And Laurenya Yuzhnyy have allegedly been working for the Russians:
The U.S. Justice Department revealed a Russian influence campaign and charged two RT employees with two counts of conspiracy in an unsealed indictment on Wednesday. According to the indictment, two employees of the Kremlin-run media company RT spent $10 million on right-wing media personalities and poisoning the well of American discourse.
The two Russians, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva funneled money into a Tennessee-based media company to get the job done. The indictment doesn’t name the company or the media personalities it hired, but it’s not hard to use clues in the court documents to figure out everyone involved. The unsealed indictment quotes the company’s description of itself on its own website as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.”
There’s only one company based in Tennessee with that phrase on its website: TENET Media. TENET Media is an outlet that publishes on YouTube and other social media. It has paid for videos from people like Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, David Rubin, Matt Christiansen, and Lauren Southern.
What kind of content did Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva get for their $10 million? “As alleged in today’s indictment, Russian state broadcaster RT and its employees, including the charged defendants, co-opted online commentators by funneling them nearly $10 million to pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.
