US counters Russian influence before 2024 presidential election, charges RT network employees

WASHINGTON - The United States on Sept 4 announced a broad effort to push back against Russian influence campaigns in the 2024 presidential election, as it tries to curb the Kremlin’s use of state-run media and fake news sites to sway American voters.

The actions include sanctions, indictments and seizing of web domains that US officials say the Kremlin uses to spread propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine, which

Russia invaded more than two years ago.

Attorney-General Merrick Garland detailed the actions taken by the Justice Department. They include the indictment of two Russian employees of RT, the state-owned broadcaster, who used a company in Tennessee to spread content, and the takedown of a Russian malign influence campaign known as Doppelganger.

“The American people are entitled to know when a foreign power engages in political activities or seeks to influence public discourse,” Mr Garland said.

The Treasury Department imposed sanctions on ANO Dialog, a Russian non-profit organisation that helps run the Doppelganger network, as well as the editor-in-chief of RT, Ms Margarita Simonyan, and her deputies.

The State Department has offered a US$10 million (S$13 million) reward for information pertaining to foreign interference in a US election. The department specifically said it was seeking information on a group known as Russian Angry Hackers Did It, or RaHDit.

The State Department also said it would designate five Russian state-funded news outlets, including RT, Ruptly and Sputnik, as foreign government missions and restrict the issuance of visas to people working for Kremlin-supported media institutions.

US officials have stepped up their warnings about Russian election influence efforts. US spy agencies have assessed that the Kremlin favours former president Donald Trump over Vice-President Kamala Harris in the November contest, seeing him as more sceptical of US support for Ukraine.

The US was caught flat-footed in 2016 as its spy agencies learnt about Russian efforts to influence the vote on behalf of Trump and were late in warning the public. In subsequent elections, US intelligence officials more aggressively called out Russian, Chinese and Iranian efforts to influence US elections.

Officials say that fighting election interference has been more difficult in 2024. Some Americans, particularly Trump’s supporters, see accusations that Russia is spreading disinformation as efforts to undermine their views.

Mr Garland said the charges announced on Sept 4 were not the end of the case: “The investigation is ongoing.”

The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have also been investigating a handful of Americans accused of knowingly spreading false Kremlin narratives. But officials have emphasised that they are not aiming to curb free speech. Americans who merely repeat or spread stories they see on Russian state media are not being investigated as part of the efforts, officials said.

The officials say that RT has spread disinformation through bots and other means, but that they are looking more closely at how the Kremlin and its spy agencies influence the election.

As news of the indictments broke, RT posted a sarcastic response on its website from Ms Anna Belkina, its deputy editor-in-chief. “There are three certainties in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the American elections,” the response read in part.

The indictments on Sept 4 charged two Russian employees of RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They are accused of spending US$10 million to secretly pay the unnamed Tennessee company to spread nearly 2,000 English-language videos on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X.

Disinformation experts have long struggled to measure the effectiveness of Russian influence campaigns, but Justice Department officials said the videos, most of which support the goals of the Russian government, have gained 16 million views on YouTube.

Mr Garland said the videos were “often consistent with Russia’s interest in amplifying US domestic divisions in order to weaken US opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine”. The Tennessee company, he said, never disclosed its ties to the Russian government.

After a terrorist attack on a concert venue in Moscow in March, Afanasyeva directed the company to focus on the false narrative that Ukraine was responsible.

Justice Department officials declined to identify the firm, but the one in the indictment uses the same slogan as Tenet Media, a company registered in Tennessee that publishes videos and other content broadly supportive of Trump. The company – and its most prominent commentators – did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The indictment does not directly accuse the company of wrongdoing but said it had ties to RT and that its founders referred to their sponsor as “the Russians”.

Critics of the US moves said the indictments raised free speech issues and the possibility that the Biden administration was trying to censor pro-Russian commentary.

Professor Paul M. Barrett, deputy director of the Stern Centre for Business and Human Rights at New York University, said the government had to tread carefully to distinguish between foreign election interference and First Amendment protections of free speech.

The US has already taken action against Russian organisations it believes are trying to influence US politics. In March, the Treasury Department imposed sanctions on a Russian group that has aided efforts to create fake news sites that spread misinformation, and in July it seized two internet domains that it also linked to RT and the Federal Security Service, a successor of the Soviet KGB.

The Justice Department action builds on that, saying it was seizing 32 more domains that were used to covertly spread Russian propaganda. According to the government affidavit, the Doppelganger campaign is run by Mr Sergei Kiriyenko, a former prime minister who is now Russian President Vladimir Putin’s first deputy chief of staff.

Mr Christopher Wray, the FBI director, said the fake news sites had been seized by the government.

“When we learn that adversaries overseas are trying to hide who they are and where their propaganda is coming from, as part of campaigns to deliberately sow discord, we’re going to continue to do everything we can to expose their hidden hand and disrupt their efforts,” he said.

Mr Garland said a Russian internal planning document stated that “the aim of the campaign is securing Russia’s preferred outcome in the election”.

The document, produced for the Social Design Agency, outlined plans to influence US voters without identifying that the content was coming from the Russian government.

It lays out a plan to target voters in swing states (as determined by The New York Times’ polling efforts), as well as voters in conservative states such as Alabama, Texas and Kansas. The document says US citizens of Hispanic descent, Jews and video gamers would also be targeted.

The goal, according to the document and the indictments, was to push Americans to support the idea that the US should focus on “addressing its domestic issues instead of wasting money in Ukraine”.

The Justice Department blocks out the names of the candidates the Russians support, but the document says that “it makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort” into ensuring that the Republican Party’s view, and in particular the opinions of Trump’s supporters, “wins over US public opinion”. NYTIMES