A multi-pronged Russian disinformation campaign sought to sway U.S. voters ahead of November’s presidential election, Justice Department officials said Wednesday, unveiling a slew of efforts to break up the campaign, including criminal charges, sanctions, and the seizure of several internet domains.
The Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, two Russian state media employees, alleging that they violated the Foreign Agency Registration Act and used some $10 million wired by Russian state-run RT news agency to covertly finance and control an unnamed Tennessee-based online content creation firm that pushed divisive political content to Americans at home.
The FBI under court authority also seized 32 internet sites that were allegedly controlled by Russian spin-doctor companies that all answered to the Russian Presidential Administration and pushed influence materials, including content related to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. FBI Director Christopher Wray said the websites, taken down around noon Wednesday, had been operating for at least two years.
One of the firms, Social Design Agency, was previously sanctioned by the Treasury Department for deploying a network of some 60 fake news websites that impersonated legitimate European news outlets.
On Wednesday, the Treasury Department sanctioned 10 other people allegedly involved in the efforts.
“Beginning in early 2024, executives at RT…began an even more nefarious effort to covertly recruit unwitting American influencers in support of their malign influence campaign,” officials said. “RT used a front company to disguise its own involvement or the involvement of the Russian government in content meant to influence U.S. audiences.”
Among them was Margarita Simonovna Simonyan, RT’s editor in chief, who was a “central figure” in the influence operations, Treasury said. The State Department also unveiled a visa restriction policy for any entities owned by or affiliated with RT, including RT parent company Rossiya Segodnya.
Russia’s foreign ministry and the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C., did not immediately return requests for comment. RT deputy editor in chief Anna Belkina did not respond to a request for comment.
The Tennessee-based firm aimed to boost Russia’s national interests and amplifying domestic division in the U.S., said Attorney General Merrick Garland. It published some 2,000 English-language videos online and across major social media platforms, gaining some 16 million views on YouTube.
In March, after an Islamic State terrorist attack killed some 60 people at a Moscow concert hall, Afanasyeva ordered the Tennessee entity to push a sham narrative that Ukraine was involved, said the Justice Department.
“I think we can focus on the Ukraine/U.S. angle,” she typed in a Discord company chat, whose contents were obtained by the U.S. and detailed in the indictment. The “mainstream media spread fake news that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack yet ISIS itself never made such statements. All terrorists are now detained while they were heading to the border with Ukraine which makes it even more suspicious why they would want to go to Ukraine to hide.”
Garland said in a statement: “Our actions today make clear that the Justice Department will be aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by the Russian government, or any other malign actor, to interfere in our elections and undermine our democracy.”
The FBI in July said it dismantled two websites and some 1,000 accounts on the X social media platform that were used by RT-affiliated Kremlin operatives to run an AI-powered campaign that sought to spread disinformation in the U.S. and abroad.
Officials, researchers, and academics have cited election security as a preeminent cybersecurity concern in 2024, where a record number of people around the world have cast their votes in the age of social media and new consumer-facing AI tools.
The U.S. intelligence community in July assessed that Russia has not changed its political interests from previous elections, where its efforts largely benefitted the Donald Trump campaigns. Russia’s war in Ukraine has become a flash point among some Republican lawmakers who have used the Biden administration’s hefty financial support for Ukrainian armaments as leverage to bash what they call neglectful White House border policies.
Ukrainian ties to the Trump administration were muddled in the lead-up to the first impeachment of the former president after he withheld congressionally authorized military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to coerce its leaders into handing over politically damaging information about President Joe Biden in the months prior to the 2020 election.
The Trump presidency in 2017 became the center of election security controversy when the Justice Department launched an investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. Special Counsel Robert Mueller later determined Trump and his allies had encouraged the hack but that there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against the former president.
Election interference is back on the table again after the intelligence community confirmed last month that Iranian hackers breached Trump’s campaign.
China has also been designated as a possible election threat by U.S. spy agencies, though a senior intelligence official said it may not be seeking to influence this coming presidential election directly because both Democratic and Republican party leaders run on platforms critical of Beijing.
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