Matt Zapotosky, Rachel Weiner, Ellen Nakashima, and Devlin Barrett report Justice Dept. charges Russian woman with interference in midterm elections:
[embeddoc url=”https://freewhitewater.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Khusyaynova-Complaint.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”]Elena Khusyaynova, 44, was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States. Prosecutors said she managed the finances of “Project Lakhta,” a foreign influence operation they said was designed “to sow discord in the U.S. political system” by pushing arguments and misinformation online about a host of divisive political issues, including immigration, the Confederate flag, gun control and National Football League protests during the national anthem.
Prosecutors said the sophisticated campaign Khusyaynova was a part of “did not exclusively adopt one ideological viewpoint” but instead tried to push incendiary positions on various political controversies on social media platforms. The Russians involved, prosecutors said, created fake personas and spread their divisive messages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The group attempted to sow conflict along racial lines and sometimes advocated positions that directly opposed each other, apparently agnostic to whom they supported as long as it turned Americans against one another, prosecutors said.
….
The messages spread widely on the platforms; prosecutors say one Facebook page reached over 1.3 million people, while several of the Twitter accounts had tens of thousands of followers.
….
Court papers say Khusyaynova’s operation was funded by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prigozhin, an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin who is known as “Putin’s chef,” and two companies he controls: Concord Management and Consulting, and Concord Catering. A federal judge in Washington this week expressed reservations about the special-counsel office’s prosecution of one of Prigozhin’s companies and directed Mueller’s prosecutors to provide a more detailed response to the company’s bid to dismiss the central charge.
A criminal complaint filed against Khusyaynova charges that she managed the finances of Project Lakhta, including detailed expenses for activities in the United States.
Between 2016 and 2018, Project Lakhta’s proposed operating budget exceeded $35 million, although only a portion of that money targeted the United States, prosecutors said.