How the Kremlin Allegedly Built a Conservative U.S. Media Startup
Tenet Media posted hundreds of videos, as it was secretly bankrolled by Russia, the Justice Department says
By Dustin Volz and C. Ryan Barber
September 6, 2024
The Wall Street Journal
WASHINGTON—In January 2023, a representative claiming to work with a European finance professional named Eduard Grigoriann shared instructions with a popular U.S. conservative media influencer to start a new YouTube channel. “Find a personality that could serve as the face of the channel,” Grigoriann’s representative said. “For the right candidate we’re willing to pay around $1-2 million per year.” The representative was a fictitious persona, as was Grigoriann, U.S. prosecutors said this week. They were fake identities being secretly operated by two Russian nationals seeking to advance Moscow’s desires to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.
Grigoriann’s offer allegedly laid the groundwork for what would later that year become Tenet Media, a seemingly successful startup incorporated in Tennessee. Prosecutors said since launching in late 2023, the company has posted nearly 2,000 videos that have received more than 16 million views on YouTube alone.
Unlike Russian efforts to seed social media with low-quality bots and trolls that earn little, if any engagement, the alleged scheme helped to launch Tenet as a serious player in conservative media, fueled by content from Trump-supporting personalities who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, had well-known views hostile to U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and advanced narratives that at times aligned with Russian talking points.
Their work for Tenet, which included interviews with members of Donald Trump’s family, repeatedly attracted the attention of prominent Americans, including billionaire Elon Musk, who on his platform, X, interacted with several of the influencers more than 100 times, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. “If the American people knew that these views were being directed and paid for by the Russian government, they wouldn’t have 16 million views,” said Brandon Van Grack, a former top official in the Justice Department’s national security division who oversaw efforts to police covert foreign influence. “And the Russian government knew that, which is why the Russian government went to such lengths to hide their direction and funding.”
‘Heterodox commentators’
The case has raised questions about what Tenet’s founders knew about the $10 million they allegedly received from the two Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, who were indicted Wednesday on charges of conspiring to launder money and operate as unregistered foreign agents. Both defendants, who remain overseas, worked at
Russian state-media outlet RT, which has long been accused of being an organ of Kremlin propaganda. The charges also have spurred complaints from Tenet’s online personalities who say they were as duped as anyone and would have produced the same content anyway.
Tenet wasn’t identified by name in the indictment of the Russians, identified only as “U.S. Company-1,” but a person familiar with the matter confirmed the company is Tenet. The court filing said the outlet described itself as a “network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.” That language matches the description used by Tenet. Its founders, Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, also aren’t identified by name in the document. Tenet didn’t respond to a request for comment sent via its website.
Chen—an influencer in her own right, with 572,000 subscribers on YouTube and 157,000 followers on Instagram—describes herself as the host of two shows on Blaze TV and conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA. She also previously wrote for RT. She didn’t respond to requests for comment via email or various social-media accounts. Donovan couldn’t be reached for comment. “Lauren Chen was an independent contractor, whose contract has been terminated,” Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon said. Turning Point USA didn’t respond to a request for comment. YouTube on Thursday took down the Tenet Media page. The platform said it was “terminating the Tenet Media channel and four channels operated by its owner Lauren Chen as part of our ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”
Duped influencers
Tenet hired a small collection of popular firebrand conservatives, paid them handsomely, and instructed them to churn out viral political content. Within months of its November 2023 launch, Tenet was attracting influential audiences and scored interviews with top Republicans, including former President Donald Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., and daughter-in-law, Lara, after she took over as chair of the Republican National Committee.
The indictment doesn’t identify the influencers who were recruited beyond referring to them as unnamed commentators. Several who were allegedly paid with Russian funds issued statements denying any knowledge or involvement with foreign election interference.
Tim Pool, a conservative voice who has repeatedly referred to Ukraine as “the enemy” and urged the U.S. to stop supporting Kyiv since Russia invaded the country two years ago, said on X that his YouTube videos were merely licensed by Tenet, and that “never at any point” did the company have editorial control over the content. “Putin is a scumbag, Russia sucks,” he added. “Myself and other influencers were victims in this alleged scheme,” Benny Johnson, a popular conservative broadcaster who also contracted with Tenet, wrote on X. “My lawyers will handle anyone who states or suggests otherwise.”
In a press briefing Wednesday, Attorney General Merrick Garland indicated Johnson, Pool and other hired talent were unaware of the Russian plot. “The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government,” Garland said.
Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov, in comments posted to the Telegram messaging app, denied the accusations. “We categorically reject the false accusations against Russian information structures and demand the lifting of the administrative restrictions imposed on the work of our journalists in America,” he said.
‘Happy to work with the Russian firm’
The 32-page indictment of Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, issued in Manhattan, repeatedly suggests that Tenet’s founders knew that Grigoriann was fake and not the real source of Tenet’s funding. There were ample alleged clues.
Prosecutors said one of Grigoriann’s fictitious associates misspelled Grigoriann’s name in at least four different emails to Tenet founder Chen, who is referred to in the indictment as Founder-1. In one instance, the indictment said, one of Grigoriann’s associates emailed a potential Tenet hire and signed the message as Grigoriann, rather than as the associate, confusing the influencer who received the email. In another, prosecutors said, Chen was informed by her funders that management and marketing of the new company they were funding would “be done by the Russian firm we agreed to hire,” but added that Chen would remain chief executive. Chen replied she was “happy to work with the Russian firm.” Prosecutors said she also acknowledged in private correspondence that Tenet’s investors were Russians.
Under the veil of Grigoriann and three fake personas of associates who worked for him, the Russians started paying Chen $8,000 a month, prosecutors alleged, using a shell entity in the Czech Republic to make payments to a Canadian company that Chen, herself a Canadian citizen, owned.
In February of last year, according to the indictment, they suggested a “specific shortlist of candidates” to try to recruit for the new media venture. Chen replied that one of the influencers they wanted to hire would cost “well over 2 million a year,” but the Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva made clear that wouldn’t be a problem.
Grigoriann was “OK with over $2m as long as we get the right person on board, under the right conditions,” the Russians replied, prosecutors said.
Even when Chen cautioned that the influencer would demand closer to $5 million a year—a sum she said would threaten profitability of the startup—the funders didn’t balk. “We would love to move forward,” they replied, according to the indictment.
At times, the talent recruited for Tenet appeared somewhat dubious of Grigoriann. Chen relayed to her funders that some of the influencers wanted more information about Grigoriann before moving forward. In April 2023, Chen herself did Google searches for “Eduard Grigoriann” and his bank account, and turned up nothing. A couple of weeks later, the Russians sent Chen a visual résumé of Grigoriann that included an image of a man on a private jet peering wistfully out a window.
The résumé said Grigoriann was born in Brussels, held a master’s in “Accounting, Finance and Political Science” and had worked as a financial analyst and consultant around Europe and in
Singapore before starting his own private equity and wealth management company. “Mr. Grigoriann intends to establish a conservative news outlet that offers expertise and experience for a wide audience in the Western world and beyond,” the résumé concluded.
In the end, one influencer agreed to work with Tenet Media for $400,000 a month plus a $100,000 signing bonus, while another received $100,000 per video. On Thursday, Tayler Hansen, one of Tenet’s star talents, said on X that the company had “ended” following the Justice Department indictment. “I will now be pursuing other job opportunities so I may continue to report on vital news stories this election season,” Hansen said, adding he was looking for independent funding for his work.
Dustin Volz is a Washington-based cybersecurity and intelligence reporter for The Wall Street Journal. His coverage focuses on the national security and geopolitical dimensions of nation-state hacking conflict, digital espionage, online influence operations, election interference, and government surveillance. Before joining the Journal in 2018, Dustin worked at Reuters and National Journal. His reporting has been internationally recognized, including by the White House Correspondents’ Association, the Gerald Loeb Awards, the Society of Publishers in Asia, and the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. In addition to Washington, Dustin has reported from London, Berlin and the Dominican Republic. He is a graduate of Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Prior to starting his journalism career, Dustin spent a year living in Indonesia as a Fulbright teaching assistant.
Ryan Barber is a reporter in The Wall Street Journal’s Washington, D.C. bureau, where he covers the Justice Department and legal affairs. Prior to joining the Journal, Ryan reported on the Justice Department and federal law enforcement for Insider and the National Law Journal. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ryan began his journalism career in high school at his hometown newspaper, the (Wilkes-Barre, PA) Times Leader and later worked at the Reading Eagle and Cape Cod Times.