This article first appeared on Mother Jones. It has been republished with the publication’s permission.
On Tuesday, an X account attributed to a Texas man named Zyron Lewis posted a video of Lewis claiming that in 2012, when he was a middle school student, he was sexually assaulted by James Talarico, the Democratic Senate candidate in Texas. This allegation—which zapped across the internet—was quickly debunked. Talarico was indeed a middle school teacher at that time, and a Zyron Lewis had been a student of his. But the Zyron Lewis in the video was not the real Zyron Lewis. The real Lewis told a factchecking site he had never been abused by Talarico, and X subsequently suspended the interloper.
This attempt to smear Talarico had a familiar ring, for it was similar to an operation mounted by a Russian disinformation network in 2024 that cooked up and spread a similar allegation about Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, then the Democratic vice presidential candidate. The network fabricated a video that falsely claimed Walz had inappropriately touched a foreign exchange student when he was a high school teacher.
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Disinformation trackers who analyzed the Talarico smear have attributed it to the same Russian outfit, Storm-1516, that targeted Walz. The Talarico hit is the latest indication that Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s disinformation agents are once again meddling in an American election.
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As Mother Jones and other outlets have reported, for about a month, Russian operatives have been circulating fake videos on US social media platforms that hurl scurrilous allegations at Democrats. These videos—made to resemble reports from such news outlets as CNN and Mother Jones—have falsely alleged, for example, that a Democratic gubernatorial candidate recruited minors into sex work and “while working for the Girl Scouts…organized sex parties for members of the Democratic Party.”
Another video claimed that a different Democratic gubernatorial nominee had sold crack to college students, “resulting in 17 deaths.” Some of these videos said a new book that I supposedly wrote—titled Enemies of Democracy for Dummies—was the source of these disclosures, and that this book details 300 criminal and scandalous acts committed by Democratic candidates.
There is no such book. My actual new book is called How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America, and it covers the decade-long twilight war Moscow has been waging against the United States, a shadow campaign that includes disinformation and influence operations mounted against every US election since 2016 to help Donald Trump. It details that smear operation Russian agents aimed at Walz in 2024, which resulted in tens of millions of Americans seeing the false charge.
The false claims hurled by Putin’s disinfo crew at Democratic candidates in this election appear to have been nipped in the bud. But these disinformation operations suggest that Putin wants Trump to hold on to Congress—not surprising, given the president’s recent moves to tighten his bond with Putin and reduce, if not end, US support for Ukraine. And while the Russian effort to spread sleazy false allegations against Democrats has not yet seemed to have paid off, there’s still time left. Moreover, Putin’s operatives are most likely preparing to do what they can to exacerbate any chaos or crisis that Trump attempts to generate before, during, and after Election Day. The Talarico smear might have been smothered before it could damage his campaign, but it’s a warning sign.
The following is a slightly revised excerpt from my real book chronicling what happened during the 2024 presidential campaign, when Putin’s crew succeeded in spreading far and wide a phony sex abuse smear.
On October 5, 2024, John Mark Dougan, a former Florida cop indicted for extortion and wiretapping who fled to Russia and set up a vast network of fake news sites to spread pro-Russia propaganda—appeared on a podcast called Red Pill News hosted by Zak Paine, a fringe character who had promoted QAnon conspiracy theories and who said he had been at the US Capitol during the January 6 riot. Dougan brought to the show an anonymous special guest referred to as “Rick,” who said he was from Kazakhstan.
Speaking in English with his voice apparently altered, Rick claimed that in 2004 and 2005, he had been a foreign exchange student at the Minnesota high school where Tim Walz had taught and coached football and that Walz had inappropriately touched him. As Dougan sipped wine and nodded along, Rick told a long and involved story about his interactions with Walz that Paine characterized as classic grooming conducted by a pedophile.
There was at least one major problem with Rick’s tale—besides its connection to Dougan. Rick said he attended this high school as part of a US State Department–funded program, but this exchange program, as NewsGuard, a disinformation tracking news site, soon discovered, had no record of a student from Kazakhstan attending that high school at the time. The Red Pill News episode, nevertheless, was carried on Rumble and other platforms.
Two days later, the X account for The Miami Chronicle, one of the phony news sites in the Storm-1516 network, began sharing a video of Rick and his allegations, promoting it to conservative commentators with large audiences. “Did you see the exchange student from Kazakhstan who gave the interview about how he was sexually groomed by Tim Walz?” this account asked, noting that Musk “needs to hear about this.”
On October 12, Juanita Broaddrick, who decades earlier claimed Bill Clinton had raped her in 1978 and who now was a right-wing social media influencer, put up an X post with the Red Pill News footage that drew almost a half-million views. Other far-right accounts passed it on.
The story truly went viral after a conspiracy-monger on X who used the handle Black Insurrectionist cited the allegation. He posted a clip of the Red Pill News episode, which was subsequently viewed over 800,000 times. Then he shared supposed emails from the victim, which were quickly shown by other X users to be fakes. (Black Insurrectionist had previously spread the false allegation that Harris had been given the questions by ABC News ahead of her debate with Trump.)
Black Insurrectionist flooded the zone, putting up about two dozen X posts promoting this scurrilous Walz allegation, which were viewed over 33 million times, according to Wired. Days later, the Black Insurrectionist account disappeared from X. (Not long after that, the Associated Press reported that the account was linked to a 51-year-old white guy named Jason Palmer in upstate New York who had a history of drug addiction and a record of alleged business fraud and who owed almost $7 million in back taxes to New York State.)
Another X conspiracist posted a video claiming he had talked to the supposed victim abused by Walz but offered no evidence to back up the claim—his video drew millions of views. A video that featured a different former student alleging that Walz had abused him popped up and was viewed over 4 million times before it was deleted. It was a deepfake. (The account that posted this video also disseminated another fake video of mail-in ballots being destroyed in Bucks County, Pennsylvania—a video that disinformation researchers attributed to Storm-1516—and within hours, it attracted tens of thousands of views.)
Big names joined in on the Walz smear. Jack Posobiec, the MAGA activist and onetime Pizzagate proponent who now was working for the GOP, and Candace Owens, a right-wing influencer and conspiracist, each highlighted the Walz allegation as a matter warranting attention. When Owens discussed the phony story on her podcast, she garnered 630,000 views. Foreign newspapers picked up the story. Dougan, the former Florida cop, who had seemingly launched this information op, fanned the flames and published an article incorporating the deepfake video, the Red Pill News episode, and Black Insurrectionist’s posts on over 100 of his bogus websites.
As the disinformation campaign took on a life of its own, The Washington Post revealed that Russian documents it had obtained from a European intelligence service showed that Dougan had received funds from Russian military intelligence. He also got financing, according to these documents, from the Center for Geopolitical Expertise (CGE), an organization set up by the pro-Putin, far-right Russian nationalist Aleksandr Dugin.
The Post reported that Dougan’s contact at the CGE was its head, Valery Korovin, who’d been honored by Putin in 2023 for “services to the Fatherland” for “carrying out special tasks.” Four years earlier, Korovin had proposed to Russia’s Ministry of Defense that the CGE mount “an internet war against the U.S. on its territory.” In a letter to the ministry, Korovin had explained that cyber ops and gray-zone warfare were how Moscow could best confront the militarily superior United States and gain equal standing with it: “The possibilities posed by internet wars really are limitless, and only with their help can we assert complete strategic parity with our geopolitical opponents.”
Dougan denied all to The Washington Post and claimed the documents it obtained were fake.
For disinformation researchers, there was little doubt this attack on Walz was a Russian active measure orchestrated by Storm-1516. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement essentially confirming this, stating that “Russian influence actors manufactured and amplified inauthentic content claiming illegal activity committed by the Democratic vice- presidential candidate during his earlier career.”
At a briefing for reporters about the 2024 election, intelligence officials said they were bracing for Russian operations aimed at causing chaos on Election Day and afterward, which could include active measures to undermine the vote tally and even incite violence. When Trump won the election, those operations were no longer necessary.
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