The Departments of Justice, State and Treasury announced Wednesday a joint effort to target with sanctions and criminal charges what the Biden administration says are Russian government-sponsored attempts to manipulate U.S. public opinion ahead of the November election.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced charges against two employees of the Russian-backed media network RT accused of conspiring to commit money laundering and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act in an indictment unsealed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York.
"The American people are entitled to know when a foreign power is attempting to exploit our country's free exchange of ideas in order to send around its own propaganda," Garland said.
While the indictment redacted the names of political parties and candidates, it was clear through the documents that the Russians sought to bolster Republican former President Donald Trump and to harm Democratic efforts — whose nominee likely would have been Joe Biden at the time.
Garland accused Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva of implementing a nearly $10 million scheme to hire a Tennessee-based company to publish and disseminate pro-Russian content. That company then contracted with U.S.-based social media influencers to share content on their platforms. The information was "often consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine," the attorney general said.
Kalashnikov identified himself as RT's "Deputy Chief of the Digital Media Projects Department," and Afanasyeva has identified herself on social media as a "producer at RT, dealing with overseas affairs and news," the indictment said.
"The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers as ties to RT and the Russian government. Instead, the defendants and the company claimed that the company was sponsored by a private investor, but that private investor was a fictitious persona," Garland said.
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The company published "hundreds of videos" that contained "commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics related to domestic and foreign policy."
At the White House briefing, when asked if high-level Russian officials were clued into RT’s activity, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that the U.S. believes Russian President Vladimir Putin was aware.
“We believe Mr. Putin is weighing in on these actions,” Kirby said.
'We have no tolerance'
The attorney general said that the investigation remains ongoing and that the DOJ is seizing 32 internet domains that the Russian government and Russian actors have used to influence the U.S. election.
The attorney general made clear that Iran has also been responsible for activities seeking to compromise former President Donald Trump’s campaign in an effort to interfere with the election outcome.
“The Justice Department’s message is clear: We have no tolerance for attempts by authoritarian regimes to exploit our democratic system of government. We will be relentlessly aggressive in countering and disrupting attempts by Russia, Iran, as well as China or any other foreign malign actor, interfere in elections and undermine our members."
Before Garland's announcement, the Treasury Department announced that its Office of Foreign Assets Control had designated 10 people and two entities as part of a "coordinated U.S. government response to Moscow’s malign influence efforts targeting the 2024 U.S. presidential election."
The Treasury Department weighed in on the influence campaign, saying in its announcement of sanctions that 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."
Treasury also sanctioned a popular pro-Russian hacktivist group, RaHDIt, and said it was actually headed by current and former Russian intelligence officers. It’s run by Aleksey Alekseyevich Garashchenko, who at the time of the group’s founding was an active member of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB, and still maintains direct contact with Kremlin intelligence agencies, Treasury said.
RaHDIt is one of dozens of pro-Russia hacktivist groups that has appeared since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Like most of those groups, it brags about its operations on Telegram, where its channel has more than 60,000 followers. Many of its posts are devoted to revealing photographs, names and other biographical information about people it alleges work for Ukraine.
Alex Leslie, a threat intelligence analyst at the cybersecurity company Recorded Future, told NBC News that RaHDIt, unlike some other pro-Russia hacker groups, particularly focuses on hack-and-leak operations and frequently gets coverage in Russian-language media.
A history of Russian efforts
Under the new actions, all property and interests in property of the designated people that are in the U.S. or in the possession or control of Americans are blocked and must be reported to the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the Treasury Department said.
The State Department also announced three related actions, including, a new visa restriction policy imposed on individuals the administration said were acting on behalf of Kremlin-supported media organizations who use those organizations as cover for covert activities. A senior State Department official said it's also designating six RT affiliates that operate in the U.S. as "foreign missions" as well as offering a reward of up to $10 million for information regarding potential foreign efforts to interfere in U.S. elections.
U.S. intelligence agencies have previously assessed that Russia wants to interfere in the 2024 election and flagged RT as a source of Russian propaganda and disinformation and required it to register as a foreign agent.
RT's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan “has close ties to top Russian Government officials” and has stated publicly that “the Russian Government sets rating and viewership requirements for RT and, 'since RT receives budget from the state, it must complete tasks given by the state,'" according to an ODNI report released publicly in 2017 following Russia’s efforts in the 2016 election.
The office of the Director of National Intelligence specifically said in July that Russia is seeking to exert influence over the U.S. election to undermine support for the Democratic presidential nominee and American public support for arming Ukraine.
CNN was first to report the expected sanctions.
Russia was found to have interfered in the 2016 presidential election by multiple U.S. investigations, including by the team led by then-special counsel Robert Mueller. The probes determined that the efforts were intended to help Donald Trump win the election over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
In February, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the Biden administration had "concerns" about possible Russian interference in the 2024 election cycle.
“This is not about politics,” Sullivan said. “This is about national security. It is about a foreign country, a foreign adversary, seeking to manipulate the politics and democracy of the United States of America.”
NBC News reported that same month that U.S. officials and cyber experts said that Russia was already disseminating disinformation using bots and fake online accounts to hurt President Joe Biden, while he was running for re-election, and other Democratic candidates.
Russian outlets also helped spread misinformation about the 2020 election, but their impact was dwarfed by former President Trump’s efforts to undermine the 2020 election himself.
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