The finance chief of Russia’s leading troll farm was on Friday indicted by the US Department of Justice for interfering with US elections, the first person to face charges involving next month’s midterm elections.
The indictment said that Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova was involved in a criminal conspiracy as the chief accountant for Project Lakhta, a broad political interference operation in the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA).
Since 2014, Khusyaynova has been handling the finances for operations to sow disinformation and stir up divisiveness in US elections, prosecutors said.
She also budgeted millions of US dollars this year for online social media efforts directed at the US and Europe.
“Today’s charges allege that Russian national Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova conspired with others who were part of a Russian influence campaign to interfere with US democracy,” US Assistant Attorney General John Demers said.
The IRA is controlled by a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, through his Concord Management and Consulting group, prosecutors said.
Prigozhin, sometimes dubbed “Putin’s chef” because he has managed catering for the Russian leader, was already indicted in February along with 12 other IRA employees over alleged disinformation campaigns during the 2016 US election.
In that effort, they pumped out millions of posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms designed to stir up animosity between political camps and groups in society.
The indictment against Khusyaynova details her budgeting for Project Lakhta month by month for the first six months of this year, a total of more than 650 million rubles (US$9.92 million), details that suggested US investigators have gained detailed inside knowledge of the IRA’s operations.
Between January 2016 and June this year, Project Lakhta had a proposed operating budget of more than US$35 million for all of its operations, including those directed at the US.
The money was for expenditures for IRA activists, social media advertising, registering domain names and buying proxy servers, all needed for the group’s influence operations.
“The conspirators allegedly took extraordinary steps to make it appear that they were ordinary American political activists” by setting up thousands of accounts made to appear to be owned by Americans, the department said.
The accounts were used “to create and amplify divisive social and political content targeting US audiences,” the department added.
In an odd bit of timing, the indictment was announced just minutes after the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence expressed concern that China, Iran and Russia could seek to undermine confidence in the Nov. 6 midterm elections, when control of the US Congress is up for grabs.
However, the statement did not say that such efforts had taken place.
It said there had not been any evidence that foreign hackers had compromised any election infrastructure, such as voter registration databases or voting machines.
“Increased intelligence and information sharing among federal, state and local partners has improved our awareness of ongoing and persistent threats to election infrastructure,” the office said in a statement with the FBI, the department and the US Department of Homeland Security.
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