Ex-Trump advisers help to grow pro-Russia website that spreads misinformation
George Papadopoulos and others involved in Intelligencer, increasingly popular source of news in rightwing circles.
Ex-Trump advisers help to grow pro-Russia website that spreads misinformation
George Papadopoulos and others involved in Intelligencer, increasingly popular source of news in rightwing circles
Amid the recent crackdown on Russian influence in American media, a group of former Trump advisers and operatives have quietly helped build a pro-Russian website that frequently spreads debunked conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine, election fraud and vaccines.
Working alongside contributors for Kremlin state media, the former Donald Trump policy aide George Papadopoulos, his wife, Simona Mangiante, and others have become editorial board members of the website Intelligencer, which is increasingly becoming a source of news for those in the rightwing ecosystem.
The growth of the website, which has not been reported on before, comes at a time when the US is seeking to crack down on Russian influence ahead of the 2024 election. Recently, the justice department charged two members of RT (formerly known as Russia Today) with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments they allegedly made to “recruit unwitting American influencers”. It also placed sanctions on RT’s editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, and nine other employees.
Intelligencer appears to be gaining in popularity. It recently had its best month for internet traffic, with an increase of nearly 300% during August, according to data from Similarweb, and its articles have been shared on social media by the conspiracist Alex Jones, former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler and former Trump aide Roger Stone.
According to Emma Briant, an associate professor of news and political communication at Monash University in Australia, the use of well-known figures to spread pro-Russian political messages represents a shift in disinformation tactics.
“Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has increasingly been forced to rely on networks of proxies and influencers whose conspiracist ‘brand’ generates income and audiences through social media monetization and some of whom Russia has now been caught covertly subsidizing,” Briant said.
The website’s opaque ownership structure makes it difficult to understand its financial backing, and there is no direct evidence of Kremlin funding. There is no corporate entity listed anywhere on the website, just a business address in Los Angeles.
Although much of the website’s content focuses on issues relating to American politics, the site actually began in Australia, with a little-known media outlet called TNT Radio, which launched in 2022. Show hosts and guests frequently deny climate change, discuss culture war issues in the US, espouse pro-Russian viewpoints on the war in Ukraine, and spread conspiracy theories about Covid-19.
Jennifer Squires, one of the station’s owners, explained in an interview that Intelligencer began as a way for TNT Radio to have a written publication to complement its radio station. To develop the new site, Squires said she turned to George Eliason, an American journalist who has lived in eastern Ukraine for more than 10 years. Eliason, who already had a show on TNT Radio at the time, has formerly appeared on RT and blames Kyiv for the war in Ukraine.
But Squires said she and co-owner Mike Ryan quickly grew disillusioned with the website’s planned appearance, and sought to disassociate themselves from it. However, Eliason continued to develop it, involving several others who had previously appeared on his radio show. The site appears to have launched at the end of 2023 – and nearly half of Intelligencer’s board members are either former aides, surrogates or fake electors for Trump’s previous two campaigns.
“The editorial board is filled with very accomplished people. All are, or were, experts at the top of their field and extremely qualified to write articles inside their fields of knowledge,” Eliason said.
Perhaps the most well-known ex-Trump official is Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy aide on Trump’s 2016 campaign. In 2018, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Kremlin-linked professor who told him Russia had dirt on Hilary Clinton.
Mangiante, his wife, has written several posts for the site about debunked conspiracy theories involving the Bidens and Ukraine. In January, she posted an interview with a former Ukrainian lawmaker, Andrii Derkach, who repeated false claims of bribery about the Biden family in Ukraine. In 2020, the US placed sanctions on Derkach, calling him an active Russian agent; Derkach, who now is running for political office in Russia, previously met with Rudy Giuliani and purported to offer evidence of corruption against the Bidens.
“Intelligencer appears to be one of several [Russia-friendly] operations targeting the upcoming US elections, leveraging a network of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, said.
Mangiante, along with fellow board member Igor Lopatonok, appears to have parlayed this work into a new documentary about the Hunter Biden laptop saga called Hunter’s Laptop: Requiem for Ukraine. According to social media posts, the documentary premiered on 5 September at the Trump International hotel in Chicago. Eliason wrote the script, which was filmed by Lopatonok, who has frequently collaborated with Oliver Stone on prior anti-Ukrainian documentaries and fawning films of dictators.
“Mr Lopatonok wanted fresh eyes from an investigative journalist and a different perspective for the story,” Eliason said. “Through the combined interviews, we were able to plumb deeper and raise questions that had not been asked before.”
Eliason also said that the address listed on Intelligencer’s website was provided by Lopatonok.
Lopatonok did not respond to requests for comment. However, he now appears to have implemented part of his business in Moscow. According to Russian corporate records, Lopatonok and his wife, Vera Tomilova, also an Intelligencer board member, registered a Global 3 Pictures LLC in Moscow in February.
According to invitations for the Hunter Biden documentary premiere, the event was hosted by the Christian Orthodox Coalition, an organization which claims to educate Orthodox Christians on social and cultural issues. Four of the organization’s board members are also board members of Intelligencer, including Papadopoulos, Mangiante and Lopatonok.
The fourth board member is Olga Ravasi, who was formerly the chairwoman of Serbs for Trump in 2020 and currently runs the Serbian American Voters Alliance political action committee. In March, Intelligencer posted about a Serbs for Trump kick-off event in Wisconsin with the state’s Republican senator Ron Johnson and former Trump acting director of national intelligence Ric Grenell.
Three other editorial board members also have close connections to the Trump campaigns. Leah Hoopes and Greg Stenstrom, both from Pennsylvania, have written a book falsely alleging the 2020 election was stolen. Both of them have been litigants in court cases challenging the results of the election in Pennsylvania, and Hoopes was one of Pennsylvania’s fake electors, who falsely signed paperwork saying that Trump had won the election.
Tyler Nixon, Roger Stone’s personal attorney, also serves on the board and hosts his own show on TNT Radio. The former Radio Sputnik journalist Lee Stranahan is also involved.
Nixon, Hoopes, Stenstrom and Stranahan did not respond to requests for comment.
Most of the site’s content appears to be created by Eliason, and Trevor Fitzgibbon, who was the spokesperson for American Values 2024, a Super Pac that supported Robert F Kennedy Jr’s presidential campaign. The website has several posts promoting Kennedy’s campaign.
Eliason said that the website is funded out of pocket and the contributors contribute pieces because it “because it makes sense to them”.
Many of the articles promote debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines and fraud in the 2020 presidential election, as well as stories that are aggressively anti-Ukrainian. In a May article, Eliason referred to those who voted for a $61bn aid package for Ukraine as “reprehensible”.
However, the site has even more direct ties to Russia beyond its content. One of its board members is Anna Soroka, an adviser to Leonid Pasechnik, the head of the self-styled Luhansk People’s Republic. In February 2023, the US sanctioned Pasechnik, calling him the “Putin-appointed interim head of the former so-called Luhansk People’s Republic”.
In 2020, Bellingcat found that Soroka had emailed back and forth with Maj Gen Andrey Ilchenko, who has been linked to Russia’s military intelligence agency known as the GRU.
Intelligencer’s content has also attracted the eyes of European propaganda outlets. The website Pravda-en has linked to and promoted Intelligencer articles, including one that attacked the OCCRP report on Lopatonok. According to a February report by France’s Viginum agency, which was set up in 2021 to combat foreign disinformation, a group of websites that operate under the Pravda name are working in coordination to spread pro-Russian content across the European Union.
“With an editorial board that reads like a who’s who of Putinist propaganda, Intelligencer is not your usual Russian ‘fake news’ site,” Briant said. “We may see more efforts like Intelligencer, which brings together cohorts of recognizable pro-Russian writers and consolidates their effort into a respectable-looking ‘news’ platform aiming to promote Russia’s influence in the US election and beyond.”
