President Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced new efforts to crack down on Russian election interference on Wednesday, but Republicans say they are “skeptical” of the new moves so close to the November election.
“We’ve seen this before. In 2016, the same people pushed the Russia hoax and we now know it was totally bogus. Now, it may be true this time, but I am extremely skeptical,” House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital.
The DOJ on Wednesday announced it is seizing 32 websites it says were linked to the Russian government and used to spread disinformation. The Justice, State and Treasury departments also indicted a pair of employees at Russian state-controlled outlet RT.
The indictment claimed that RT, in a $10 million scheme, had duped US-based influencers into sharing content “deemed favorable to the Russian government” through a Tennessee-based company believed to be Tenet Media.
The DOJ accused RT of “conspiring to commit money laundering and to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray, right, and AG Merrick Garland, left, announce new actions to crack down on Russian election interference. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
The content was designed to amplify “U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition to core Russian interests, particularly its ongoing war in Ukraine.”
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Stephen Miller, a longtime Trump advisor, wrote on X: “The biggest election interference in American History is the DOJ’s weaponization of the security state — surveillance, fake intelligence, sham indictments, raids, mass censorship, importing illegal voters — to target President Trump, his aides and supporters. Third world tyranny.”
“Russian interference again says the Democrat’s DOJ,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., wrote on X. “We would hate for Russian influence to convince Americans that the Democrats and Kamala Harris caused all this crippling inflation, wide open deadly border invasion by tens of millions of illegal migrants, and funded senseless foreign wars and cause Americans to vote for Trump!!”
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Attorney General Merrick Garland pushed back on the skepticism and 2016 parallels: “This is deadly serious, and we are going to treat it accordingly.”
When asked by Fox News Digital about its reaction to the allegations, RT said, “We certainly have a reaction. Actually, we had several, but we couldn’t decide on one (we even thought of running an office poll), so here they are.”
“2016 called and it wants its clichés back,” was among them, as were: “Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the U.S. elections,” “We gotta earn our Kremlin paycheck somehow,” and “Somewhere Secretary Clinton is sad that it’s not because of her.”
The DOJ said Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, is trying to sow discord in the U.S. through spreading disinformation. (Kirill Kazachkov/Roscongress Foundation via Reuters.)
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The indictments included several internal propaganda project proposals put together by the Kremlin. The proposals aimed at sowing racial discord and the threat of “widespread poverty” due to inflation.
According to project “Good Old USA,” they increase the belief that the U.S. “has been doing way too much to support Ukraine” to 51 percent, up from 41 percent in a November Gallup poll.
Under their “targeted audiences” section, the project said it would focus its efforts on U.S. citizens of Hispanic descent, American Jews, American gamers and Reddit users and residents of swing states.
“The Guerilla Media Campaign” said that it was not aimed at justifying Russia as no American politicians could be classified as “pro-Putin,” but rather on bolstering beliefs that the policies of “Candidate B,” believed to be Biden, are “encroaching on their rights.”
The Russians deemed Republicans to be “advancing a relatively pro-Russian agenda.”
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It directed surrogates to hone in on spreading content about “record inflation,” “risk of job loss for White Americans,” “privileges for people of color, perverts and the disabled,” “threat of crime from people of color and immigrants (including new immigrants from Ukraine),” and “overspending on foreign policy at the expense of interests of white US citizens.”
It also aimed to spread the message: “We are being drawn into war. Our guys will die in Ukraine.” It called for a “minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information.”
Fox News’ Greg Norman contributed to this report.