Nearly ten million dollars from a sanctioned Russian broadcaster, a fictional European backer invented to hide it, and six popular American commentators who say they never knew whose payroll they were on.
In September 2024 the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed an indictment that described one of the more elegant Russian influence schemes of the decade. Rather than build fake accounts or clone news sites, the operation simply rented reach that already existed. It funnelled close to ten million dollars from RT, the Russian state broadcaster, into a Tennessee-based company that paid established American commentators to keep making the videos they were already making. The audience was real, the influencers were real, and the only fiction was the source of the money.
The company and the cover story
The company was Tenet Media, founded by the Canadian commentator Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan, neither of whom was charged. According to the Justice Department’s case, Tenet took in roughly nine point seven million dollars between 2023 and 2024 and passed most of it to a small roster of contributors, a flow of money reported in detail as the case broke.
The money did not arrive with an RT logo attached. Prosecutors say the founders told at least some of the talent that the funding came from a private investor, a wealthy European financier named Eduard Grigoriann. Grigoriann did not exist. The indictment describes him as a fabricated persona built to give the operation a plausible bank account and a face, so that anyone who asked where the budget was coming from would receive an answer that led nowhere near Moscow.
The two people actually running it
Behind Tenet, according to the indictment, stood two RT employees, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva. Prosecutors charged them with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The documents portray them as the hidden managers of the American operation, weighing in on content, steering topics, and at one point circulating a video that a suspected Russian foreign-agent persona had produced, then watching the Tenet team push to publish it.
The scheme mattered because of who it reached. Tenet’s contributors included some of the largest political voices on YouTube and X, among them Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin, along with Lauren Southern, Tayler Hansen, and Matt Christiansen. Their combined following ran into the millions. Reporting on the case, including from CBS News, described payments that reached hundreds of thousands of dollars a month for a single creator’s output, sums that align an incentive without ever having to dictate a script.
What the operation bought
The genius of the arrangement was that it did not require anyone to lie on Russia’s behalf. The commentators already held the views RT wanted amplified. The money simply guaranteed volume, consistency, and a steady output of content skeptical of U.S. support for Ukraine and corrosive of trust in American institutions. Attorney General Merrick Garland described the aim plainly, saying the Justice Department would not tolerate attempts by an authoritarian regime to exploit the country’s free exchange of ideas to covertly advance its own propaganda.
That is the move worth understanding. Traditional propaganda pushes a message the audience would otherwise reject. This operation paid to accelerate messages the audience already welcomed, delivered by trusted messengers the audience had chosen for itself. The Russian hand was invisible not because it was hidden well, though it was, but because there was nothing in the content that looked foreign. It sounded exactly like domestic American political commentary, because that is what it was.
The influencers say they were deceived
The contributors were not charged, and several responded publicly that they had been victims of the scheme rather than participants in it. They said they were commentators hired to make videos, that they retained editorial control, and that they had no knowledge their paychecks traced back to RT. On the facts in the indictment, that account is consistent with how the operation was built. The Grigoriann persona existed precisely so that the talent could be paid without being told, which means their surprise, if genuine, is a feature of the design rather than a hole in it.
Outcome and what changed
Tenet Media collapsed almost immediately after the indictment, dropped by YouTube and abandoned by its contributors, most of whom kept their own channels running and recast themselves as victims of the scheme. The two RT employees were charged but remain in Russia, beyond the reach of American courts. The following month the U.S. State Department escalated, describing RT as effectively an arm of Russian intelligence and pressing allies to treat it accordingly, and a wave of further sanctions and platform restrictions followed.
None of that closed the underlying door. RT was already sanctioned and largely deplatformed in the West when it built the Tenet channel, and the whole point of the arrangement was to reach American audiences without RT’s name attached. The indictment shut down one company. The model it exposed, a shell firm, a fictional backer, and real influencers paid to keep doing what they already did, costs little and can be rebuilt under a new name, which is the part of the case that has not gone away.
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