DoJ indictment Russian shell company

[Rideback]

Particularly consider the low range of viewership the channel had.

[mister_coffee]

Oh, yeah, Tim Pool is not a victim:

https://polispandit.substack.com/p/tim- ... t-a-victim

Victims don't get paid $100_000 per video they produce.

[Rideback]

Since the indictments have gone public there's been a ripple effect of looking into who else in the media spread the disinformation and the biggest purveyor is looking like Musk's using his Twitter/X platform. Whether he is on DoJ's list in their investigation is unknown but Musk is provably in the thick of the story.

[Rideback]

https://www.wired.com/story/project-goo ... a5ABhKPydA

'In late August 2023, Ilya Gambashidze was in a conference room at the office of Social Design Agency, a Russian IT company he founded that is based in Moscow, close to the world-renowned Moscow Conservatory. Gambashidze was relatively unknown in Russian politics at the time, but just a month earlier his name had appeared on a Council of the European Union’s list of Russian nationals subjected to sanctions for playing a central role in a sprawling disinformation campaign against Ukraine.

In the conference room, Gambashidze was laying out his plans for a new target: Along with his colleagues, he began drafting what would become known as the Good Old USA Project. The project was supposed to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in favor of former president Donald Trump, specifically targeting certain minorities, swing-state residents, and online gamers, among others, in a scheme that included a full-time team dedicated to the cause.

On Wednesday, Gambashidze and his company were named by the US Department of Justice among the architects of a disinformation campaign known as Doppelganger that has for the past two years been targeting Ukraine and, more recently, US elections. The Doppelganger campaign uses AI-generated content on dozens of fake websites designed to impersonate mainstream media outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox Business, using a network of fake social media accounts to disseminate pro-Russian narratives targeting audiences across the globe. Doppelganger is a Kremlin-aligned disinformation campaign that was first linked to the Kremlin in 2023 by the French government.

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On Wednesday, the Justice Department announced the seizure of 32 internet domains it says are linked to the Doppelganger campaign which violate US money laundering and criminal trademark laws.

“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. “Companies operating at the direction of the Russian government created websites to trick Americans into unwittingly consuming Russian propaganda.”

The Treasury Department had previously sanctioned SDA and Gambashidze in March for its part in the Doppelganger campaign. But the court documents unsealed on Wednesday contain a treasure trove of documents and meeting notes from Gambashidze and his colleagues, outlining in unprecedented detail the goals and tactics that the Kremlin has been deploying in order to influence the outcome of the 2024 US election.

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The records also reveal the plan was discussed at the highest levels of the Russian government, with Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff of the presidential executive office, playing a key role. The notes appear to show that President Vladimir Putin may have been updated on the campaign; in one meeting with Russian government officials, Gambashidze wrote that government officials told him they had “reported to the President about the project,” which the FBI agent who authored the affidavit said he took to refer to Putin.


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The documents show that the orchestrators of the campaign targeted existing divisions within US society, using racist stereotypes and far-right conspiracies to target supporters of former president Donald Trump.

​​"They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Gambashidze writes in one document outlining his “guerrilla media” plan. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.”

The same document is full of racist and conspiratorial claims, including that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color.” It adds that white middle-class people are being discriminated against with high inflation and rising prices, while “unemployed people of color end up being privileged groups of the population.”

And the goal of the campaign, from the beginning, was crystal clear: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump],” Gambashidze wrote in the Good Old USA Project planning document.

The Good Old USA plan openly admits that “none of the significant American politicians can be considered pro-Russian or pro-Putin,” and so rather than focus its efforts on trying to convince people that Russia is great, the plan called for promoting the idea that the US should be focusing its resources less on Ukraine and more on domestic issues, such as rising inflation and high gas prices.

“It makes sense for Russia to put a maximum effort to ensure that the Republican Party’s point of view (first and foremost, the opinion of Trump supporters) wins over the US public opinion,” the Good Old USA Project planning document reads. “This includes provisions on peace in Ukraine in exchange for territories, the need to focus on the problems of the US economy, returning troops home from all over the world, etc.”

[mister_coffee]

Preston Stewart runs down why the dudes accepting the money (he focuses on Tim Pool) should have reasonably known the whole deal was suspicious:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaYwp9UIpyA

Sounds like Willful Blindness to me (from findlaw.com):

Willful Blindness

: deliberate failure to make a reasonable inquiry of wrongdoing (as drug dealing in one's house) despite suspicion or an awareness of the high probability of its existence NOTE: Willful blindness involves conscious avoidance of the truth and gives rise to an inference of knowledge of the crime in question.

[mister_coffee]

This is so fun:

[mister_coffee]

This:

[mister_coffee]

If it were me at this point I'd want to work backwards and look at content creators and track their income versus the sizes of their audiences. I'd specifically heard some of the names (Tim Pool) come up because they were pretty remarkable outliers in terms of their income versus how many viewers they had. That would be an interesting rock to flip over.

Word on the street is that they've charged US citizens as well, but they are cooperating and helped give the evidence needed to put out this indictment.

[Rideback]

The indictment tells how when they needed more money they emailed the source. Got no reply. So they googled to see what time Moscow time was for their last chat with the fictious character and indeed it was Moscow time. So the logic tracks, per the indictment, that they knew the money was coming from Russia, not a wealthy benefactor in Europe.

[mister_coffee]

The interesting question, is now that Tim Pool and Benny Johnson know where the money they were being paid came from, what are they going to do next? They can say they "didn't know" but another reasonable question is did you put any effort into finding out who your benefactors were?

There has been lots of gossip in the content creator world over the last few years that many of the MAGA influencers obviously had a sugar daddy.

This is also obviously just the tip of the iceberg and it will be interesting to see who else was getting paid to shill, who was paying them, and how much the recipients knew about it.

It is also remarkable how much effort was put into hiding the source of money. That in itself should have made people suspicious. If they didn't know what was up, that is.

[Rideback]

More in depth
https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/russia ... irect=true

[Rideback]

Been a slew of arrests, charges and detentions lately related to the Russian disinformation crowd

https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/04/politics ... PA4aaX9PKw