Transcript - America This Week, September 6, 2024: "Hall of Political Mirrors"

Walter calls a scandal. Russiagate is exhumed again. Walter explains weasels, both the human and actual kind. Also, "Sredni Vashtar," by Saki.

Matt Taibbi: All right. Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: And I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt Taibbi: Walter, last time we were on the air, we got off the air and within five seconds, what did you say?

Walter Kirn: That was on Monday.

Matt Taibbi: On Monday, right. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: Yeah, that was on Monday after our livestream. Because all of my soothe-saying is done, of course, off-camera, I said, “Matt, by the time we get on the air Thursday, there will have been a big scandal. I can feel it brewing and my gypsy bones.” And it’s really only that as you internalize the narrative of this election year, and of the last few years, of the last few couple of elections, you get a sense of what they call the pace of operations in military terms.

And the pace of operations had slacked off a little bit, and it lacked certain ingredients that it usually has, which are giant paranoid conspiracies that will have effects on the ultimate vote, and the conditions afterward. And just before the debate here, I thought was a great time for that to occur. People accuse me of conspiracy thinking, but it’s only that I’m trying to observe the patterns. I don’t know if these things come from God. I don’t know if they come from headquarters. I don’t know if they come from the great storyteller buried in the earth somewhere under the Hopi reservation. But sure enough... And you said to me, “Wow, we should note that if you’re right or something. We should keep those clips in a file, those after chats,” because...

Matt Taibbi: Actually we probably do have them somewhere, so maybe we can release those. But yeah, you said to me after the show, there’s going to be something that’ll be all over the news and everybody’s going to be flipping out about it, basically by the end of the week. And voila, right on cue, Russiagate comes back. I forget which Friday, the 13th movie it was, where Jason, who’s been killed like 19 times, comes jumping out of Crystal Lake, and there’s a person in a canoe. But this story just will not die. No matter how many times we kill Russiagate, it will continue to resurface and crawl out of the sea covered in maggots and just advance towards the town. And it has come back again. There is no other card to play than Russia is interfering in the election.

So let’s be clear, there is a real case here. Now, there are some unknowns in this case, which I think will be interesting to discover as we go through the indictment. But there is a thing that is really against the law that they are looking at, and there are some significant figures attached to this story, but the degree to which everybody is going to flip out about this is going to be way out of proportion to reality. And then I can almost guarantee, similar to your prediction, that there are going to be some shoes to drop factually later in this story that will make this look a little different than it looks now or maybe a lot different. But let’s just get started on the basic overview of this new Russiagate panic, which is... It dropped, I guess, on Wednesday.

Walter Kirn: That would be yesterday.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah. Right. So let’s look at the NBC coverage, which wasn’t the most crazy.

Speaker 1: With two months ago before the election, the Biden administration says it is cracking down on foreign countries trying to influence opinion in the US. The target today, Russia. The DOJ announcing the seizure of 32 internet domains used or sponsored by the Russian government, it says, to spread bogus news stories.

Merrick Garland: These websites were designed to appear to American readers as if they were major US news sites.

Speaker 1: The DOJ also indicting two employees of the Russia-funded media company, RT, which was banned in the US following the invasion of Ukraine.

Christopher Wray: Since at least last year, RT has used people living and working inside the US to facilitate contracts with American media figures.

Speaker 1: The two Russian nationals are accused of running a 10 million scheme to fund and direct a US company producing videos, mostly directed to the publicly stated goals of the Russian government. According to the indictment, it comes a day after former New York State employee, Linda’s Sun pleaded not guilty to taking millions from China in exchange for influencing top levels of the New York State government.

Kathy Hochul: Well, the moment we discovered the misconduct, we fired this individual.

Matt Taibbi: So that’s interesting.

Kathy Hochul: I’m outraged by this behavior.

Speaker 1: The couple allegedly living a lavish lifestyle with multi-million dollar homes, luxury cars, and expensive gifts.

Speaker 2: The Department of Justice says that she was a threat to our national security. In what way?

Matt Taibbi: All right. Okay. So that’s the basic overview. They didn’t give you the names of the people involved. We will. That’s in the indictment that was handed down. That story also didn’t tell you the breadth of the reaction. The State Department on Wednesday announced that it was cracking down on operations of the parent company of a lot of Russian media firms. Rossiya Segodnya, and that’s the parent to companies like Sputnik and RIA Novosti. Treasury Department also announced a series of sanctions against a dozen people linked to this cadre of former RT employees, including the former editor-in-chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan.

And then there was an indictment by the Justice Department that really lays out what the big central case was all about. And it’s complicated. See, as you say, Walter, the issue here is that the ordinary person is going to have no way to sift through what actually happened here. But you have a Russian company, or a bunch of Russians who funnel a bunch of money through a series of shell companies.

Walter Kirn: How much money is it in question here?

Matt Taibbi: It’s $9.7 million. That’s what it says in the indictment anyway. And then there are a pair of people who are described as Founder One and Founder Two. So there are Russians. There are two Russians who are named in the indictment, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Yelena Afanasyeva.

Walter Kirn: Matt, why can you pronounce those names? Well, that seems suspicious to me.

Matt Taibbi: Kalashnikov, I think we’ve all had...

Walter Kirn: Okay, that one I could do.

Matt Taibbi: Yeah, exactly. So the Russians are the bad guys in this story. They’re the ones who are allegedly bringing the money.

Walter Kirn: Are they Russians in Russia or Russians in America?

Matt Taibbi: It doesn’t specify where exactly they are. The Justice Department announcement said that they were indicted, it did not say that they were arrested or that they knew where they were. So they’re the people against whom charges have been filed.

Walter Kirn: I love how indictments look.

Matt Taibbi: I know. I know.

Walter Kirn: I love the typeface. I love the...

Matt Taibbi: It just never changes.

Walter Kirn: Yeah.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Okay. So USA v. Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva. And so here it starts off by identifying over the past year, RT and its employees, Kalashnikov and Yelena, they deployed nearly 10 million to Fund and Direct US Company One, which is a company we think that’s called TENET. It’s based in Tennessee. And running TENET, essentially...

Walter Kirn: Is it named after the movie? I wonder. Isn’t there a spy movie that came out? The Christopher Nolan movie-

Matt Taibbi: There is, yeah. It’s kind of a cool movie I think. I go back and forth. Ironically, I go back and forth about whether it’s a cool movie because the movie’s about going back and forth. But yeah, it’s also the name of a former CIA director. And then there were these two other figures. There are the bad guys. Create this company, TENET, based in Tennessee. Money is funneled through a whole bunch of different entities, so it’s disguised. And then there are two people who are identified as Founder One and Founder Two, Founder One most everybody thinks is this internet personality, Lauren Chen. We’re going to get to her because she’s really interesting. Founder Two is this person, Liam Donovan. And I’ve never heard of him, and we’ll show his Twitter account in a moment.

But the story’s really not about either of those people. The really important part of the story are the figures who are described as Commentator One, Commentator Two, and so on. And these figures, we think, we’re not exactly sure which one corresponds to which, but we’re pretty sure... Here, let’s just read it. “Founder One and Founder Two also work together to deceive two us online commentators, Commentator One and Commentator Two who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers. Founder One and Founder Two, contracted with Commentator One and Commentator Two to produce videos using their own names and leveraging their existing audiences for license and publication.”

And then here’s a really, really interesting part of this indictment. “Kalashnikov, Afanasyeva, Founder One and Founder Two worked together to mask US Company One’s true source of funding, I.E.R.T., by falsely portraying to Commentator One and Commentator Two, that US Company One was sponsored by a private investor named Edward Grigoriann.” So in essence, what they’re saying is that the Russians and the two Americans, or Lauren Chen and Leon Donovan, we think, that’s reportedly, the conspiracy here is that they represented to these commentators who turn out to be very big names. And there are probably Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson among others. These are sort of prominent heterodox personalities.

Some would say they’re right wing. Some would say that.. I wouldn’t really say Tim Pool is right wing. I don’t think that’s fully an accurate description. I think Rubin is... He would be a self-described conservative, but either way, they are very big names in kind of the online media world. And the idea is that they are now-

Walter Kirn: Matt, I’m a little confused here. They’re unindicted, but it is also stipulated that they were deceived?

Matt Taibbi: Yes. So the conspiracy is that they were deceived.

Walter Kirn: But they’re not members of the conspiracy. In some sense, they’re victims of it?

Matt Taibbi: Yes. The indictment portrays them that way, although it also has some pretty unkind moments about them. So yeah, here’s the part that’s not going to look good for the commentators. “On or about February 8th, 2023, Founder One reported to Persona One on Founder One’s outreach to Commentator One and Commentator Two. Founder One advised that Commentator One said, “It would need to be closer to 5 million yearly for him to be interested.” And that Commentator Two said, “It would take 100K per weekly episode to make it worth his while.” Founder One cautioned that from a profitability standpoint, it would be very hard for the company to recoup the costs for the likes of Commentator One and Commentator Two based on ad revenue from web traffic or sponsors alone.”

So now that’s hearsay, right? Because we’re not hearing... the government isn’t claiming it’s hearing these big media personalities say that directly. What they’re reporting is that somebody like Lauren Chen told that to the Russians, that this is how much they would need to do this. But that’s a pretty damning detail if it’s true.

Walter Kirn: What part of it is damning?

Matt Taibbi: “Well, I’m going to need $5 million a year to do this.”

Walter Kirn: On the part of one of the commentators.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Exactly. Somebody comes to-

Walter Kirn: And what were they being asked to do? I’m-

Matt Taibbi: Produce content.

Walter Kirn: So this was going to be their main source of revenue, or-

Matt Taibbi: No. No. Nope, they were going to be independent contractors. Now let’s look at some of the statements. So Tim Poole has a statement that he put out. This is important because now this ends speculation. Okay, so here’s Tim Poole saying, “My statement regarding allegations in the DOJ indictment. Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims. I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or what they’re instructed.”

Then there is also a statement from Rubin, I believe. A statement on the DOJ indictment. “These allegations clearly show that I and other commentators were victims of the scheme. I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period. People of the Internet was a silly show covering viral videos, which ended four months ago.” And then I believe there was also a statement by Benny Johnson. I didn’t know Benny Johnson. Did you?