ICYMI: How Is Being a Paid Propagandist Not a Crime?
ICYMI: How Is Being a Paid Propagandist Not a Crime?
Days before US feds dropped bombshells indicting Russians linked to Kremlin military intelligence who paid US-based media influencers, I wrote that we need FARA laws for paid political influencers
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Author’s note: This report was originally posted on August 30, 2024. Reposting today in light of the bombshell revelations that some of the biggest MAGA-cheerleading right-wing influencers were on Russia’s payroll. Vital to note my first example of a pro-Putin German journalist who was paid 600,000 Euros by a Putin bag man, and my second example — how Mike Flynn didn’t reveal he was a paid propagandist until after the fact.
“There still seems to be a lack of awareness that disinformation campaigns are driven by paid influencers and fake journalists who produce bullshit content to promote Putin’s bullshit narratives.”—me on Twitter
“Until such time as we shut off the flow of dirty money from fascists and criminals, the influencers will continue to poison us.”—High Fidelity for Bette Dangerous
Broadcast news producers had Hubert Seipel on speed dial.
The German journalist and author was readily available to make the rounds whenever he was invited to talk about Russia. He wrote two books on Putin’s rise to power, and critics noted his sympathies for the Kremlin devil.
An access journalist, Seipel said he’d met with Putin nearly 100 times. But what he failed to disclose to even his book publisher were the payments he received from a Russian oligarch close to Putin.
According to the Cyprus Confidential Project — 3.6 million offshore records given to the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) — Seipel was paid 600,000 Euros in offshore payments from companies tied to Alexei Mordashov, a Russian tycoon under sanctions for his Kremlin ties.
As disinformation analyst Dietmar Pichler told Bette Dangerous, one influential journalist is worth more than 1,000 trolls and Seipel, an award-winning filmmaker, wielded his vast influence on a country reliant on Russia’s oil and gas.
Germany has long been accused of protecting Putin due to that energy dependence and with Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine now barreling toward its fourth year — more than a decade since the initial invasion — renewed scrutiny on so-called “influencers” is way overdue.
While the tactics aren’t new, the reach is significantly greater with the assist of social media platforms, which function as criminal cities on the world’s stage.
While the example of Seipel is a tidy one — pro-Russian journo paid by Russia — the world of the influencer is a murky one.
When disgraced lt. general Mike Flynn wrote an op-ed on Election Day of 2016 in The Hill that promoted the virtues of Turkey, calling the authoritarian regime and its leader Erdogan “our strongest ally against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), as well as a source of stability” while casting aspersions on exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, it was rather curious. He referred to Gülen as “a shady Islamic mullah” and concluded that “radical clerics like Gülen” are “running a scam and deserve no “safe haven.”
His Turkey rah rah seemingly came out of nowhere, as did his targeting of the cleric, who he linked to Bill Clinton.
Well, in March of 2017, the real story broke. Four months after the op-ed was published, Flynn reported that he had received $530,000 from an Erdogan cutout for consulting work and that his handler had reviewed the op-ed before it was published.
In reviewing my American Monster series, and particularly focusing on my investigations into Paul Manafort, it’s very important for Western leaders and consumers of media to know that our reality is being fucked with by paid operatives, and that is why we are struggling to regain a shared narrative of truth.
As I noted on RadPod & Chill last night, I not only want our flag back, I want our shared narrative of truth back.
One way to get that narrative back is for “influencers” to be regulated — we regulate political advertising and foreign agents, so why not “influencers.”
If anyone is being paid to promote political narratives of our foreign adversaries or crypto or anti-Ukraine sentiment or whatever the bullshit of the moment is, they have to disclose that or face legal consequences.
When I was a campaign manager in 2022 (we won btw), I tried to get a social media “influencer” who was being paid by another candidate to stalk and harass my candidate — now councilmember — to disclose on his memes and posts that he was being paid to harass my client. He was trashing her online, making racist memes etc, while also receiving thousands of dollars from her opponent’s campaign.
As I wrote in an investigation for this weekend’s Byline Supplement, the laws and regulations move slower than tech, but they’re coming.
Pavel Durov’s arrest and in France and Brazil’s threat to shut off X is just the beginning.
As we reported on RP&C last night, this has nothing to do with free speech and everything to do with social media platforms being used to traffic crimes against humanity.
And yes, this is personal. Stalker brigades have spent years crafting disinformation campaigns to make those of us who do independent investigative journalism radioactive. I can never announce my political victories, because they swarm me and my places of employment — they try to suicide troll people to death and have succeeded in some cases.
So these aren’t just benign actors shitposting on the internet. These are paid soldiers of war — also known as digital militias — working actively against democracy to try to destroy us from the inside.
As Jim Stewartson said last night, let’s stay focused on the funders of these digital cells, because once the money evaporates, so do the lies and the harms caused by the lies. Each time a campaign I work on concludes, so do the attacks. Until the next round of funding clears.
We shouldn’t be so wide-eyed anymore.
When Kim Kardashian is pushing the favorite currency of money launderers, extortionists, and war criminals, she should have to disclose up front the quarter million she was paid.
Ukrainians know all this. They’ve seen the damage done by “influencers” working for Putin.
As Craig Unger reported in the New Republic in 2022: “For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives.”
He hones in on Paul Manafort — “the Roy Cohn–trained fixer and political consultant who represented the interests of corrupt despots the world over—the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Romania’s Nicolai Ceausescu, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko—and Vladimir Putin.”
As Unger noted:
Manafort’s ties with Russia go back to 2004, when he began his journey into the shadowy world of flight capital, offshore companies, and Russian intelligence. In all, over $75 million in Russian funds flowed through Manafort’s operations into his offshore accounts. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Manafort appointed his constant companion, a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik, as head of his Ukraine operations with full “power of attorney” to interact with pro-Putin oligarchs who were funding Manafort.
Paul Manafort set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives.
As Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, once explained, “Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure.… In every ministry, he has a guy.” And much of it was in service to Putin’s objective of taking over Ukraine, not by military force as we are seeing today but from the inside, via the pro-Putin Party of Regions, whose oligarchs paid Manafort, and its candidate Viktor Yanukovych, an oligarch worth $12 billion.
Manafort launched Yanukovych into the Ukrainian presidency in 2010. But by 2013 the pro-European facade he had created for his candidate had been stripped away, revealing Yanukovych to be merely another of Putin’s pawns. After the massive protests in Maidan Square in 2014, when nearly 100 activists were killed, Yanukovych was forced to leave the presidency and flee to Moscow.
While hiding out in Moscow, Yanukovych was convicted of treason.
And Manafort took on a new American client. His client was another Russian pawn, a facade created of a great businessman and patriot. Well, you know the story from there.
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