by Nicholas Ballasy
The Department of Justice on Wednesday indicted two Russian nationals for spending about $10 million on a “scheme” to advance “Russian government messaging” to U.S. audiences.
DOJ announced the indictment charging Russian nationals Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, 31, also known as Kostya, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27, also known as Lena, with “conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering” in an indictment unsealed in the Southern District of New York.
According to the agency, Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva are both employees of Russia Today, or RT, a state-controlled media outlet.
“The Justice Department has charged two employees of RT, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, in a $10 million scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” said Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in a statement.
“The Justice Department will not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit our country’s free exchange of ideas in order to covertly further its own propaganda efforts, and our investigation into this matter remains ongoing,” he added.
Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva are both “at large,” DOJ said.
The employees were allegedly “covertly funding” a Tennessee-Based “online content creation company” to create the content to advance Russian interests.
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Nicholas Ballasy is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Merrick Garland” by DOJ.
RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA….Russia is the boogie man. NO, our own democratically controlled government is the boogie man. Look at all of the deceit and outright lying during the 2016 presidential election, and how the democrats kept implicating Russia in election meddling. Which of course has been proved to be total BS!
I’ve been reading RT.com for over15 years, and quite frankly, I believe what I read there with greater conviction than what I read on the Ministry of Propaganda, a.k.a. the MSM. Western governments are doing all they can right now to stifle free speech. Marxism has infested these Western governments and they will stop at nothing to continue their destruction of our constitutional freedoms.