Pro-Trump Media Firm Abruptly Folds After Russia Scheme Exposed

Tenet Media is no more.

The conservative media network folded Thursday night, just one day after the Department of Justice unsealed an indictment accusing it of being funded by Russian state-controlled media, according to Tenet Media field reporter Tayler Hansen.

The indictment accused Tenet and its founders of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a statement.

The company’s founders, Canadian Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovon, have not yet commented publicly on the scandal. The fallout from the alleged propaganda scheme lost Chen her broadcasting gig with another far-right media group, Blaze Media, which has already wiped episodes of her podcast from Spotify and deleted her contributor page from its website. Blaze Media CEO Tyler Cardon told Semafor that the conservative anchor had been “terminated.”

The Russian funds paid for videos by popular far-right personalities, including podcaster Tim Pool and Lauren Southern. Pool has since described himself as a “victim” in the Tenet scandal.

“I have been contacted by the FBI as a potential victim of a crime,” Pool posted on X on Thursday. “The FBI believes I have information relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation and have requested a voluntary interview. I will be offering my assistance in this matter.”

YouTube also wiped Tenet Media’s content from its platform “after careful review” following the indictment, telling NBC News that its decision to erase the channel and its affiliates was part of “ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”

Tenet is just the latest flavor of Russian-backed misinformation campaign that has plagued American politics, but it is a sign of just how sizable the foreign country’s budget is in 2024 for influencing the November election.

Donald Trump on Friday inexplicably started detailing two horrific sexual assault allegations made against him, as part of a hapless attempt to discredit a completely different sexual assault allegation.

During a press conference in New York City, Trump gave rambling remarks in which he made gross references to two women who claim he sexually abused them. His comments came shortly after oral arguments concluded for the day in Trump’s appeal of the verdict in E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation case against him. 

Trump’s lawyers argued in court Friday that  Carroll’s 2023 rape trial was tainted by the presence of other allegations. While attempting to follow their lead to downplay Carroll’s claims against him, Trump recapped the accusations two women made against him during the trial—as if that would somehow make him seem less guilty. 

“There were two witnesses. One is a woman who followed me for years,” Trump said, talking about Jessica Leeds, who told jurors at Carroll’s civil trial that Trump had groped her when they sat next to each other on a plane to New York City in the late 1970s. 

“There was no conversation. It was like out of the blue. It was like a tussle,” Leeds claimed at the time. 

Trump’s characterization of the interaction was quite a bit different: “She said in 1979 I was in an airplane with her, commercial flight, and … we became very intimate,” said the former president.

As he told the story, Trump interrupted himself to say, “I was famous then too. I’ve been famous for a long time,” apropos of nothing. Later Trump tried to return to this point, dismissing the claims, saying, “It’s very funny, when you’re rich and famous, you get lot of people come up with a lot of stories.” Combined, Trump’s remarks sounded eerily similar to his infamous Access Hollywood tape, where he claimed that “when you’re a star they let you” grab their genitals.

Throughout his explanation of the supposedly “totally made-up story,” Trump continued to insist that he didn’t know when exactly their interaction had taken place, noting that this likely happened “a long time ago,” in 1979.

“I believe I had some pretty big success then, and I was being talked about a lot. Maybe The Art of the Deal was out, you know, sometime after that, I’m not sure. But I was well known,” Trump said. As it happens, The Art of the Deal came out almost 10 years later, in 1987. In attempting to make light of the serious allegation, Trump boasted about his popularity and seemed to reveal his own faulty memory. 

“And passengers are coming into the plane, and she said I was making out with her, and then, after 15 minutes—and then she changed her story a couple of times, maybe it was quicker—that I grabbed her at a certain part, and that was when she had enough,” Trump said. 

“So think of the impracticality of this,” Trump urged. Later, he implied that her story made no sense because “back in those days” there was an arm rest between passengers on airplanes. 

“What are the chances of that happening? What are the chances?” Trump questioned. “And, frankly, I know you’re going to think it’s a terrible thing to say, but it couldn’t have happened. It didn’t happen. And, she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.”

The story was “a total lie,” according to Trump. “Now, I assume she’ll sue me now for defamation like I got sued by E. Jean Carroll.”

“No police reports, no witnesses, no corroboration of any kind. No criminal suggestions. No nothing,” Trump said, appearing to read off a card in front of him. 

Trump then moved on to the allegations made against him by journalist Natasha Stoynoff, who’d testified that while she visited Mar-a-Lago to interview Trump and Melania for an article in 2005, the former president had pushed her against a wall and forcibly kissed her, before they were discovered by Trump’s butler.

Throughout Trump’s remarks Friday, he repeatedly referred to pieces of paper he was holding, but that did not seem to help him recall key details—like, who he was actually choosing to defame in the first place. 

“Her name was … whoever. Let’s see. Her name … was who?” Trump leaned back so his lawyer, Alina Habba, could feed him the answer. 

“Swornov? Yeah. I don’t have it,” Trump said, confused. “Whatever her name was—I don’t know the lady, so. Perhaps it’s better that way, but I don’t know the lady.”

Trump claimed he couldn’t possibly have assaulted her, because she had ultimately written a “beautiful story.”

Throughout his remarks, Trump’s lawyers looked increasingly displeased with their client’s ramblings—but it seems that Trump wasn’t too happy with them, either.

“I’m disappointed in my legal talent, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump said while standing right in front of them, complaining that they had not brought up “such a famous dress” that was “Monica Lewinsky part two,” which he claimed would have exonerated him.

Donald Trump will now be sentenced for his hush-money case on November 26, more than three weeks after the presidential election. This is a massive victory for the convicted felon.

Judge Juan Merchan in a four-page decision ruled that the delay should help relieve any concerns that sentencing would influence the November election.

“Unfortunately, we are now at a place in time that is fraught with complexities rendering the requirements of a sentencing hearing, should one be necessary, difficult to execute,” Merchan said in his ruling.

“This is not a decision this Court makes lightly but is the decision which in this Court’s view best advances the interests of justice,” Merchan added.

The case’s sentencing ran into some procedural issues after the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity in July. New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ominously warned just after the ruling that a sentence may never come, initially delaying the sentencing hearing until September 18.

In a court filing last month, Trump’s defense team asked Merchan to delay sentencing until after the November elections, claiming that Merchan had “appearances of impropriety” due to his daughter’s work for Democratic political candidates. Trump unsuccessfully pushed for Merchan’s recusal three times, only to be rebuffed.

Trump ally Andrew Bailey, the Missouri attorney general, sued the state of New York on his behalf, appealing to the Supreme Court following its immunity ruling to delay the former president’s sentencing. The long-shot effort failed, as the high court declined to postpone the hearing.

Bailey was also seeking to have Trump’s gag order in the case fully lifted, but the court similarly denied that request. The order had been partially lifted in June, allowing Trump to talk about the witnesses and jurors in the case, but he’s still barred from talking about court staff, prosecutors, Merchan and his family, and others connected to the case.

Trump still has attempted to skirt the gag order, which could worsen his sentence. He had his political allies act as surrogates to criticize the people he couldn’t, even editing their words at times. Some politicians, such as Representatives Bob Good and Lauren Boebert, admitted that they traveled to Trump’s Manhattan trial for this reason. Trump also criticized one of the prosecutors in the case without mentioning his name. And there are the 10 documented violations of the gag order, which Merchan has already punished Trump for to the tune of $10,000 in fines.

Trump was found guilty in May on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime in the first degree. The Republican presidential nominee covered up his affair with adult film actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election with help from his fixer at the time, Michael Cohen. Merchan’s decision means that Trump will not face consequences at least until the end of November, if at all.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump has completely reversed his opinion on the cryptocurrency industry, moving past calling it a “scam” to becoming a warm ally—but his sons may be screwing up the blossoming alliance.

Donald Jr. and Eric Trump’s botched rollout of their own cryptocurrency platform, World Liberty Financial, has been plagued by scams and raised alarm bells from Trump’s allies within the crypto circuit, who fear that the poor handling and bad press could damage the burgeoning sector’s reputation.

“This is a huge mistake,” Nic Carter, a Trump supporter and founding partner at the crypto-focused venture capital firm Castle Island Ventures, told Politico. “It looks like Trump’s inner circle is just cashing in on his recent embrace of crypto in a kind of naive way, and frankly it looks like they’re burning a lot of the good will that’s been built with the industry so far.”

The project was announced last month under a different name—“The Trump DeFi Project”, short for decentralized finance—as a way to platform cryptocurrencies, but actual details of the proposed platform have been scant.

That slow rollout has ushered in an onslaught of misinformation about World Liberty Financial. Fraudsters have relentlessly attacked the project, compromising the social media accounts of Republican National Committee Co-Chair Lara Trump and Tiffany Trump, and sending supporters to a fake website with inaccurate details about the platform. False Telegram channels posing as the official World Liberty Financial channel have also drawn thousands of users to a host of misinformation, thwarted only by the Trump brothers’ loose warnings not to click on unaffiliated links and avoid scams.

World Liberty representative Zak Folkman told Politico that the group behind the crypto project is “building a world-class decentralized finance platform with the absolute best of the best in the industry.”

“We take security very seriously and put it first and foremost, above anything,” Folkman told the outlet, adding that the startup is working “with the top auditing firms and security specialists in the world.”

Trump has increasingly tried to frame himself as a pro-crypto candidate in this election cycle. At a Bitcoin conference in Nashville in July, Trump promised to build out a “strategic national bitcoin reserve” if elected, according to CoinDesk. But the former president’s recent investments would show that his change of heart on the digital assets isn’t all an act.

Financial disclosures released in August show that Trump has $7.15 million coming from a source labeled NFT INT., likely referring to his NFT series. He’s also kept a stockpile of cash in the new-wave currencies, with the disclosure listing roughly $5 million in crypto.

J.D. Vance won’t change who he is in order to win the election in November. And that means aligning with frightening far-right weirdos unapologetically—even if they’re pushing pro-Nazi propaganda.

On Thursday, Vance sat down for a recorded interview with Tucker Carlson as the former Fox News host continues facing backlash for platforming a pro-Nazi podcaster. In fact, Vance joined Carlson just hours after the White House condemned the “Nazi propaganda” interview.

Carlson came under fire after inviting Darryl Cooper, host of The MartyrMade podcast, as a guest on his show—whereupon Cooper proceeded to call Winston Churchill the “chief villain” of World War II, not Adolf Hitler.

In platforming Cooper on the “Tucker Carlson Show,” the former Fox host helped MartyrMade shoot to the top of the podcast charts. This was no red flag for Vance, who still appeared at his scheduled pre-recorded interview with Carlson following this news.

“Not ideal timing. But it is what it is,” a Trump campaign official said.

It makes sense that Vance doesn’t seem to care about Cooper’s revisionist history, considering that he still follows the Hitler apologist on X.

Besides boosting white supremacists, Carlson continues to regularly promoting “the great replacement theory” and spreads election lies. Meanwhile, Vance is still set to appear alongside Carlson during a live speaking tour. They’ll be joined by the likes of Alex Jones, Donald Trump Jr., and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

On Friday at the U.S.-Mexico border, Vance was asked if Carlson “should be interviewing those kinds of people months before the election.”

“Tucker Carlson isn’t affiliated with the campaign,” Vance replied. “He’s going to do what he wants to do.” And so too will Vance it seems.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s media company initially presented some grandiose projections to attract potential shareholders. Cut to two years later, and those projections have proved to be completely misleading, according to a Meidas Touch report published Friday. 

The original pitch deck that Trump Media & Technology Group showed to its investors in 2022, including “hundreds of thousands of retail shareholders,” per CEO Devin Nunes, contained some pretty fantastical numbers. The company projected revenue of $114 million in 2023, which would then balloon to $835 million in 2024. 

The reality of Trump’s struggling stock couldn’t live up to the fantasy that was promised.

In 2023, TMTG’s revenue was only $4.1 million, and the company reported a loss of more than $58 million. The projection fed to investors was off by a whopping $110 million—and that was before the election cycle had even really begun. Since then, things have become even more dire.  

Since spiking around the Republican National Convention, the value of Truth Social stock has steadily declined. Shares of Trump’s media stock have often corresponded with how well investors think Trump’s presidential campaign is going, according to The New York Times. 

The company’s current state is a far cry from the massive jump it was projected to make this year. By the end of the second quarter of 2024, TMTG had only taken in $836,000 and reported losses of $343 million. 

Trump’s majority stake in the company, which is 115 million shares, a roughly 60 percent stake, was once worth a whopping $6 billion. Now it’s worth only $2 billion.

TMTG stock has continued to crater this week, as it hit its lowest value since it became publicly traded, closing beneath $17 on Wednesday. 

Donald Trump apparently doesn’t care whether or not he wins in November anymore.

At a Fox News town hall on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee revealed that his 2024 campaign strategy excludes anyone who he doesn’t believe supported him in the last election cycles.

Responding to a question from Sean Hannity about the economy, Trump spun a thread about a would-be supporter in the Republican primary who hadn’t voted for him before.

“One person who didn’t support me—he said, ‘I must admit I had the most successful four years of my life but I’m gonna vote for some—’ and now that person came back to me. I don’t want that person,” Trump said to muffled applause. “I don’t want that person.

“You know, they say you should take everybody, but that’s not the way I’m built. It’s one of those little problems,” he added.

It’s not the first time Trump has attempted to wash his hands of the labor required to win a fair election. Speaking in Detroit in June, Trump said of his campaign, “We don’t need [the] votes,” and “We got more votes than anybody’s ever had.” Instead, he argued that the campaign needed to “guard the vote” in anticipation of a “steal.”

Failing to draw more voters to his cause would, frankly, prove to be a huge problem for Trump, who finally admitted earlier this week that he actually did lose the 2020 election. The former president lost to President Joe Biden by more than seven million votes.

Neglecting to court those voters would surely spell disaster for his chances in November, especially during a fresher election season that has drawn renewed energy since Vice President Kamala Harris has taken over the Democratic ticket—though Trump may not understand the depth of the problem. While Trump’s support levels have held steady, Harris’s have slowly grown, indicating that she is picking up crucial undecided voters.

Later in the town hall, Trump made an outlandishly hyperbolic statement about his support around the country while discussing the September 10 debate on ABC News, arguing that the network better “be fair” to him or else it would alienate “75, 80 percent of the country.”

Senator Marco Rubio doesn’t think that Russia paying off right-wing influencers is a big deal.

The ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was asked on Fox News Thursday about the Justice Department revelation that several conservative commentators were paid by assets of the Russian government to produce propaganda and disinformation. Rubio defended the influencers, calling them “victims.”

“We are talking about preexisting political opinions in the United States. These are preexisting political opinions that have existed well before any Russian engagement or involvement or what have you,” Rubio said to Sean Hannity. “These people that they say that were being funded by the secret donor that was hiding their true identity, they already had these opinions, they already believed in these things.”

“They legitimately believe in the views that they’re espousing,” Rubio added. “They were victims, they were targets of a fraud in which someone posing as just a regular investor had Russian money behind them.”

Rubio is joining his fellow conservatives in defending the commentators at Tenet Media, which the DOJ revealed Wednesday was secretly funded by Russian state media employees in “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging.” These influencers included Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, Lauren Chen, and Benny Johnson. One right-wing media organization, Blaze Media, has already fired Chen as a result of the indictment.

Not surprisingly, these commentators described themselves as victims in the scheme, a point that was not only echoed by Rubio, but also by MAGA Republicans like Representative Matt Gaetz, pundit Ben Shapiro, and even Donald Trump. But, how do they explain that these “preexisting ideas” popular among Republicans right now seem to be exactly what Vladimir Putin’s government wanted to fund?

Previous Russian operations in the United States appear to have been aimed at promoting conflict and discord to undermine faith in the country’s institutions, such as the electoral process, and promote foreign policy favorable to Russia. It stands to reason that funding conservative influencers had similar aims. Right-wing figures like Rubio, Trump (whose political rise has been very useful to Putin), and Gaetz have to ask themselves if the ideas they’re espousing can really be good for America if Putin himself wants to put money behind them.

The Russian disinformation plot revealed in a Justice Department indictment this week may just be the tip of the iceberg, according to newly unsealed court documents.

On Wednesday, the DOJ announced it would seize 32 internet domains linked to a larger Kremlin scheme to promote disinformation and influence the 2024 election. The Russian campaign, known as Doppelganger, uses AI-generated content to create “fake news” boosted through social media with the aim of electing Donald Trump.

“Today’s announcement exposes the scope of the Russian government’s influence operations and their reliance on cutting-edge AI to sow disinformation,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement about the charges. According to records, the plan was well known at even the highest levels of the Russian government—and Russian President Vladimir Putin himself may have been aware of the campaign.

Of particular note, the documents released Wednesday included an affidavit that noted a Russian company is keeping a list of more than 2,800 influencers world wide, about one-fifth of whom are based in the United States, to monitor and potentially groom to spread Russian propaganda. The affidavit does not mention the full list of influencers, but is still a terrifying indicator of how deep the Russian plot to interfere in U.S. politics really goes.

The Doppelganger program and its “Good Old USA Project” aimed to mimic mainstream media outlets to push pro-Russian policies through fake social media accounts. Documents show that the Kremlin specifically targeted Trump supporters, minorities, gamers, and swing-state voters by spreading far-right conspiracies and capitalizing on existing divisions in U.S. politics.

​​”They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream,’” Ilya Gambashidze, an architect of the project, wrote, outlining his scheme. “It is these sentiments that should be exploited in the course of an information campaign in/for the United States.” To do so, the Russian government would emphasize that Republicans are “victims of discrimination of people of color” and promote conspiracies that white middle-class people are being discriminated against.

The “guerrilla media” plan needed to not only plant falsehoods, but also spread them far and wide. They targeted gamers and chatroom users, who they described as the “backbone of the right-wing trends in the US segment of the Internet,” and monitored social media influencers. The Russians planned to build relationships with prolific posters who were “proponents of traditional values, who stand up for ending the war in Ukraine and peaceful relations between the US and Russia, and who are ready to get involved in the promotion of the project narratives.”

“We need influencers! A lot of them and everywhere. We are ready to wine and dine them,” wrote Gambashidze in a note from a meeting with Russian government officials.

Though this specific campaign has no official link with recent findings about Tenet Media’s work with Russian state media network RT, the goals are the same: “To secure victory for [Donald Trump].”

J.D. Vance completely fumbled his response to Wednesday’s mass shooting at Apalachee High School in Georgia, in which he resigned to school shootings as a bleak “fact of life.”

“Now look, the Kamala Harris answer to this is to take law-abiding citizens’ guns away from them. That is what Kamala Harris wants to do,” Vance said during a rally Thursday in Arizona.

“Look, I don’t like this. I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said. “But if you’re—if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you’d realize that our schools are soft targets.”

“We’ve got to bolster security so that if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able to,” Vance said, sharing his fatalistic view of what are entirely avoidable tragedies. There is just no way to prevent young people from committing gross acts of violence with tools that the government already supposedly regulates. Just no way!

Vance’s limp policy idea imagines public schools as the only venue for a mass shooting—increased security there would not prevent, say, a shooting at a university campus, church, grocery store, mall, or really anywhere else. Plus, even he admitted he didn’t like the idea of beefed up security around his children.

“And again, as a parent, do I want my school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t,” Vance said. Then why did he just pitch it? “I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like they’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

Vance’s cynical response to the deadly shooting, which killed four people and injured nine others, is particularly grim in light of Kamala Harris’s response: “It doesn’t have to be this way.”