Welcome to Rabbit Hole, a breaking-news analysis that helps you get smart on the one story everyone’s obsessing over—for Beast Inside members only.
If the Russian troll factory’s criminal trial seems like a circus, that’s probably on purpose. Flip through the latest headlines out of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s trial of the Internet Research Agency (IRA) and you’ll see the defense claiming that Mueller is allegedly hoarding nude selfies; F-bomb quotes from Animal House in court filings; and leaked court documents doctored and published on a Minecraft-inspired Twitter account. The hijinks are juvenile but they’re also in keeping with what looks to be an increasingly bizarre campaign by the company to wink at its own celebrity.
Nesting doll of shell companies: Understanding how the Russian troll factory has operated since the 2016 election can be a little tricky because of the various shell companies it’s allegedly acted under. Here’s a brief recap, according to court filings from the Special Counsel’s Office and sanctions designations. Concord Management, a company run by a man known as “Putin’s chef,” set up “Project Lakhta,” an effort to use social-media sock puppets to interfere with the elections and politics of countries like the U.S. and Ukraine. What’s confusing is that Concord allegedly carried out its plan through a web of shell companies, the most infamous of which is the Internet Research Agency, but included others like the Federal News Agency.
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Despite the range of different company names, the disinformation operations all allegedly followed the same modus operandi. Money flowed from Putin’s catering crony, Yevgeny Prigozhin, through his company Concord Management and to the various shell companies, doled out by the same accountant, Elena Khusyaynova. Prigozhin himself is allegedly sourced up with Russian intelligence, too. Concord Management is now run by Dmitry Utkin, a former Russian military intelligence officer who founded the Wagner Group, a private military company that works arm-in-arm with Russian military intelligence in places like Ukraine and Syria.
New tactics: Despite getting called out by name in the intelligence community’s assessment on 2016 election meddling published in early January 2017, Project Lakhta continued its work, relatively undisturbed, after the election. In fact, a study commissioned by the Senate intelligence committee claimed that IRA-associated activity actually increased on Twitter and Facebook in 2017 beyond what the outlet had posted in 2016. Some of the themes in troll factory content changed. In a nod to the growing investigation of Russian interference, Russian trolls tried to discredit Mueller and pushed a storyline that “emerging Russia stories were a ‘weird conspiracy’ pushed by ‘liberal crybabies.’”
Breaking the fourth wall: One thing you might expect an alleged covert arm of Russian intelligence to do when its cover is blown is to go to ground. That’s at least what we’ve seen with some of the other figures involved in the Russia investigation. The dozen alleged GRU officers who reportedly hacked the DNC emails—a hack hyped by IRA sock puppets—haven’t said anything since their names showed up on an indictment. Alleged GRU officer Konstantin Kilimnik, indicted alongside Paul Manafort on the same covert lobbying charges, and Oleg Deripaska, another alleged Russian associate of Manafort, have also kept a low profile.
By contrast, IRA trolls have been active ever since 2014, when the company was first founded, and showed no signs of stopping even after the 2016 election. They announced in October 2017 that they’d be holding a question-and-answer session and reached out to a Daily Beast reporter, inviting him to submit questions to the IRA. Bizarre though it was, the invitation and little-noticed Q&A session two months later—where they blew off serious questions by answering with goblin pictures—was a sign of things to come in court: Russian trolls embracing the collapse of their cover rather than trying to deny it.
Mueller brings the heat: In February 2018, Mueller indicted Prighozin, Concord Management, and a dozen IRA employees; this was followed by U.S. sanctions, and a second indictment of Khusyaynova, the IRA accountant. Faced with that kind of attention and pressure, the troll factory further embraced the spotlight.
In June, the Federal News Agency, one of the many shell companies mentioned in the Project Lakhta indictment, announced with great fanfare the rollout of a troll news agency, USA Really. The new project nodded at the troll factory’s alleged roll in helping to elect Trump with pictures of its purported office, bearing a Trump portrait on the wall. USA Really went out of its way to publicly associate itself with the IRA and blasted out a statement boasting that Khusyaynova was an employee of the company of USA Really after the Justice Department indicted her for her role in helping to fund the 2016 election meddling.
Yet when Facebook booted IRA-related trolls from its platform, the Federal News Agency sued the company in November 2018 and claimed no knowledge or relationship with the infamous Internet Research Agency, despite the fact that it was only too happy to brag that the same accountant, Khusyaynova, had worked for it.
Disorder in the court: Lawyers for Concord Management, the company allegedly providing the money for Project Lakhta, have also been acting mighty troll-y inside the courtroom. In one court filing, a Concord attorney quoted the frat-house comedy Animal House and claimed that a government motion amounted to a declaration that “You f**ked up...you trusted us.” In another outburst, the Concord defense raised the claim that the special counsel’s collection of evidence has swept up a mysterious nude selfie. In a late January filing, the special counsel’s office also claimed that troll factory-linked social media accounts named after the popular Minecraft video game had leaked material shared with Concord’s defense team through the discovery process.
Wrestling with a pig: Why send lawyers to argue Concord’s case in court when sanctions have already blocked it from the U.S. financial system and its employees have basically no chance of ever seeing an American courtroom? Why leak discovery material when it’s obvious that the government can trace it back to your attorneys? Why not just keep your mouth shut and slink out of the spotlight and hopefully live to troll another day?
The way to interpret the antics of Concord and its many shell companies, both inside the court and out, is as a meta troll. It’s at the center of the biggest story in the world right now. Sure, it’s making an embarrassing spectacle of itself. But it can’t avoid the spotlight now and the trollmasters are hoping that it ends up making a spectacle of the Russia investigation hounding it now, too.
