Front Burner - U.S. accuses Canadians in alleged Russian propaganda scheme

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

The U.S. Department of Justice has accused Tenet Media of being financed and influenced by a state-backed Russian news network.Two Russian employees of RT – the state broadcaster – are alleged of spending $10-million to secretly pay the company to spread pro-Russia propaganda.According to the indictment, the company never made it clear to its crew of commentators, some of whom are Canadian, about its ties to RT and the Russian government. Freelance reporter Justin Ling is here to explain what was in the indictment and what it says about Russian influence in the upcoming U.S. election.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Donald Trump got more votes than any sitting president. Donald Trump won Florida and Ohio.

And I don't believe any modern president has ever won both states and then lost the election. Trump won, what is it, 90% of Bellwether County? So that is Tim Pool. He is a hugely popular right-wing political commentator. He's also a big supporter of Donald Trump. He's had this big presence on Tenet Media, which describes itself as, quote, a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues. Let me translate that for you. on Western political and cultural issues.

Let me translate that for you. They are a bunch of right-wing streamers and influencers who focus a lot on the culture war and American politics. So last week, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Tenet of being financed and influenced by a state-backed Russian news network. Two Russian employees of RT, the state broadcaster, are accused of spending $10 million to secretly pay the company to spread pro-Russia propaganda with a focus on the war in Ukraine. According to the indictment, the company never made it clear to its crew of

commentators, some of whom are Canadian, about its ties to RT and the Russian government. And some of these influencers are already saying that they are the victims here. So today, Justin Ling is here to explain what was in the indictment and what it says about Russian influence in the U.S. election this time around. Justin, hey. Hey, Jamie. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you. So for someone who is not familiar with Tenet, just describe it for me.

What was it? And frankly, you shouldn't be familiar with it. I think even a lot of us who cover this file weren't even terribly familiar with it either. No, I wasn't. But you might be familiar with some of the hosts in their network. So Tenet is basically just something between a kind of production company and sort of a talent agency. It was sort of the management arm for a number of extremely popular right-wing streamers, people like Tim Pool, who you heard off the top, Benny Johnson, a former TV reporter, kind of turned YouTube streamer.

This is how embarrassing it's gotten for Justin Trudeau in Canada. Lauren Southern actually is another one. She's actually Canadian and she kind of cut her bones here in Canada and then kind of later went bigger in the U.S. and Europe. Me saying that mass immigration is going to cause extreme cultural clashes and perhaps even be the death of the West has affected my life every day to this point. To this point. Tenet was supposed to be sort of a clearinghouse for all of these culture warriors. They had their own YouTube page, but really their main kind of mission seemed to be to collect money and sort of field it out to their talent.

And just to be clear, I just want to be clear about one thing. This indictment doesn't actually name Tenet explicitly, right? So how do we know that this is the company that the U.S. Department of Justice is talking about here? Yeah, they did not make it hard. Let's put it that way. They actually use some of the language you mentioned it off the top, this idea of being a heterodox site for, you know, free speech and so on and so forth. That is the exact language Tenant uses on its website. tenant uses on its website. Myself and other journalists have sat there combing through this indictment, matching up little bits and pieces that correspond directly to people like Tim Poole, to people like Benny Johnson, Lauren Southern, Dave Rubin. More and more people are waking up

and being like, Donald Trump is not the evil fascist Hitler that they keep telling us. These extremely popular streamers, you know, when the Department of Justice writes that one streamer has, I think, you know, 2.7 million subscribers on YouTube and another one in the agency has 3.5 or whatever it was. Those correspond exactly with the subscriber numbers for Kool and Rubin. Yeah. And then like the day after the indictment came down, the company folded and YouTube wiped its content from its platform. They said the decision was

part of a quote, ongoing effort to combat coordinated influence operations. So that was obviously another very big hint. So Justin, tell me about the founders of this company, a husband and wife duo. The wife, Lauren Chen, is also Canadian. Yeah, so Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan, they founded Tenant Media several years ago to kind of create the distribution and financing network for these popular right-wing streamers. They themselves are not exactly huge names. Chen used to go by this title of Roaming Millennial. She produced videos on her own YouTube page, kind of exactly what you'd expect. You know, immigration's bad.

You know, supporting Ukraine is bad. Trans people are bad. The kind of, you know, usual fare for people who trade in this sort of reactionary grievance politics. But like I said, she was not super successful at it. You know, they registered their company here in Montreal. They kind of made a go of it for several years, but they did not break into the big time. And I think that's kind of clearly behind the decision to sort of more play a behind the scenes role of managing other people as opposed to doing a lot of that streaming themselves. Tenet itself, just talk to me about how big an audience it did have.

Yeah, so honestly, through Tenet, because they had their own YouTube page, it wasn't massive. Before they were taken offline, they had about 300,000 YouTube subscribers, which is not huge in that space. And many of their videos didn't exactly kind of go viral, let's say. But really, 10 into the YouTube page, it was sort of insignificant. It was kind of irrelevant. What really mattered were the people under the umbrella. You know, if you look at some of the other talents in their roster. A lot of folks will never have heard of these people, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin. Between them, just on YouTube alone, they have about 7 million subscribers. They're the right-wing superstars,

the far-right social media. And their videos frequently go super viral. And they're also not even on just YouTube. They're also on Rumble and BitChute and Twitter and a bunch of other places. Right, they have Discord spaces. Exactly. They have pretty huge audiences, definitely in the millions who are following, listening to, engaging with these guys and Lord & Southern daily, weekly, from all around the world.

When it comes to the money that they were getting from Tenet, do we have a sense of how much these right-wing influencers were being paid by this company to produce for them? Yeah. So according to the Department of Justice, so Russia Today, which we'll get to in a minute,

but the Russian broadcaster paid Tenet Media almost $10 million over the length of their agreement, which only ended up being about two years and some change. We're talking about six figures per video. We don't really know exactly because none of the individuals were named and you have to do a little bit of accounting, but we're talking about people like Tim Pool, people like Benny Johnson, probably clearing probably about $2 million a year under this agreement. And, you know, sometimes people actually, this is part of the effort that Tim Pool made

in response to these allegations to sort of clear his name and suggest that he had no idea about this. Part of his defense was to say, oh, you know, I make a lot of money for my videos. I just thought this was somebody, you know, looking to kind of monetize my content. And I didn't think it was all that odd. In the podcast space, we just heard that I think Travis Kelsey is getting a 100 million dollar contract. So these numbers are, that's where they're at. I think people don't realize how big the podcasting is. The amount of money that we were offered for the show was around market value for offers we had already received. And so it was just like, cool, I know, Lauren,

sure, you know, whatever. And then you got Benny and Dave. But once you sort of drill down on this, you realize how absurd this is. You're more realistically talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars per year from monetizing these YouTube pages. Two million is just orders of magnitude more than you would normally get paid by working in this ecosystem. So the idea that they sort of had no idea that the money was just kind of, you know, just what they would expect anyway is just completely bunk. They were making huge amounts of money through this. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization.

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So as you mentioned, Tim Pool says, you know, I was a victim, I didn't know. I can say that I just announced I've been contacted by the FBI as a victim of a potential victim in a crime. They have stated that I may have information relevant to their ongoing investigation and requested a voluntary interview. Some of the other ones have said similar stuff. I'll just know you and I are talking at around noon on Sunday, Eastern Time, and Lauren Southern has yet to comment. But like at some point, right, according to the indictment, Tim Poole and Dave Rubin, another of the influencers, they do kind of start asking questions about where all this money was coming from, right?

And then basically, this semi-elaborate ruse was created to mislead them, which was kind of funny. So just tell me a bit more about it. Yeah, so from the outset, right, so these guys are and women are represented by tenant media, tenant media, as best I can tell from this indictment is not exactly paying them big bucks up until this point, I think they're still kind of early days, they're still bringing on new talent. And when they do, the tenant media is negotiating with these talent to say, you know, what do you expect to get paid? How's millions out? Okay, how about 2 million? And clearly, some of them are starting to think, you know, who is behind this huge financing operation? And when they start raising questions, tenant media, Lauren Chen, goes to the folks who were providing the money from Russia Today, who they admit, according to the Department of Justice indictment, who they admit privately are, quote, the Russians.

So, you know, they're fully aware of what's going on here, at least according to these allegations. Lauren Chen goes to the Russians and says, you know, can you provide them with something? And the Russians put together this phony CV for this financier based in Paris by the name of Edward Gregorian. So they make up this kind of fake CV, fake LinkedIn page and send it back. And that seems to allay their concerns. The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government. Instead, the defendants in the company claimed that the company was sponsored by a private investor. But that private investor was a fictitious persona. And then as this scheme goes on, as they're getting paid, you know, six figures per video, these two characters, actually, it's on my point to the many different characters start popping into the discord channel, start offering notes on videos,

start asking them to post certain types of content to their pages. And they're operating under a whole bunch of different names, in some cases seemingly getting confused about their own different personas. And according to the Department of Justice, both of these people are employees of RT, or Russia Today, and basically are Russian propagandists. And the indictment goes into other examples of how these employees, the Russians, tried to actually influence the content in addition to the money, right? Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll mention one that I have here. Like they instructed Chen, the founder, to produce content that blamed the U.S. and Ukraine for the March 2024 terror attack in Moscow that was claimed by ISIS.

The first thing I said was Ukraine. Only a moron would say otherwise. Ukraine. For what purpose would anyone attack Russia? Now, to be fair, there is a decent probability that ISIS could make sense, but Ukraine makes the most sense. I mean, by every measure, by every measure, it looks like the United States knew that something like this was going to pop off. You know, at what point is there culpability? Well, I guess we're going to have to wait and see to find out who these guys were and to find out, you know, what what the response will be as it pertains to Ukraine. So, look, Justin, like, of course, this is the latest iteration of Russian interference in elections and wedge issues in America. But it seems to me a bit of an evolution in tactics.

So, I mean, of course, we know that they interfered in 2016 and 2020 during the BLM movement. But it was mostly ads and bots and social media like Facebook and Twitter. And just tell me a bit more about why you think we are seeing this strategy now. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. It's both sort of an evolution of Russian disinformation and kind of wedge tactics. But it's also a necessary reaction to how we've been combating it. So, we all remember, I think fairly well, Moscow's effort to meddle in the 2016 election. The report states, quote, the Russian government directed extensive activity beginning in at least 2014 and carrying into at

least 2017. The whole idea was just sort of so chaos, so confusion, get people arguing, getting people divided. And then, of course, we know they also directed a hacking campaign targeting Hillary Clinton. A senior lieutenant in the Russian military, Alexei Lukashev, sent an email to John Podesta, making it look like a security notice from Google, telling him to change his password, giving Lukashev and his conspirators a chance to lift 50,000 emails. They tried to make overtures to the Trump campaign. Reports saying Paul Manafort gave polling information to Konstantin Kalimnik, who the committee describes as a Russian intelligence officer.

Senate investigators also concerned that Manafort may have been involved in the Russian efforts to hack emails from the Democrats' 2016 presidential It was sort of a throw everything at the wall and see what sticks effort. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that a lot of it didn't really work. In the years that followed, we saw a kind of more targeted effort by Russia, right? We know that they tried to kind of plant the flag on certain issues. And they used outlets like Russia Today, which is the English language. They also broadcast French and Spanish and a whole bunch of other languages.

But primarily, it's an English language propaganda effort targeted at the West. RT has long tried to, you know, basically sow distrust of Western governments and sort of launder Russian talking points. And they've been kind of doing iterations of this for years. But again, it wasn't super effective. People don't believe it. People kind of know what RT is at this point. And those who are susceptible to it seem to already distrust the media and the government so acutely that they don't need much more help. But all this to say is that when the war in Ukraine began, both the US government, Canada,

the EU all took actions to knock RT not just off the air, but in some cases off the internet. Telecom networks removed RT from cable packages after Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez raised concerns about propaganda. We will ban in the European Union the Kremlin's media machine. The American incarnation of Russia's state TV was dropped by its distributors and, in a memo obtained by CNN, told its staff that it would cease all operations ASAP. So Russia has been, I think, trying to figure out a way to kind of get back in the game. And according to this indictment, they did so by trying to launder RT talking points directly through trusted names and right wing commentary. And I think this is probably the most effective effort they've had yet. elaborate for me on why these guys like why uh these right-wing you know quote-unquote trusted personalities so the thing with something like rt normally is that you know what they're gonna say

right and they've had basically the same line for the longest time. When the war in Ukraine began, it's, you know, Russia's doing the right thing. It's defending itself. Ukraine is full of Nazis, all of that kind of typical propaganda. What's so clever about what they're doing now is that they're trying to nudge people who have sort of existing audiences, existing kind of support bases, they're nudging them into new positions, which I think is maybe the most clever thing they've done yet. Someone like Tim Pool, someone like Benny Johnson, these guys are right-wing iconoclasts. You know, their whole shtick is don't trust the media, don't trust the government, you

know, only trust me. They're not big geopolitical thinkers normally, right? Like they might have a maybe a soft sort of pro-Russia bias. But I wouldn't think about any of these guys as being huge clearinghouses for Russia propaganda otherwise. But clearly, when you're receiving millions of dollars a year, allegedly, if you're receiving millions of dollars a year and being told what the line is, well, Russia just bought actually a relatively cheap entry into a huge market. And it's changing minds, right? I don't think I would assume that every single viewer of Tim Pool or Lauren Southern is automatically pro-Russian. I think this financing effort from RT probably helped them get there in a big way. Not all of them,

but I think probably many of them. You know, those guys like Tim Pool will say that they had complete and total editorial control, right? And that they weren't influenced. Outside external Russian control of your show maybe you want to address how you do the editorial at your show was lauren ever talking to you about the editorial content of the show or anything like that nope uh so i barely even talked to lauren i mean the culture war show is a conversation show on various topics the subject matter of the show editorially is there's no thought into it. We had been. Wired did an interesting analysis of the stuff that a lot of them talk about. And, you know, the big topics were Elon Musk, supposed racism against white people, illegal immigrants, free speech, diversity in video games. So it also aligns just generally with their goal of just kind of the breakdown of cohesion. Do you think that any of the commentators will really change their tune now, now that it seems like, you know, they have, according to them, been hoodwinked or manipulated

unwittingly? Yeah, I mean, I think I think I would only start accepting that they feel at least even a modicum of remorse or regret, or, you know, want to rectify this, I would only believe that if they start giving the money back, right? Like, talk to me then. But, you know, there is something kind of worth considering here, which is that I think this money, you know, if all the details in this allegation, this indictment are true, I think this money had a real impact in advancing certain narratives, such as the idea that Ukraine or the US government was behind the terror attack earlier this year, such as the idea that there are bioweapons labs in Ukraine. I think that Tim Pool talked about constantly as a reason for why Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. All these ideas, I think this money helped advance them into this right-wing media ecosystem.

But what's sort of troubling is that I don't think it's the only reason these ideas exist, right? And I think you can go too far in suggesting how powerful and effective Russia has been. The reality is there are other people in this space who are making up these conspiracy theories and sowing this disinformation and peddling this discord who are doing it more or less for free or, or, you know, just for the regular YouTube ad money, who are not getting paid by the Russian government. So it's one of those things where certainly the money helps. But we also have to recognize that the level of sort of animosity and distrust and alienation is so endemic that people are doing it all on their own and don't need any help from Moscow to do it. Their level of mistrust of the U.S. government, that's where this comes from. From their perspective, this is where it comes from. It's not that they're necessarily

trying to be pawns of Russia. How do you think, though, that what we're seeing here is different from the U.S. government openly funding media organizations like Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, whose goal is to reach people in places like China and Russia. So these are government funded media entities that have recently been covering issues and perspectives that the United States wants them to cover, the mistreatment of the Uyghurs in China, the increasing repression from Putin in Russia? Well, I mean, you said it right there. They're openly doing it, right? If, listen, if the Russian government wants to come out and say, we'll give a million bucks to any, you know, streamer who wants to parrot the line, by all means, they can

do that. And people can opt to take the money. I mean, write might write the sanctions at this point but you know if they want to produce uh content with the same level of sort of transparency and openness that the u.s government does in financing radio free europe or radio liberty yeah okay that's great that's not what they're doing they're doing it in a clandestine way um they're doing it to sow conspiracy theories that we know are demonstrably untrue. It's absurd to, I know this is not what you're doing, but this is certainly the line that a lot of right-wing folks take. It is absurd to suggest that what Russia's doing

is exactly the same or equally as blameworthy as how the West openly, publicly finances real journalism outfits. No, it's fine. If you want to think Radio Free Europe is a propaganda outlet, by all means, at least they're being upfront about where their money comes from. At least they're telling you how they make their editorial decisions and you can criticize them or not listen to them as much as you want. But the fact that we have that information is what makes this so much different. One last question before we go, Justin. Do we have any indication right now that this strategy was much wider than just the $10 million to Tenet?

We don't know anything for sure. This is part of a series of indictments the DOJ filed just this past week. There could be more to come. There could be more charges filed. There could be more allegations. We don't know. But what I do know is in speaking to some folks in this right-wing ecosystem, there's a lot of finger pointing happening right now. A lot of people are freaked out by the prospect that they themselvesruples about taking money and not disclosing it, who are parroting pro-Russian talking points, who are living, let's say, very luxurious lifestyles.

And there are a lot of questions now about whether or not they're part of the operation. And, you know, maybe that's true. Maybe that many others did, in fact, take this money. But it's also, I have to imagine, a huge coup for the Russian government because part of what they love doing is getting people to turn on each other and start being paranoid. And now that's sort of very much what the right wing media ecosystem is doing now. So, you know, just another kind of clever success story for the Russian propaganda effort. Okay. Well, that sounds like a great note to end on. Justin, thank you, as always. Thanks for having me.

All right. So just a note before we go today, after we recorded this interview, Lauren Southern, one of the Canadian influencers we spoke about in the interview, released a statement. She says that she is not accused of any crimes and that the allegations she read about in the indictment were not known to her. She also said that suggestions that her compensation mirrors other numbers is not true. All right, that is all for today. Thanks so much for listening to the show, and we'll speak to you tomorrow.