Today I looked into the DOJ accusations against conservative outlet Tenet Media. None of it makes any sense.
First off, let’s see the accusation (which can be read in full on the DOJ official site). As described by Variety:
A state-controlled Russian media outlet provided nearly $10 million to “covertly finance and direct” videos produced by a Tennessee-based online content company, the Justice Department alleged, identified by media reports as U.S. right-wing social media network Tenet Media.
A federal indictment unsealed Wednesday (available at this link) charged two employees of RT, formerly known as Russia Today, of using “fake personas and shell companies” to carry out a “secret influence campaign in the United States.” The duo “operated under covert identities” at an American company identified in court documents as “U.S. Company-1.” CNN and other media outlets said they confirmed that the company in question is Tenet Media, whose affiliated personalities include Benny Johnson and “Culture War Podcast” host Tim Pool, both of whom have millions of followers on YouTube and other platforms.
Tim Pool is the person at Tenet coming under the most scrutiny in this scandal, and is widely suspected to be the “Commentator-3” cited in the indictment. Keep that in mind.
My initial knee-jerk reaction is that $10 million (or $9.7 million to be precise) is an incredible amount of money. To put that into perspective, Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, one of the most famous human beings on the face of the planet with almost 400 million followers on Instagram, received $11 million from the US Army for a recruiting campaign earlier this year. So even by American standards, $10 million is a lot of money. It’s big, big, big bux.It’s the kind of money one would give to only the top A-list celebrities like Johnson, Taylor Swift, or the Kardashians. Not some moron with a podcast.
That’s American standards, what about Russian standards? Well, RT received a little under 38 billion Rubles in federal funding in 2024, or about US$424 million. So Tenet allegedly received 1/50 of the RT budget to have Tim Pool rant about a bunch of things.
To add even more perspective, Margarita Simonyan’s publicly listed annual salary in 2021 was 42 million rubles, or roughly $500 thousand. So apparently Russia was paying Tim Pool 20 times more than their top person at RT. Okay.
Is Tim Pool worth 20 Margarita Simonyans?
I don’t think RT gives anyone $10 million. But maybe Tim Pool is worth it? Let’s take a look at Tenet’s footprint on YouTube. Yes there are other social media platforms but YT is the only one I have an account for so that’s what I’ll look at for the purposes of this post.
So they have 315 thousand followers, which is decent though not great. But their views per video are extremely unimpressive. From what I saw, the vast majority had under 10 thousand views. Some even less than 2 thousand. The indictment itself claims that the Tenet Media channel has a lifetime view count 16 million. Presumably whoever wrote the indictment thought that was a scary number but anyone familiar with social media knows that’s really not very good. 16 million would be decent for a month or a quarter, but not a lifetime of several or more years.
To be fair, I looked up Tim Pool’s personal channel.
Better, but still not great. 1.37 million subscribers and individual videos typically get a little over 100 thousand views, sometimes less.
For context, one of my favorite channels, HistoryLegends, has 656 thousand subscribers, and gets over 500 thousand views per video. Another excellent channel I enjoy, GDF, has 271 thousand subscribers and easily gets 100 to 500 thousand views per video. Even EXPAT American, which is a much smaller channel with 63 thousand subscribers, typically gets more than 10 thousand views per video, sometimes as many as 50 thousand or higher. I really have to suspect TENET Media might artificially inflate their subscriber count, as it’s hard to otherwise explain why their channel would have such a poor subscriber-to-view ratio.
It would be almost literally a better investment to give me $10 million to spam pro-Russian content. Really, I suspect very few people in Russia even know who Tim Pool is. As I already said, $10 million is big boy money and you have to be an extremely famous and noteworthy person to get anywhere even close to that amount, and only in a select few countries. Russia just does not have that kind of cash to throw around willy nilly, it’s ridiculous.
Now I would like the reader to put yourself in the shoes of someone at Tenet Media, or whatever business you happen to work at. What would your initial reaction be if someone emailed you offering $10 million for “services” that are obviously not worth that much? I don’t know about you, but I would immediately assume it’s a scam. It has to be a scam, what else could it be?
I do think this was a scam, but not by Russians. A scam by the FBI. During the “War on Terror” the FBI repeatedly carried out trumped up “FBI foils FBI terror plot” operations, when they’d find some low-IQ store clerk and twist his arm into “planning” a terrorist act they could arrest him for. We also know the “Russiagate” scandal was nonsense. So why believe them now?
A naysayer might object to my conspiracy theory is far-fetched because $10 million is a lot of money to waste to frame Tim Pool as a Russian asset. Well yes it is. But the difference between a budget of $10 million and a budget of zero is whether or not you get your money back at the end. In a classic credit card scam you trick the victim into giving the money back to you. In this case, the DOJ indictment has a “money laundering” charge attached to it for the exact reason, I think, so they can seize Tenet Media’s asssets. I’m almost certain that’s what’s going to happen. The Lord taketh and the Lord taketh away.
Really, for God’s sake, look at the “Russian agents” named in the indictment. Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva. It sounds like the boss asked someone to come up with two convincing Russian people and just went with the first names to pop up in his head without changing them later. Kalashnikov… really? Was his other accomplice Boris Badanov? Most importantly, this Kostiantyn and Elena have not been detained, further identified, or even shown in a photo.
Now one last point. Why Tim Pool and his friends at Tenet Media? If the plan was to smear and discredit right-wing media as puppets of Russia, why not go for a bigger fish? Why not go for Tucker Carlson or someone like him who actually has a large audience? I think it’s actually very simple. Tucker Carlson is not a moron so wouldn’t fall for such a dumb trick. The guys at Tenet Media are morons.
Ian Kummer
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I’ve never heard about this guy, indeed. btw, Kostiantyn isn’t a real name.
Yeah, the bigger fish wouldn’t fall for this. Tim Pool or his producer/manager would be though.
Good article Ian.
It’s not supposed to make sense. It’s to make a “boogity boogity Reds under the bed!” scare. Which can be repeated ad infinitum by the propagandamedia which are blow-holing the Official Line. Anything that questions Amerika Regime policy is a RUSSIAN INFLUENCE OPERATION!
If MSNBC, CNN, NPR, the corporate print media, and all the other mouthpieces just spouted “Russia is trying to exert mind control over you” some people would say “that sounds like something you pulled out of your arse. Where’s the proof?” Now, there’s a by-gawd U.S. Justice Department INDICTMENT saying that. And the Justice Department would never lie, right? So the Narrative Managers can point to this FACT, of an actual indictment, with names and everything! when they want to screech about Russian influence. And anything the Power Centres don’t like will be denounced as “this is just like what the Officially Indicted Russian Influencers were doing.” They can yabber about that until Nov. 5.
It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t make sense. It’s there to make “spins.”
I don’t really care if these Tenet guys received any money from Russia. What I find really really amusing about this issue is that Russia is accused of antidemocratic because it prevents the operations of NGOs that go against the country, but here we are, watching the paragon of democracy in the world doing exactly the same.
The double standard is really staggering.