So this story is freaking weird. Tenet is a start up media company that promotes several right wing people from Lauren Chen, formerly known as Roaming Millennial, Lauren Southern, Tim Pool, and a few others. Tenet had a working relationship with some shared contacts at Russia Today. For those who don’t know, RT was pretty much Russia’s version of the BBC or Al Jazerra. They have an office in DC. I’ve been there. RT used to put on Larry King after he left CNN. RT put on some left wing talk show hosts that used to be on Air America back in the day. As far as I could tell, RT just acted as a public news company, and they’d lease extra time to these other people. As far as I could tell the Russian government ignored them. Then once the Ukraine thing began one of the main Russian commentators there had a shit fit on the air and said that Russia was screwing with their freedom to act as unbiased journalists.
So then we get this weird as fuck indictment from the DOJ. It accuses Tenet of taking 10 million dollars from RT, which was being funneled through a wealthy benefactor. Only problem is that unbeknownst to everyone but Lauren Chen, the wealthy benefactor doesn’t exist. The dude was made up. So it’s like a weird as shit honey pot posing as influence peddling when no one knows about the influence peddling. Except Lauren Chen, who besides being HOT AS FUCK, didn’t seem to change anything about what she was posting before the deal went through. She did encourage people to post a bit from Tucker Carlson who showed Russian grocery stores are pretty nice and the food is affordable, but beyond that there doesn’t seem to be much more to it.
But this shows that there’s quite an extensive network of foreign countries using influence peddling to try to change US policy in their favor. I mean the Israelis are masters of this. Every member of Congress has an AIPAC guy who takes them on paid vacations to Israel. The NY Times got caught printing Chinese propaganda, paid directly from the Chinese government. Bob Menendez is on trial for taking bribes from…I can’t remember who. The Saudis?
Money in politics has gotten so bad that it’s infecting money in news, and I wonder if it’s even propping up news corporations to such a degree that they’d go bankrupt without it. It’s bad enough if Big Pharma can influence what NPR is saying about disease. It’s quite another if Germany or hell North Korea can influence foreign policy by the news influencing politics. Never mind the influence US intelligence agencies have on the news.
Getting money out of politics is a national emergency.
