Yevgeniy Viktorovich Prigozhin, the most heavily sanctioned among the close coterie of oligarchs surrounding Russian president Vladimir Putin, is running a troll farm striving to influence the U.S. mid-term elections in favor of president Donald Trump's Republican Party.
Prigozhin's key role in Russia's new election meddling campaign was confirmed when U.S. authorities charged a 44-year-old Russian woman working for a Prigozhin. This woman is part of Prigozhin's "Project Lakhta" social media campaign that is spreading distrust about the American political system ahead of the 2018 elections, said the criminal complaint charges leveled by federal prosecutors.
Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova of St. Petersburg, Russia worked as the chief accountant for Project Lakhta, a troll farm spreading misinformation and disinformation.
The criminal complaint says Khusyaynova is responsible for Project Lakhta's finances. This woman controls expenses such as expenditures; ads on social media platforms; the purchase of proxy servers and promoting news postings on social networks. Project Lakhta's total budget from January 2016 to June 2018 comes to $35 million.
Federal prosecutors claim Project Lakhta is being funded by Prigozhin and two of his companies. Prigozhin was one of 13 Russians indicted in February by Special Counsel Robert Mueller on charges of interfering in the 2016 presidential election.
The strategic goal of this Russian conspiracy is to ignite discord in the U.S. political system and to undermine faith in American democratic institutions, said G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. This conspiracy continues to this day.
Federal prosecutors says the Prigozhin-funded confusion campaign focuses on a wide variety of topics, including race relations, gun control and the Second Amendment, immigration, the Confederate flag, the Women's March, and the NFL national anthem debate.
Terwilliger said members of the conspiracy took advantage of specific events in the United States to anchor their themes. These events include the church shootings at Charleston, South Carolina, and concertgoers at Las Vegas; the Charlottesville 'Unite the Right' rally and its violence and police shootings of African-American men.
Previous to the charges against Prigozhin, the Department of Justice, FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a joint statement on foreign meddling in the 2018 elections.
The statement said there is no evidence of a disruption of infrastructure that will enable adversaries to prevent voting; change vote counts or disrupt America's ability to tally votes in the midterm elections. These federal agencies, however, said foreign powers are seeking to "exploit America's free and open political system."
