The New Russiagate Allegations are a Joke, Even if They are True.

Even if the new Russiagate story is true, it is a joke.

Russiagate is the psy-op that will never die. Just when you think it’s gone forever it comes back. The most recent iteration of Russiagate comes in the form of a Southern District of New York indictment that alleges the conservative outlet “Tenet Media” received 10 million dollars from two employees of the Russian state-funded news outlet RT and that this money was given to prominent conservative commentators such as Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Lauren Southern without them knowing it came from Russia. While it is very possible this story is true, it is worth noting that the stories of “Russian election interference” in the last two elections have been debunked. It is also worth noting that even if this story is 100 percent true it is a joke and pales in comparison to election interference the U.S. does around the world.

The Russiagate stories from 2016 and 2020 have been proven false.

It is worth noting that the stories of election interference from the last two elections have been disproven.

In 2016, the FBI and other intelligence agencies accused Russia of hacking the DNC and giving the emails to Julian Assange. The Muller report alleged that Wikileaks received the DNC emails from a Russian cutout called “Guccifer 2.0” on June 14th, 2016. The problem with this narrative is that Assange had already announced he had the DNC emails on June 12th and WikiLeaks did not publish any material from “Guccifer 2.0” as the account had already put out most of it publicly and WikiLeaks was unable to verify the content.

A 2017 forensic investigation from VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity), a collection of former intelligence officials such as NSA whistleblowers Bill Binney and former CIA analyst Ray Mcgovern found that the DNC emails on Wikileaks would have had to have been a leak, not a hack.

Finally, in 2019, the narrative was fully debunked when a 2017 testimony was released showing that Crowdstrike, the Clinton campaign-hired firm responsible for generating the claim that Russia hacked the DNC had no evidence to back it up. The company’s CEO. Sean Henry admitted they had “no concrete evidence” Russia stole emails from the DNC.

Pictured Above: Sean Henry the CEO of CrowdStrike admitting there is “no evidence they (DNC emails) were actually exfiltrated.”

There were also allegations in 2016 of Russian Bots swinging the election. But these allegations only amounted to a single troll farm where only 11 percent of the content was even related to the election. Even the Pentagon-funded Rand corporation admitted the troll farm’s messaging was “neither well organized nor especially well resourced”.

Many other claims of Russian bots in 2016 were completely proven false. The Neo-con think tank Hamilton 68 claimed to have uncovered a list of 600 Russian bots on Twitter but the Twitter files proved most of the accounts were not originating from Russia at all.

In 2020 the intelligence community claimed Russia was putting bounties on the heads of American troops in Afghanistan. The CIA then later came out and admitted they had no evidence for this claim.

Former intelligence agents also claimed the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” leading it to be blocked on social media platforms. This was disproven years later when mainstream media outlets ranging from The Washinton Post to The New York Times verified the content as authentic. Hunter Biden has admitted he could have dropped off his laptop at a repair shop and later even sued the repair shop where he dropped it off for “wrongfully sharing his personal data”.

While so far, no evidence has come out countering the allegations from the recent indictment, and Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, the founders of “Tenet Media” have yet to put out a statement countering the allegations, the fact that previous claims of Russian interference have been proven to be bogus is reason to not accept these allegations at face value.

Even if entirely true this story is a joke

Even if this story is entirely true it is an absolute joke of an attempt at “election interference”. Even the inditement admits none of the commentators even knew they were on the Russian payroll saying that Tenet Media was

falsely portraying to Commentator-I and Commentator-2 that U.S. Company-I (Tenet media) was sponsored by a private investor named "Eduard Grigoriann."

There is also no evidence that the Russian funding even influenced any of the content on the channels they were paying. Tim Pool in his statement said he licensed his podcast “Culture Wars” to Tenet Media but that he had full editorial control over the show and that the only condition of the agreement was to broadcast the show on Tenet Media’s YouTube channel. Dave Rubin said he knew nothing about the activity and the only content he produced for TENET was a show called “People of the Internet” that covered viral videos.

Examples of Rubin’s content from TENET media found on the way back Machine include a video titled “Chimps have a bizarre reaction to prosthetic legs” and a reaction to the viral comedic video “What if Google was A guy”.

Pictured Above: Some examples of the type of content Dave Rubin produced for “Tenet Media”.

The indictment does not even allege that the RT funding influenced any of the creators and in fact only cited two examples of the RT employees even trying to influence the content at all. One example they cited was the RT employee trying to get the company to repost a video of Tucker Carlson in a grocery store in Russia, a video that had already been widely seen on social media and already shared by multiple news outlets. Another example cited in the indictment is that the RT employees asked TENET media to blame the Moscow terror attack on Ukraine, a fairly silly conspiracy theory given the fact that ISIS had already taken credit for that attack.

Furthermore, all of the creators on Tenet media such as Dave Rubin, Benny Jhonson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern already had massive audiences on YouTube and other social media platforms and would have had eyeballs on their content with or without Russian funding.

Even if this story is 100 percent true it seems more like a giant waste of money and resources on the part of the Russians than some sort of psychological warfare operation as the justice department has alleged. The Russians allegedly paid 10 million dollars to content creators who in turn created a bunch of silly clickbait videos without even knowing they were receiving Russian funding. It does not seem at all that the Russians were able to steer the content of these creators in their preferred direction and the only influence they were able to put forward amounted to a silly conspiracy over the Moscow Terror Attacks and a Tucker Carlson video that had already been widely viewed.

Even Michael van Landingham, a former CIA analyst who played a big part in the original Russiagate claims in 2016 said“Painting the creation of YouTube videos as ‘psychological warfare’ on millions of Americans overstates the gravity of the threat.”

This joke inference pales in comparison to real election interference done by America around the world.

The greatest irony of this story is that this joke of an attempt at election interference pales in comparison to what is done by America around the world. Some notable examples include:

• In 1996 the U.S. helped sway the Russian election toward their preferred neo-liberal candidate Boris Yeltsin.

• In 2002 the U.S. backed a coup against Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela.

• In 2006 the U.S. attempted to overthrow Hamas after they were elected in Gaza by arming members of Fatah in Egypt for a coup attempt.

• In 2014 the U.S. funded think tanks and organizations that set the stage for a violent coup against Yanukovych in Ukraine.

• In 2015 the U.S. government bragged about using social media influence operations to swing Venzuela’’s national assembly to the opposition.

• In 2018 the U.S. funded think tanks and organizations that set the stage for a violent coup attempt against Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

• In 2019 the U.S. used the OAS (Organization of American States) to falsely claim Evo Morales stole his election, leading to a violent far-right military coup.

• In 2022 the U.S. forced the removal of Pakistan’s democratically elected Prime Minister Imran Khan because he was against the proxy war in Ukraine.

These were all well-organized attempts at election interference that often resulted in actual coups against democratically elected governments. Compare this to Russia’s “election interference” which amounted to funding a bunch of mainstream conservatives without even being able to influence their content as they were not even aware they were being funded by Russia.

Final Thoughts

I honestly do not know if these allegations are true or not. The fact that previous Russiagate claims were proven false causes me to be skeptical, but the fact that the founders of Tenet Media have yet to comment on the allegations points to the fact that they could very well be true. Even so, taking all of the allegations at face value the Russian’s attempts at election interference are a complete joke. The indictment reads more like a Russian version of “Burn After Reading” than some sort of well-organized intelligence operation. The RT funding did not seem to have any impact on the actual content made for Tenet media from creators like Dave Rubin and Tim Pool who were unaware they were even being funded by RT in the first place. All in all the 10 million dollars seems to have been a giant waste of money from the Russians who were unable to even get much of their propaganda messaging out through their operation. Nevertheless, these allegations will be used to crackdown further on independent media, McCarthy smear anyone critical of the official State Department narrative and continue the new cold war with Russia and the proxy war in Ukraine.