Unsealed FBI Doc Exposes Terrifying Depth of Russian Disinfo Scheme

The Russian disinformation plot revealed in a Justice Department indictment this week may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to newly unsealed court documents.

On Wednesday, the DOJ announced it would seize 32 internet domains linked to a larger Kremlin scheme to promote disinformation and influence the 2024 election. The Russian campaign, known as Doppelganger, uses AI-generated content to create “fake news” boosted through social media with the aim of electing Donald Trump.

“Today’s announcement exposes the scope of the Russian government’s influence operations and their reliance on cutting-edge AI to sow disinformation,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement about the charges. According to records, the plan was well known at even the highest levels of the Russian government—and Russian President Vladimir Putin himself may have been aware of the campaign.

Of particular note, the documents released Wednesday included an affidavit that noted a Russian company is keeping a list of more than 2,800 influencers world wide, about one-fifth of whom are based in the United States, to monitor and potentially groom to spread Russian propaganda. The affidavit does not mention the full list of influencers, but is still a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes.

The Doppelganger program and its “Good Old USA Project” aimed to mimic mainstream media outlets to push pro-Russian policies through fake social media accounts. Documents show that the Kremlin specifically targeted Trump supporters, minorities, gamers, and swing-state voters by spreading far-right conspiracies and capitalizing on existing divisions in U.S. politics.

​​”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Ilya Gambashidze, an architect of the project, wrote, outlining his scheme. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” To do so, the Russian government would emphasize that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color” and promote conspiracies that white middle-class people are being discriminated against.

The “guerrilla media” plan needed to not only plant falsehoods, but also spread them far and wide. They targeted gamers and chatroom users, who they described as the “backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet,” and monitored social media influencers. The Russians planned to build relationships with prolific posters who were “proponents of traditional values, who stand up for ending the war in Ukraine and peaceful relations between the US and Russia, and who are ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

“We need influencers! A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them,” wrote Gambashidze in a note from a meeting with Russian government officials.

Though this specific campaign has no official link with recent findings about Tenet Media’s work with Russian state media network RT, the goals are the same: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump].”

J.D. Vance completely fumbled his response to Wednesday’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, in which he resigned to school shootings as a bleak “fact of life.”

“Now look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do,” Vance said during a rally Thursday in Arizona.

“Look, I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But if you’re—if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you’d realize that our schools are soft targets.”

“We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to,” Vance said, sharing his fatalistic view of what are entirely avoidable tragedies. There is just no way to prevent young people from committing gross acts of violence with tools that the government already supposedly regulates. Just no way!

Vance’s limp policy idea imagines public schools as the only venue for a mass shooting—increased security there would not prevent, say, a shooting at a university campus, church, grocery store, mall, or really anywhere else. Plus, even he admitted he didn’t like the idea of beefed up security around his children.

“And again, as a parent, do I want my school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t,” Vance said. Then why did he just pitch it? “I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like they’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

Vance’s cynical response to the deadly shooting, which killed four people and injured nine others, is particularly grim in light of Kamala Harris’s response: “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

The fallout from last week’s Arlington National Cemetery fight is still plaguing the Trump campaign.

The Trump staffers reportedly involved in accosting a cemetery official are Justin Caporale, a deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump’s reelection bid, and Michel Picard, a member of Trump’s advance team, NPR reported Thursday evening.

Caporale had previously worked under former First Lady Melania Trump, and served under Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as director of external affairs, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Caporale was also listed as an on-site contact during the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He was, at the time, a project manager for the Women for America First rally, before some of the crowd stormed into the halls of Congress.

Trump’s decision to film at the military graveyard—and in Section 60, where recent military casualties are buried—violated federal law, which prohibits politically related activities in the cemetery such as taking photos and videos in support of a political campaign. The criminal behavior sparked a verbal and physical fight between Trump’s surrogates and an Arlington National Cemetery official who attempted to rein in the politico’s videotaping.

The Trump campaign claimed that they had been given permission to videotape by the families of fallen service members, but unfortunately for Trump, that doesn’t change federal law. In a rare statement last week, the Army said that it considered the case closed but sided with the cemetery official, writing that they believed the official had been “abruptly pushed aside” and “unfairly attacked” by Trump staffers.

Trump has even begun this week to insist the fight did not happen at all, making the involvement of a senior campaign staffer all the more damaging. Trump’s campaign has repeatedly promised to release video exonerating both him and his staffers, but no video has appeared.

The Republican presidential nominee’s anti-military rhetoric has been a point of contention with current and former service members in recent weeks. In August, the reputed Vietnam-era draft dodger came under fire for arguing that the Presidential Medal of Freedom he awarded to one of his billionaire donors was “much better” than the nation’s highest military honor, the Medal of Honor. That comment struck a nerve with veterans, who connected Trump’s disrespectful rhetoric to a 2020 Atlantic report that caught the former president repeatedly referring to fallen soldiers as “suckers and losers.”

The Republican Party is in trouble this election, and may lose its majority in the House of Representatives—so says Texas Representative Tony Gonzalez, a Republican himself.

Speaking at the Texas Tribune Festival on Thursday, the congressman said he believed the party would lose in November due its own actions.

“What’s frustrating me is I firmly believe that House Republicans are going to lose the majority—and we’re going to lose it because of ourselves,” Gonzales said.

Gonzalez said that a culture of blame had taken hold of his party, as well as the Democrats, pointing to a cycle of oversight hearings opposed to whichever party was in power.

“It’s not rocket science here. You know the economy, it’s really real. I mean, more and more middle-class Americans are falling further and further behind in access to quality health care,” said Gonzalez. “Are we talking about this? Are we talking about some of these kind of kitchen table issues? No—it’s all about who we’re going to impeach.”

Gonzalez was censured by the Texas state Republican Party earlier this year for voting for gun safety legislation, and increasing same-sex marriage protections. He also directed some of his criticism toward Democrats, who failed to break through for a major victory in the state.

“Texas Democrats are failing to deliver the message. They are stuck in all-or-nothing, and guess what? They’re getting nothing,” Gonzalez said. “That works out well for Republicans.”

Texas Democrats “haven’t evolved into going, ‘How do I win a race? How do I deliver a message for the general population, and not just my base?’” Gonzalez added. “And anytime you get stuck in that, you’re going to lose.”

Gonzalez hasn’t shied away from criticizing his party in the past, attacking Representative Matt Gaetz for “paying minors to have sex with them at drug parties” and Representative Bob Good for endorsing his opponent, “a known neo-Nazi,” in a CNN interview in April.

“These people used to walk around with white hoods at night. Now they’re walking around with white hoods in the daytime,” Gonzalez said at the time.

The Texas congressman isn’t the only member of his party who has been critical of the GOP’s lack of results recently. Last November, Representative Chip Roy yelled at his colleagues for failing to accomplish anything significant, and in January, Representative Andy Biggs complained on Newsmax that his party has accomplished “nothing” since winning control of the House in 2022.

Gonzalez isn’t likely to win over many of his colleagues, though: The National Republican Congressional Committee immediately issued a statement saying that they “disagree” with him.

Hours after the Justice Department announced it is charging a former Trump adviser over his work with Russian media, Donald Trump made a shocking promise: He’ll lift U.S. sanctions on Russia.

The Justice Department on Thursday charged Trump’s 2016 campaign adviser Dimitri Simes, as well as his wife, Anastasia, for working with a sanctioned Russian state television network and laundering the profit. According to the indictment, the couple received over $1 million, a personal car, and a driver for their work with Russia’s Channel One. (Simes, by the way, is mentioned over 100 times in the Mueller report, for his relationship with Trump allies like Jared Kushner.)

Given the news, when Trump took the stage at the Economic Club of New York on Thursday, the first question from the panel of business leaders was about Russian sanctions. H. Rodgin Cohen, senior chair of law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, asked the former president if he “would strengthen or modify any of these economic sanction programs, particularly Russia.”

Trump then went on a rant about the problems of sanctions, stating clearly, “I want to use sanctions as little as possible.”

“You’re losing Iran, you’re losing Russia. China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency,” he said, explaining that he believes sanctions of countries like Russia weaken the dollar. “There’s so much conflict with all these countries that you’re going to lose” the dominance of the dollar.

During his time in office, Trump imposed new sanctions on Iran and North Korea but was so reluctant to impose sanctions on Russia, despite election interference and its use of chemical weapons, that lawmakers had to force his hand. As he described to Cohen on Thursday, Trump was quick to take the punishment away. “I use sanctions very powerfully against countries who deserve it, then I take them off.”

The sanctions that Dimitri and Anastasia Simes violated were put in place “in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a statement.

Thursday’s indictment comes on the heels of another Justice Department case charging two Russian state media employees in “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” Several prominent pro-Trump influencers were implicated in the case.