s not to say it never happened, but it’s rare. 

Predictably, the usual cohort of regime propaganda outlets breathlessly hailed the indictment, never failing to capitalize on an opportunity to paint their opponents as Russian agents, regardless of the truth of such claims. The New York Times (“Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative Media”) and MSNBC (“MAGA Influencers Are Scrambling After the DOJ’s Russia Indictment”) are just two examples. Other regime mandarins acted accordingly. YouTube, for example, removed hundreds of Tenet Media videos.

The widespread and immediate media coverage of a case that was dead on arrival (from a prosecution perspective) strongly suggests that smearing right-wing news sources was the DOJ’s goal. This was accomplished by inundating the country with the regime-friendly narrative that Johnson, Rubin, and Pool were associated with Russian intelligence. They’re not, and the DOJ knows it. 

Despite this, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco claimed that RT “co-opted online commentators by funneling them nearly $10 million to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences.” In the same press release, Attorney General Merrick Garland claimed that Tenet Media was “creat[ing] and distribut[ing] content … with hidden Russian government messaging.” One wonders how Garland could discern the “hidden” nature of the messaging while the American public could not.

Both of these statements are, at best, only partly true. The indictment contains no allegation that Tenet Media pumped pro-Russia disinformation to U.S. audiences. The word “disinformation” appears only twice, both times in the section entitled “background on Russian influence operations,” which have no bearing on the present matter. Further, there is no allegation that Tenet Media’s content was false, a prerequisite for “disinformation,” according to the regime’s definition. 

Indeed, the only substantive crime charged was a failure to file registration paperwork under a law that makes no distinction between true and false information (money laundering was also charged but only “in furtherance of” the failure to register; in other words, if there were no failure to register there would have been no money laundering).

These facts reveal that the DOJ didn’t bring the indictment to convict Kalashnikov or Afanasyeva (they’ll never set foot in the United States) nor to impede disinformation (there wasn’t any). Despite this, the DOJ announced the prosecutions to a global media frenzy in press releases choreographed with other major cabinet-level agencies that were amplified by the usual legacy media institutions. The association between conservative commentators and Russian intelligence was complete. 

This “guilt by association” smear tactic is an ancient form of propaganda, one which Democrats have deployed with great success in recent decades. What’s relatively new is the DOJ’s use of the criminal justice system to seed an association in the minds of normal Americans: Russia is bad, right-wing commentators are connected with Russia, therefore right-wing messages are “bad.” Put another way, the coordinated press releases were the purpose of the indictment. The criminal justice system was merely the vehicle, albeit one that imbued those press releases with more authority than they would otherwise possess. 

This mental association trick is the left’s go-to tactic when it comes to information warfare. It consists of smearing political opponents by inducing a false mental association with Adolf Hitler, racism, or Vladimir Putin. The regime’s incessant lies from 2016 through the present are sufficient proof: such as Russiagate, Crossfire Hurricane, the Mueller report, Hamilton 68, and the “51 former intelligence officials” scandal in which dozens of former intelligence community personnel lied to Americans that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation — a fact that our three-letter agencies knew to be false at the time. And it’s election season, so all that Russia, Russia, Russia nonsense is being rehashed again by has-beens who haven’t updated their world model since the Berlin wall fell. 

‘Disinformation’ DOJ Style

Though the Kalashnikov indictment doesn’t allege that any Tenet Media content was false, recall that Deputy Attorney General Monaco called it “disinformation” and “propaganda” while Garland called it “hidden Russian government messaging.” Plainly, DOJ wants you to believe that conservative commentators were Russian dupes but doesn’t want you to inquire whether Tenet Media’s content was true. 

Here’s where it gets interesting. On the same day DOJ unsealed the Kalashnikov indictment, it also unsealed a warrant to seize various websites designed as part of a Russian intelligence operation called Doppelganger. According to DOJ’s affidavit of probable cause, Russian state-sponsored entities created spoofs of well-known media sources, including websites for The Washington Post, Fox News, Der Spiegel, and other foreign and domestic outlets. They then planted stories on those spoofed website that were designed, according to the affidavit, to advance Russian interests. 

Though not part of the Kalashnikov indictment, the Doppelganger affidavit provides insight into what DOJ considers to be “disinformation.” Of its 277 pages, nearly 190 are documents obtained by the FBI. These documents were created by Russian intelligence entities for Russian intelligence consumption. They describe a multifaceted influence operation by which Russian intelligence would prepare stories for American and European audiences. 

If you assumed that Russia’s intelligence services prepared false stories to advance their interests at our expense you’d be mistaken. Instead, Russian intelligence specified that their goals included convincing Americans to focus on creating jobs, reducing crime, and reducing illegal immigration at home instead of spending money overseas. They realized that “[i]n order for this to be effective you need to use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information.” And they observe that the Democrat Party consists of “far-left globalists who advocate for perversion of traditional moral and religious values” as compared with Trump supporters, “whose priority is to preserve traditions of the American way of life.” No wonder DOJ doesn’t want you to hear about this. 

As for the news stories DOJ calls “disinformation,” here are a few headlines and subheadlines: “[the U.S.] national debt has already surpassed $33 trillion,” “Young Americans Face a Poverty-Stricken Old Age,” and “Migration Crisis Will Bury [Biden’s] Future with Ukraine.” Do these seem false to you?

When viewed together, the Kalashnikov indictment and Doppelganger affidavit reveal that DOJ’s definition of disinformation is something like: “true and reliable information that is unacceptable to prevailing left-wing orthodoxy.” Thus, while we do have massive problems with debt, illegal immigration, crime, and job creation for citizens, and while I have never heard a compelling and succinct explanation for why we should spend a dime in Ukraine, our government doesn’t want us to receive information that might validate these concerns.

Instead of addressing these concerns, the DOJ has weaponized the criminal justice system to censor views it doesn’t like. 

T.J. Harker is the general counsel of a Knoxville, Tennessee, company. He spent more than a decade as a federal and state prosecutor, where he investigated and tried national white-collar frauds and espionage matters. He writes at Amicus Republicae on Substack.