'Russia, Russia, Russia' is not a hoax

Years before former President Donald Trump seized upon the Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen, he insistently promoted another supersized falsehood -- namely that charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election were "a hoax." His minions in the media, from Fox News down to the lowliest web trolls, have incessantly parroted that lie despite the volumes of evidence uncovered by the Senate Intelligence Committee's bipartisan investigation and the special counsel probe by Robert Mueller.

But now a fresh indictment released by the Justice Department on Sept. 4 shows that the Kremlin conspiracy to rig U.S. elections in favor of the Republican Party is not a liberal myth but a live threat -- and that several of the most prominent MAGA media voices denouncing the "hoax" were themselves on the Russian payroll, taking big money. The charges lodged against Russia Today employees Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva include money laundering, conspiracy and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The indictment describes in detail, with supporting documents translated from Russian, how Kremlin consultants and employees of RT, the state media outlet, directed at least $10 million in funding to a shadowy Tennessee firm known as Tenet Media.

Working under direct control of the Russians were Lauren Chen, a Canadian far-right YouTube "influencer" who also worked for Glenn Beck's BlazeTV, and her husband Liam Donovan. Chen and Donovan launched Tenet and hired major right-wing personalities such as Tim Pool, host of "Timcast," Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, a former Buzzfeed reporter fired for plagiarism, and Lauren Southern, a white nationalist who is also from Canada.

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The idea was to draw their millions of online followers into an audience for streaming Tenet videos -- and the company paid them each hundreds of thousands of dollars. One of them, identified in the indictment as "Commentator-1" and most likely either Johnson or Pool, received $400,000 per month for producing four videos.

Of far more significance than the gamy individuals who joined up with Tenet was the company's deeper purpose, as outlined by the Russians in a document reproduced as part of the indictment. Their project's top "objectives" as the election year approached were to target voters in swing states, Hispanic and Jewish voters, and "residents of conservative states" who usually vote Republican, and to move them toward pro-Russian viewpoints about the war in Ukraine, while undermining confidence in President Joe Biden and promoting discontent over the economy and culture, especially among white Americans.

Its stated "goal" was to "secure victory of U.S. Political Party A candidate" -- which meant to elect Trump as president.

In short, federal investigators caught "Russia, Russia, Russia" -- as a mocking Trump likes to say -- interfering yet again to prop up his campaign. And just as word of the indictment broke, the Republican presidential nominee reiterated his promise to sell out Ukraine for a "peace" plan as soon as he wins election, even before he enters the White House. What Russia spent on Tenet would be pocket change compared with that return on investment.

Although the indictment depicts Rubin and Pool as ignorant of their sponsorship by the Russian government, and presumably duped by the cover story of a "Belgian investor" who didn't actually exist, none of them seemed too curious about who was financing this mysterious windfall. They apparently never imagined that spouting Russian propaganda against Ukraine, as all of them consistently did, might have attracted Kremlin sponsorship. Chen and Donovan evidently knew the venture was subsidized by Russian funds, routed through Mideast banks.

Indeed, Rubin, Johnson and Pool immediately declared they are innocent "victims" of the Russian scheme, defrauded into serving as Kremlin stooges. But they have also suggested, along with a chorus of right-wing defenders on Fox and elsewhere, that the indictment is actually a conspiracy by the Justice Department to censor "conservatives" and frighten gullible voters with "dirty tricks."

So which is it? The ugly truth is that the American Right, deeply compromised by the Kremlin connections of its leader Trump, doesn't care that he or its own media networks have been penetrated by a hostile foreign power. They are happy to take Russian money, or at least are untroubled when others grab those rubles -- just as "conservatives" were once content to secretly accept illicit millions from the Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon or, for that matter, from agents of the German government during the years before World War II.

There are lots of terms to define these acts and attitudes -- some legalistic, others defamatory. But none of those descriptions would include "patriotic."

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