The Patriot Post® · Russiagate Version 2024?

The Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! And once again, they’re involved in an election interference plot — or so says Joe Biden’s Kamala Harris’s Justice Department.

The DOJ has filed charges against two Russian nationals, accusing them of engaging in money laundering and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Attorney General Merrick Garland stated, “We allege that as part of that effort, [Russia Today] and its employees, including the defendants, implemented a nearly $10 million scheme to fund and direct a Tennessee-based company to publish and disseminate content deemed favorable to the Russian government.”

“To implement this scheme,” he continued, “the defendants directed the company to contract with U.S.-based social media influencers to share this content and their platforms. The subject matter and content of many of the videos published by the company were 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.”

That Tennessee-based company appears to be Tenet Media, which had a YouTube channel featuring several popular right-leaning social media influencers. These individuals included Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, and Matt Christiansen, whose videos we have regularly featured on our Patriot Post website.

A number of these social media influencers have spoken out, all of them indicating they were completely unaware of any illegal activity or Russian involvement in the company. “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims,” said Pool. “I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed,” he added, but “Never at any point did anyone other than I have full editorial control of the show, and the contents of the show are often apolitical. The show is produced in its entirety by our local team without input from anyone external to the company.”

Pool’s comment is noteworthy, as it gets at the heart of the supposed pro-Russia disinformation campaign alleged by the Biden administration. Garland pointed out 32 Internet domains that were seized by the DOJ, claiming the Russian government and Russian-sponsored actors were using them in a covert campaign to interfere in our country’s elections.

However, like the Russian collusion hoax of 2016 and Hunter Biden’s laptop that was supposedly Russian disinformation but was actually legitimate information, this latest claim of some nefarious Russian plot once again looks more like a deep-state-orchestrated anti-Trump campaign than any genuine effort to protect America’s electoral system.

Indeed, a number of the Internet domains that were seized — which were supposedly designed to spread misinformation by mirroring mainstream news sites — were so obviously fake that it makes one wonder if they weren’t satire. For example, a site dubbed “CNN California” had just seven followers. Wow … talk about a massive Russian influence op.

Meanwhile, YouTube has eliminated Tenet’s channel, scrubbing all the videos from its platform. Furthermore, Tenet Media’s founders, Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, both social media influencers prior to starting Tenet, have been flagged by the DOJ for working with these Russian nationals and deceiving all the other social media influencers they hired by claiming that the funding for the startup came from a fictitious individual named Eduard Grigoriann. As of yet, no charges have been filed against the couple, though Chen has been dumped by Blaze Media.

The timing of this revelation and the Russian fearmongering seem all too convenient. The Russians, after all, and the Soviets before them, have been playing these games for years. But the notion that they have ever successfully swung an American election is the stuff of conspiracy theory.

Of course, we could just take Vladimir Putin at his word when he says he wants Kamala Harris to win the election.