A former Florida sheriff who moved to Russia amid an FBI investigation is a Kremlin-backed propagandist responsible for fake viral videos and disinformation targeting Kamala Harris' campaign, according to European intelligence documents. reviewed by the Washington Post.
The GRU, Russia's military intelligence service, funded John Mark Dougan, operator of several fake news websites. According to documents reviewed by the MailDugan was responsible for several websites that appeared to publish fake local news, including DC Weekly, the Chicago Chronicle, and the Atlanta Observer. The documents, which mainly focus on the period from March 2021 to August this year, show that Dougan worked with Yury Khoroshevsky, an officer in GRU Unit 29155. Two European security officials told Mail that Khoroshevsky's unit is responsible for sabotage, political interference operations and cyber warfare directed at the West.
Dougan also reportedly worked with the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, a Moscow-based institute founded by a far-right Russian nationalist. Alejandro Dugin. The center's director, Valery Korovin, also works closely with Khoroshevsky, according to documents reviewed by the Mail. Khoroshevsky began depositing payments into Dougan's bank account in April 2022 and met frequently with him and Dougan, documents show. Dougan received some of the payments after websites he created had difficulty accessing Western ai generators.
Disinformation experts and the government have been sounding the alarm about Russian agents trying to influence the 2024 presidential election. The Biden administration has alleged that Russian influence campaigns have operated websites and social media accounts to influence the elections, and that they have created false characters on social networks to spread misinformation. In July, the Justice Department seized two domain names and more than 900 media accounts that it claimed were part of an “ai-enhanced” Russian bot farm.
dougan may also be responsible for spreading a video involving false allegations of sexual misconduct against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, disinformation experts told the Mail. The person in the video claims to be Matthew Metro, a former student of Walz, but the real Matthew Metro has debunked both the video and the claims.
NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, told the Mail that Dougan was the initial source of the claims. Eleven days before the video was posted, Dougan appeared on a podcast with an anonymous man who claimed to be a former exchange student from Kazakhstan who had been abused by Walz.
Dougan told the Mail he was not behind DC Weekly or other sites and said he did not know Korovin or Khoroshenky. He said he worked as an IT consultant for an American company.
“I'll tell you hypothetically, if they were my sites,” he said, “then I'm just fighting fire with fire because the West is lying about everything that's going on,” Dougan said. “They are lying about everything.”
