Amid a recent crackdown on Russian influence in the American media, a group of former advisers and operatives to President Trump have covertly helped build pro-Russian websites that frequently spread debunked conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, election fraud and vaccines.
Former Donald Trump policy adviser George Papadopoulos and his wife, Simona Mangiante, have joined Kremlin state media contributors on the editorial board of the website The Intelligencer, which has increasingly become a news source for members of the right-wing ecosystem.
The website’s previously unreported growth comes at a time when the U.S. is cracking down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 elections. The Department of Justice recently charged two people from RT (formerly Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for allegedly paying “unwitting U.S. influencers” to “recruit” them. It also sanctioned RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.
The Intelligencer appears to be growing in popularity: Internet traffic to the site increased nearly 300% in August, its highest month in recent memory, according to data from SimilarWeb, and Intelligencer articles are being shared on social media by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler and former aide Roger Stone.
Emma Bryant, an associate professor of news and political communication at Monash University in Australia, said the use of celebrities to spread pro-Russia political messages represented a shift in disinformation tactics.
“Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has had to rely increasingly on a network of proxies and influencers whose conspiracy theorist ‘brands’ generate revenue and audiences through social media monetization, and Russia has now been found to have covertly funded some of them,” Bryant said.
The website’s opaque ownership structure makes its financial backing difficult to understand, and there is no direct evidence of funding from the Kremlin. The website does not list a legal entity, only a business address in Los Angeles.
While much of the website’s content focuses on issues related to American politics, the site actually originated in Australia from a little-known outlet called TNT Radio, which launched in 2022. The show’s hosts and guests frequently deny climate change, discuss culture war issues in America, advocate pro-Russian views on the war in Ukraine, and spread conspiracy theories about COVID-19.
In an interview, Jennifer Squires, one of the station’s owners, explained that Intelligencer began as a way for TNT Radio to have a publication to complement its radio station. Squires said that to develop the new site, they enlisted the help of George Eliasson, an American journalist who has lived in eastern Ukraine for more than a decade. Eliasson, who already had a show on TNT Radio at the time, had previously appeared on RT and argued that Kiev was to blame for the Ukrainian war.
But Squires said she and co-owner Mike Ryan soon became disillusioned with the website’s planned look and asked to disassociate. But Eliason continued to develop the site, bringing in several people who had previously appeared on his radio show. The site appears set to launch in late 2023, with nearly half of Intelligencer’s executives being former aides, surrogates or fake campaign staffers from Trump’s past two campaigns.
“The editorial board is made up of extremely talented people; they are all leading experts in their fields and extremely qualified to write within their own areas of knowledge,” Eliasson said.
Perhaps the best-known former Trump official is Mr. Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about contacts with a Kremlin-linked professor who told him Russia had dirty information about Hillary Clinton.
Mangiante’s wife has written several articles on the site about debunked conspiracy theories about the Biden family and Ukraine. In January, it published an interview with Andriy Derkach, a former Ukrainian lawmaker who repeated false allegations of bribery involving the Biden family in Ukraine. In 2020, the United States imposed sanctions on Derkach, calling him an active Russian agent. Derkach, who is now running for public office in Russia, claimed to have previously met with Rudy Giuliani and presented evidence of corruption against the Biden family.
“The Intelligencer appears to be one of several (pro-Russia) operations targeting the upcoming US elections, leveraging networks of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” said Olga Lautman, a senior research fellow at the Centre for European Policy Analysis.
Mangiante, along with director Igor Lopatnok, appears to have applied his findings to “Hunter’s Laptop: A Requiem for Ukraine,” a new documentary about the Hunter Biden laptop furor. According to social media posts, the documentary premiered at the Trump International Hotel in Chicago on September 5. The screenplay was written by Eliasson and filmed by Lopatnok, a frequent Oliver Stone collaborator on anti-Ukraine documentaries and films praising dictators.
“Mr. Lopatnok wanted the fresh perspective of an investigative journalist and a different perspective on this case,” Eliason said. “Through multiple interviews, we were able to dig deeper and ask questions that hadn’t been asked before.”
Eliasson also said the address listed on the Intelligencer website was provided by Lopatnok.
Lopatnok did not respond to requests for comment, but he appears to now be running part of his business in Moscow: Russian corporate records show that he and his wife, Vera Tomirova, who is also a director at Intelligencer, registered Global 3 Pictures LLC in Moscow in February.
According to an invitation for the premiere of the Hunter Biden documentary, the event was hosted by the Christian Orthodox Union, an organization that aims to educate Orthodox Christians on social and cultural issues. Four of the organization’s executives, including Papadopoulos, Mangiante and Lopatnok, are also Intelligencer executives.
The fourth board member is Olga Ravasi, who served as chairwoman of Serbian Americans for Trump in 2020 and currently runs the Serbian American Voters League political action committee. In March, Intelligencer ran a story about a Serbian Americans for Trump kickoff event in Wisconsin that was attended by the state’s Republican senator, Ron Johnson, and Trump’s acting director of national intelligence, Rick Grenell.
Three other editorial board members also have close ties to the Trump campaign. Leah Hoopes and Greg Stenstrom, both from Pennsylvania, have written books falsely alleging that the 2020 election was stolen. Both are parties to a lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s election results, and Hoopes was one of the fake electors in Pennsylvania who signed papers falsely stating that Trump won the election.
Tyler Nixon, Roger Stone’s personal lawyer and host of his own show on TNT Radio, is also on the board, as is former Radio Sputnik journalist Lee Stranahan.
Nixon, Hoopes, Stenstrom and Stranahan did not respond to requests for comment.
Most of the site’s content appears to have been created by Mr. Eliason and Trevor Fitzgibbon, a former spokesman for American Values 2024, a super PAC that supported the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The website contains several posts promoting Mr. Kennedy’s campaign.
Eliason said the website is self-funded and contributors submit articles “because it’s meaningful to them.”
Many of the articles promote now-debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines and fraud in the 2020 presidential election, as well as aggressively anti-Ukraine stories. In a May article, Eliasson called those who voted for a $61 billion bailout for Ukraine “reprehensible.”
But the site has direct ties to Russia beyond its content. One of its executives is Anna Soroka, an adviser to Leonid Pasechnik, head of the self-declared Luhansk People’s Republic. In February 2023, the United States imposed sanctions on Pasechnik, calling him “the interim head of the former Luhansk People’s Republic appointed by President Putin.”
In 2020, Bellingcat discovered that Soroka had exchanged emails with Major General Andrei Ilchenko, who is said to have ties to Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU.
Intelligenthr’s content has attracted the attention of European propaganda media. The website Pravda.en has linked to and promoted Intelligenthr’s articles, including articles attacking the OCCRP report on Lopatnok. A report published in February by Vizinum, a French intelligence agency created in 2021 to counter foreign disinformation, said a group of websites operating under the name Pravda were working together to spread pro-Russian content across the European Union.
“With an editorial board that features heavyweights in the Putinist propaganda world, The Intelligencer is not your typical Russian ‘fake news’ site,” Bryant said. “We may see more Intelligencer-like efforts in the future that bring together prominent pro-Russia reporters and consolidate their efforts into a polished ‘news’ platform aimed at promoting Russian influence in the U.S. election and beyond.”
