The U.S. Department of Justice has been charged with spying on Russian propaganda in the 2016 Ukrainian election campaign, and it has been declared that it is not a spy country
The U.S. Department of Justice said it disrupted foreign influence campaigns designed to spread Russian government propaganda.
The effort was meant to reduce international support for Ukraine, bolster pro-Russian policies, and influence voters in the U.S. and elsewhere, the Justice Department said.
The Justice Department required RT’s U.S. arm to register as a foreign agent in 2017, after US intelligence officials said it was involved in Russian attempts to interfere in the 2016 election.
Russian companies Social Design Agency, Structura National Technology, and ANO Dialog have been named by the Doppelganger investigation as being involved in the effort.
The President’s inner circle included the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the presidential office Sergei Kiriyenko.
The Biden administration warned actors against interfering with the elections. “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,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement alongside the announcement of the RT employees’ indictment, “and our investigation into this matter remains ongoing.”
In a statement on its website ahead of the charges, RT dismissed the findings, joking that their responses in an office poll included comments like “Ha!” and “2016 called and it wants its clichés back.”
The DOJ Investigation of the Doppleganger Campaign, a Russian State-Owned Threat to the Russian Presidency
The US has accused Russia before of interfering with elections. After the 2016 election, law enforcement accused Russian agents of election interference-related crimes, including computer hacking. The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in 2020 that found President Putin supported an influence campaign to support Donald Trump in the White House.
“Russia remains the most active foreign threat to our elections,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told senators in May at a briefing about election risks.
The campaign, dubbed Doppleganger, has fooled news outlets such as The Washington Post and Fox News with its ruses, as well as posing as NATO, the Polish and Ukrainian governments, and the German police.
In March, the USTreasury imposed sanctions on two Russian companies and their executives for launching fake accounts and news websites at the direction of the Russian Presidential Administration.
The campaign recently used fake French-language news sites to push claims of corruption at the recent Paris Olympics and to warn of potential violence, according to a Microsoft report.
The fake profiles on X were created using artificial intelligence by the bot farm. The accounts supported Russia in its war against the Ukranians. The effort and the AI software behind it were organized by an editor at RT, the Russian state-owned media outlet, the Justice Department alleged. The project was funded by the Kremlin and run by a Russian intelligence officer.
The influence campaign, which was allegedly directed by members of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, created media brands or closely mimicked existing ones to spread Russian government propaganda, according to the US. They also allegedly created fake social media personas of non-Russian citizens to post comments.
“This seizure illustrates vividly what the U.S. government and private sector partners have warned for months: the Russian government and its proxies are aggressively accelerating the Kremlin’s covert efforts to seed false stories and amplify disinformation directed at the American public,” DOJ National Security Division chief Matthew G. Olsen said in a statement.
