Trump Official Behind Controversial Russia Decision Has Kremlin Ties

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since the publication of this post The Telegraph has retracted its original story. In its place, the paper has left this apology:

An article, “Trump official who shut down counter-Russia agency has links to Kremlin” (3 June), erroneously stated that Mr Sergei Chernikov – and, by association, his niece, Ms Yulia Kirillova – had current ties to the Kremlin and to President Putin personally. This is false. In fact, neither Mr Chernikov nor Ms Kirillova has any association with the Kremlin or Mr Putin. Mr Chernikov has lived away from Russia since 2008 and has not returned since 2020.

It was also incorrect to state that Mr Chernikov once served as Deputy Governor of the Nenets region in Siberia, or that he received a personal note of thanks from Mr Putin for supporting his electoral victory in the 2000 election campaign. The article also omitted certain publicly available relevant facts, including that President Putin publicly condemned the key shareholders of Bashkir Soda Company (in which Mr Chernikov held shares) prior to its expropriation.

Original post continues below.

Senior State Department staffer Darren Beattie, a passionate Putin supporter behind the move to dismantle a key agency fighting Russian propaganda, is married to a Russian woman whose uncle is a longtime Kremlin ally, according to The Telegraph.

Yulia Kirillova grew up in Moscow, studied abroad in North America, and married Beattie in 2021 in Florida. She moved to D.C. in January. Her uncle Sergei Cherniko is a drinks magnate who had an estimated net worth of $150 million in 2005. That year, he served in Russia’s ministry of natural resources and was then deputy governor of Siberia’s Nenets region. Cherniko later served in Putin’s civic chamber from 2008 to 2010.

The relationship raises even greater scrutiny around Beattie’s April decision to eliminate the Global Engagement Center, a State Department office tasked with dealing with Russian disinformation campaigns. Beattie has been a staunch supporter of Putin, setting himself apart from the traditional conservative right in Bannon-esque fashion.

“US gov’t has been supporting Ukranian neo-nazi groups in its obsessive proxy war against Russia,” he wrote on X in 2022.

“State Department could sell butt plugs and forward proceeds to fund resistance effort in ukraine,” he wrote again that year. “Iran Contra but with a modern American twist.”

“A big part of American ruling class’ hatred of Russia is that Russia is a major power that rejects the woke ideology at the core of American regime,” he wrote in 2021.

This is a clear conflict of interest that is extremely typical within the Trump administration. And on top of that, Beattie was initially fired from the Trump administration in 2018 for attending a white nationalist conference. He has a long history of many other deeply problematic views.

“Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” Beattie wrote on X in October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” On January 6, 2021, he spent the day on X warning Senator Tim Scott, “BLM,” Ibram X. Kendi, and Kay Cole James to “learn their places” and “take a knee” to MAGA.

That, on top of this personal in at the Kremlin, is highly questionable behavior for a ranking official, which has been overly normalized by this administration.

The Pentagon’s new press secretary is a chronically online 26-year-old white nationalist who believes in the “great replacement” theory, thinks Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskiy is an “entitled midget,” and pushed an antisemitic conspiracy theory about Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched after being falsely accused of murder in 1915. 

Kingsley Wilson, who has served as deputy press secretary since January, is the daughter of right-wing talking head and former Trump adviser Steve Cortes and previously worked for Center for Renewing America, a think tank founded by Project 2025 architect Russel Vought. She will now act as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s primary mouthpiece at the Pentagon, a department that has not had regular press briefings for some time now. 

“The Office of the Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs is announcing that Kingsley Wilson will serve as Press Secretary for the Department of Defense,” senior Defense Department adviser Sean Parnell wrote on X last week. “Kingsley’s leadership has been integral to the DOD’s success & we look forward to her continued service to President Trump!”

Wilson’s personal X page is a treasure trove of ultraright-wing content. 

“Minneapolis became Mogadishu in 10 years time,” she said over a video of Muslim Representative Ilhan Omar at a rally in her district. “The Great Replacement isn’t a conspiracy theory … it’s reality.”  

She has posted about the great replacement therory—a racist conspiracy theory that alleges there is a coordinated plot to decrease America’s  white population through immigration, in some iterations at the behest of Jewish leaders—incessantly for the past three  years. 

She said, “I hate this entitled midget,” in response to Zelenskiy receiving military aid from the U.S last year, and lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin for having “encyclopedic knowledge of his people’s history,” which she called “beyond impressive … especially when contrasted with the low-IQ lunatics working at the U.S. State Department.”

“Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl. He also tried to frame a Black man for his crime,” she wrote on X. “The ADL turned off the comments because they want to gaslight you.” The ADL stated that they were “deeply disturbed” by Wilson’s comments. 

While troubling, this is a predictable pick, as Trump has lined his highest ranks with fringe MAGA loyalists with often openly racist politics, like State Department official Darren Beattie and National Counterterrorism Center head Joe Kent. They, like Wilson, are anti-neocons who subscribe to the same far-right, deep-MAGA views as figures like Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel, rather than the more conventional conservatism of the GOP.

Trump officials claim the suspect behind Sunday’s attack in Boulder, Colorado, was in the United States illegally. But they’re leaving out one convenient detail: He had filed an asylum application.

Mohamed Sabry Soliman, an Egyptian national, has been charged with a federal hate crime for attacking peaceful demonstrators calling for the release of Israeli hostages held captive in Gaza, leaving eight people injured.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Soliman entered the country on a B-2 tourist visa in August 2022. He filed for asylum the next month, and his visa expired the following year.

Donald Trump and his entire administration seem to have seized on the expired visa as proof that an “illegal” immigrant committed such a heinous crime.

“He came in through Biden’s ridiculous Open Border Policy, which has hurt our Country so badly,” said Trump in his own statement on Monday, conveniently ignoring that Soliman entered the country on a tourist visa. “This is yet another example of why we must keep our Borders SECURE, and deport Illegal, Anti-American Radicals from our Homeland.”

“The Colorado Terrorist attack suspect, Mohamed Soliman, is illegally in our country,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said.

“There’s certainly a concern that the previous administration allowed way too many terrorists and illegal immigrants into the interior of our country,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “This individual, this terrorist, was allowed into the country by the previous administration, was foolishly given a tourist visa, and then was illegally allowed to stay.”

But each of these statements seems to be obfuscating the truth: If you file for asylum, you are not here illegally until a judge denies that request. Until then, you have a pending asylum application.

“He entered the country in August 2022 on a B2 visa that expired on February 2023. He filed for asylum in September 2022,” McLaughlin said on X on Monday.

But what happened next? If his asylum application was denied and he stayed anyway, why wouldn’t she say so?

Perhaps because that’s not the case. Soliman entered the country legally, filed for asylum, and then very likely was living here while he awaited the decision. Asylum applicants who have been awaiting a response for longer than 180 days are typically granted work authorization, under laws passed by Congress decades ago.

In other words, Soliman was not in the country due to Biden’s “open border” policy. But then again, Trump and co. have never liked sticking to the facts.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was enraged to hear that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had been focusing on arresting only criminals, The Washington Examiner reported Monday.

Last week, 25 field directors from ICE’s Enforcement Removal Operations, as well as 25 special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, were called to Washington for a meeting. Officials told the Examiner that the president’s ghoulish immigration czar wasn’t happy.

“Miller came in there and eviscerated everyone,” said one official. “‘You guys aren’t doing a good job. You’re horrible leaders.’ He just ripped into everybody. He had nothing positive to say about anybody, shot morale down.”

The official told the conservative outlet that Miller didn’t want ICE to narrow its field to just undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” the official recalled.

When one ICE official pushed back against Miller’s call to widen the deportation dragnet, citing border czar Tom Homan’s claims that ICE’s deportation efforts would target criminals, the deputy chief of staff seemed confused.

“What do you mean you’re going after criminals?” the official recounted Miller as saying. “Miller got into a little bit of a pissing contest.”

Last week, Miller and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced that the Trump administration had set a new quota of a minimum 3,000 ICE arrests per day. On Monday, ICE announced that it had completed its largest operation ever in Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Area—but as the number of arrests rose, so did the number of people detained with no criminal record or deportation order. Hundreds of so-called “collaterals” were arrested as part of the massive operation.

At least 11 large companies—including Morgan Stanley, Microsoft, and Oracle—are cutting ties with law firms that caved to President Trump’s threats of political retribution, according to The Wall Street Journal.

General counsels for multiple companies told the Journal that the law firms’ willingness to cut deals with the president, rather than stand up for themselves, greatly eroded their confidence in the ability of those firms to represent them in court or in high-pressure negotiations.

Massive law firms that work on lucrative contracts, like Paul, Weiss, Kirkland & Ellis, and others, struck deals with the Trump administration after he aimed six executive orders at them, removing clearances, building access, and government contracts from firms he thought were attacking him. The law firms capitulated, offering billions of pro bono work to the Trump administration, allegedly in the name of protecting their clients and their contracts.

But multiple lawyers at each firm think that their leadership should’ve put up a tougher fight. One staffer told the Journal she felt “physically ill” upon hearing of Paul, Weiss’s sellout to Trump. Some younger lawyers have even quit over these deals, as one associate at Simpson Thacher said in his exit email that he would not “sleepwalk toward authoritarianism.”

The firms that decided to strike back did end up losing clients but kept some of their principles intact. Jenner & Block declared in a statement that folding to the Trump administration would require “compromising our ability to zealously advocate for all of our clients and capitulating to unconstitutional government coercion, which is simply not in our DNA.”