Federal officials accused Russia of using unsuspecting right-wing American influencers to spread Kremlin propaganda ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

On Wednesday, the Justice Department filed charges against two employees of Russian state media broadcaster RT, accusing them of secretly funding and directing the production of social media videos that garnered millions of views.

The RT employees, identified in the indictment as Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, are charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act. They are accused of funneling nearly $10 million to an unnamed Tennessee company that contracted with online influencers with large audiences.

“The company never disclosed its ties to RT and the Russian government to the influencers or their millions of followers,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday.

Details of the indictment are consistent with Nashville, Tennessee-based Tenet Media. For example, the channel’s website describes it as “a network of heterodox commentators focused on Western political and cultural issues.”

Tenet was founded in 2022 by Lauren Chen, a conservative Canadian YouTuber, and her husband Liam Donovan, whose X-profile describes him as president of Tenet Media. Chen hosts a show on Glenn Beck’s BlazeTV and is a staff writer for the right-wing activist group Turning Point USA. She wrote opinion pieces for RT in 2021 and 2022.

According to the indictment, the Tennessee company’s founders worked with Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva – who they knew were Russian – to recruit influencers to create videos posted on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X. The indictment states that the company’s nearly 2,000 YouTube videos have been viewed more than 16 million times, which is consistent with public statistics on Tenet Media’s YouTube channel.

Chen and Donovan did not respond to requests for comment.

The charges against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva come as U.S. intelligence officials say foreign efforts to influence the election outcome are growing. On Wednesday, the government seized 32 internet domains linked to another Russian influence operation. Iran was also recently accused of trying to hack both the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns.

What distinguished the RT operation from many other jamming attempts was the fact that it seemed to reach a real audience thanks to the well-known names.

“Buying authentic influencers is a far better use of funds than creating fake personas because they bring their own trusted audience and are actually, you know, real,” wrote Renée DiResta, the author of Invisible rulers: the people who turn lies into realityabout how online influencers spread propaganda and rumors in a post on Threads.

A fictitious financier and lucrative contracts

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many American cable operators removed RT’s U.S. channel, RT America, from their schedules and eventually ceased production. The video scheme allowed RT to secretly reach American viewers without being present on the broadcast airwaves, the indictment says.

Tenet launched in November 2023 with six contributors well-known in right-wing media, including Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, David Rubin and Lauren Southern. The videos they create for Tenet regularly cover conservative topics such as “migrant gangs,” transgender, online censorship and attacks on Vice President Harris and President Biden.

“Although the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, the subject matter and content of the videos often reflect the Russian government’s interest in reinforcing domestic political divisions within the United States in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian government interests, such as the ongoing war in Ukraine,” the indictment states.

The prosecution accuses Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva of working with the founders of the Tennessee company to conceal the true sources of money. They told some informants that the company was backed by a wealthy European banker named Eduard Grigoriann. “In truth and in fact, Grigoriann was a fictitious person,” the indictment states.

The influencers say they were unaware of the project’s Russian connections. On Wednesday, Johnson, Pool and Rubin released statements on X calling themselves victims. Southern did not respond to a request for comment.

“If these allegations prove to be true, I and the other personalities and commentators have been deceived,” Pool wrote.

“I knew absolutely nothing about these fraudulent activities. Period,” Rubin wrote.

Johnson said he was approached by a “media startup” and “negotiated a standard remote contract that was later terminated.” His most recent video on Tenet Media’s YouTube channel is from August 29.

According to the indictment, the Tennessee-based company offered lucrative terms. An influencer received $400,000 a month, a $100,000 signing bonus and an additional performance bonus in exchange for four videos per week.

Afanasyeva allegedly exerted considerable influence over the Tennessee company’s operations and publications, including pushing for certain approaches that were consistent with the Kremlin’s narrative.

For example, the indictment said Afanasyeva told the company to blame Ukraine for a terrorist attack on a Moscow concert hall in March, even though ISIS had claimed responsibility. The company’s founder said one of the contributors was “happy to report on it.”

Afanasyeva also allegedly asked the company to release a video of “a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia” — likely a reference to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who traveled to Moscow in February. According to the indictment, a producer at the company told one of the founders “it just feels like obvious advertising” but he was told to “get it out there.”

Afanasyeva also encouraged influencers to share the company’s videos on their own channels and became angry when she felt they did not promote the videos sufficiently, the indictment says.

Some of Tenet Media’s contributors pushed back against the notion that their work was influenced by outside influences.

“At no point did anyone other than me have full editorial control over the show and the show’s content is often apolitical,” Pool wrote. “The show is produced entirely by our local team, with no input from outside individuals.”

“I have not been influenced in this way. My perspective or the nature of my content has not changed,” said Matt Christiansen, another Tenet Media employee, in a livestream on Wednesday evening. “How could I have been inadvertently tricked into repeating someone else’s words when I wrote every single one of them myself?”