Tenet Media

Tenet Media was an American far-right media company founded by Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan in January 2022, known for its promotion of Russian propaganda. It featured six right-wing influencers, including Matt Christiansen, Tayler Hansen, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern. It described itself as a "network of heterodox commentators that focus on western political and cultural issues".
Tenet's podcasts featured prominent Republican figures, including Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, Project 2025 director Paul Dans, Vivek Ramaswamy, Kash Patel and Kari Lake. Tenet's content included coverage of illegal immigration, supposed racism against white people, free speech and Elon Musk, as well as climate change denial content.
Indictment of Russian nationals
Two Russian nationals were federally indicted by the DOJ on September 4, 2024 for their alleged activities relating to Tenet. The company was identified only as "Company-1" in the indictment but descriptive information allowed several media sources to identify it as Tenet. According to an unsealed indictment, the two indicted Russians were employees of the Russian state-controlled media company RT who were charged with failing to register as a foreign agent, and allegedly funneling around $10 million into Tenet in order to "distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging". Some of the influencers, including Pool, Rubin, and Johnson, have responded by claiming to be victims of the Russian disinformation campaign. Attorney general Merrick Garland said Tenet "never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government." Prosecutors also allege the $10 million was a Russian money laundering operation.
Around February 2023, Tenet sought to hire two right-wing commentators with 2.4 million YouTube subscribers and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers to produce videos. The two eventually signed on, and "Commentator-1" and "Commentator-2" each received over $400,000 per month for producing political videos for Tenet.
The indictment alleges the Tenet founders masked their Russian funding by creating a fictitious persona of a wealthy European sponsor, "Eduard Grigoriann." The charged Russian nationals, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, were involved in day to day operations of Tenet by fall 2023, using false names to conceal they were Russian RT employees. The indictment alleges the founders acknowledged in private communications that their "investors" were actually the "Russians." Tenet influencer Tayler Hansen announced on September 5 that the company had shut down.
The Biden administration said the indictment was part of a wider effort to counter a major Russian government effort to influence the 2024 presidential election that included sanctions on ten individuals and entities, and the seizure of 32 internet domains.<ref name="CNN"/>

Main Menu

See Also

Main Menu