Bevy of Trump allies now working to promote Kremlin propaganda to U.S. conservatives

A group of former Donald Trump advisers and operatives have helped set up an increasingly popular website that spreads pro-Russia propaganda and right-wing conspiracy theories.

Trump's former 2016 campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, his wife Simona Mangiante and a number of other associates of the former president make up the editorial board for the website Intelligencer, which enjoyed its best month for traffic in August and has been promoted by conspiracist Alex Jones, former Trump White House staffer Garrett Ziegler and former Trump aide Roger Stone, reported The Guardian.

“Intelligencer appears to be one of several [Russia-friendly] operations targeting the upcoming U.S. elections, leveraging a network of far-right figures and disinformation tactics,” said Olga Lautman, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis.

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The Justice Department recently charged two employees of the Russian state-owned RT with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and money laundering for payments to "unwitting American influencers" and sanctioned the outlet's editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan and nine other employees.

“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,” said Emma Briant, an associate professor of news and political communication at Monash University in Australia.

There's no direct evidence of Kremlin funding for the website, which started as an offshoot to the Australia-based TNT Radio, but the station's two co-owners quickly grew disillusioned and distanced themselves from Intelligencer after turning to Ukraine-based American journalist George Eliason.

"[Jennifer] Squires said she and co-owner Mike Ryan quickly grew disillusioned with the website’s planned appearance, and sought to disassociate themselves from it," The Guardian reported. "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."

Those board members include Igor Lopatonok, who produced a documentary about Hunter Biden's laptop with Eliason, and Olga Ravasi, the former chairwoman of Serbs for Trump in 2020, along with Leah Hoopes, who served as a fake elector from Pennsylvania, and Greg Stenstrom, who also challenged the election results in that state.

Roger Stone’s personal attorney Tyler Nixon also serves on the board and hosts his own show on TNT Radio, while former Radio Sputnik journalist Lee Stranahan is also involved with the website.

Another board member is Anna Soroka, an adviser to Leonid Pasechnik, a Ukraine-born politician who has been sanctioned by the U.S. for his pro-Kremlin work in that country.

Eliason and Trevor Fitzgibbon, who was the spokesperson for a super PAC supporting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., apparently create most of the site's content, which promotes debunked conspiracy theories about vaccines and the 2020 election, as well as aggressively anti-Ukraine propaganda.

“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 U.S. election and beyond.”