Even by the standards of right-wing social media, last year’s rollout for Tenet Media was strange. Videos of the event featured influencers such as Benny Johnson and Dave Rubin talking portentously about freedom and censorship while bathed in a nightclub-style purple light.
By Will Sommer
“I worked for several massive corporate news organizations,” Pool, a former Vice News staffer, said in his own purple-toned promotional video. “And what did I learn? They lie.”
From its first days, though, the online stars Tenet called its “talent” seemed to question why this collective existed at all. They all still posted on their own channels, and Tenet’s view counts were noticeably low.
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In his own promotional video for Tenet, YouTuber Matt Christiansen even conceded that the company he had joined could well be a house of cards.
“What if I’ve been duped, what if this is all a ruse?” Christiansen said. Still he maintained that he trusted the site’s founders, conservative social media commentator Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan.
Christiansen got his answer about Tenet on Wednesday, when the Justice Department indicted two employees of Russian government-funded RT for illegally operating Tenet behind the scenes. Rather than being a domestic network of social media accounts, prosecutors allege that Tenet was a foreign influence operation funded with roughly $10 million in Russian money.
The indictment outlines how prosecutors say this money was sent overseas and shared among the conservative YouTubers through whom Russia sought to promote its agenda.
Most of the six members of Tenet’s “talent” team claim they did not know the money was coming from Russia. (Canadian activist Lauren Southern has not issued a statement as of this writing.) The indictment alleges that Tenet’s founders and Russian backers misled at least two of them, Pool and Rubin, about the source of Tenet’s funding by inventing a fictitious Belgian investor named Eduard Grigoriann.
“I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity,” Rubin, who rose to prominence by fashioning himself as a “centrist” critic of liberalism, said in a statement.
The news that some of the right’s biggest online stars had, apparently unwittingly, taken millions from the Kremlin provoked a wave of schadenfreude from their critics. On X, never-Trump conservative writer Christian Vanderbrouk, quipped that Tenet’s stars managed to see conspiracy theories everywhere — yet never questioned why a mysterious Belgian was paying them to prop up a little-watched YouTube channel.
Chen and Donovan aren’t named in the indictment, but Tennessee corporate records identify them as Tenet’s founders. Prosecutors allege that the founders knew their funding was coming from Moscow and privately acknowledged in messages to each other that their backers were Russian.
Chen, who uses the social media handle “Roaming Millennial,” is well-connected on the right. She has 572,000 YouTube subscribers on her own channel and, until recently, hosted two online shows for Glenn Beck’s website, the Blaze. But while Chen is a conservative influencer in her own right, her involvement in Tenet was not publicized.
Chen did not respond to requests for comment. In an email, Blaze CEO Tyler Cardon said “Lauren Chen was an independent contractor, whose contract has been terminated.”
YouTube said in a statement on Thursday evening that it had terminated Tenet Media’s channel after learning of the indictment, as well as four separate channels operated by Chen, “as part of our ongoing efforts to combat coordinated influence operations.”
In December 2022, according to the indictment, Tenet’s Russian investors tasked the site’s founders with hiring a “personality that could serve as the face of the channel” and routed the funds for it through far-flung destinations such as Mauritius and the United Arab Emirates.
Much of that money went to Rubin and Pool, according to the indictment. Rubin received $400,000 a month for 16 videos, plus a performance bonus and a $100,000 signing bonus — all for a series in which Rubin commented on dumb internet clips that often received just roughly 1,000 views per episode.
Tenet also proved lucrative for Pool, who made $100,000 per episode for a weekly show he hosted, according to prosecutors. The same month that Tenet launched, Pool purchased a skate park in Martinsburg, W.Va., as well as other significant real estate purchases in the same area.
Rubin and Pool initially asked for more information about where the money was coming from, prompting the Russians to invent “Eduard Grigoriann,” a fictional Belgian banker committed to free speech, the indictment states. Grigoriann’s name was misspelled on many documents, and the influencers could find no evidence online that he worked at the real bank where he claimed to have made his money. Plus, a profile of Grigoriann created by the Russians cited his interest in “social justice” — a red flag for Rubin, according to an email sent by one of Tenet’s founders.
“I think it may be because that’s usually a term used by liberals, but we’re trying to create a conservative network,” the founder wrote to Tenet’s Russian backers, according to the indictment.
Tenet managed to reach some prominent conservative figures. Former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Republican National Committee Chairwoman Lara Trump both appeared on “In the Arena,” a Tenet-funded show hosted by Johnson.
Even after recruiting their talent, though, the Russians purportedly running Tenet were frustrated with Tenet’s lack of success. Like many media executives, they worried that their employees were doing more to promote their personal social media brands than their new outlet. In February 2024, Elena Afanasyeva, one of the indicted RT employees, allegedly complained under an alias in a Tenet chatroom that the influencers she had hired weren’t boosting Tenet enough.
“I know this is not an obligation, but we are falling behind with numbers,” Afanasyeva wrote, according to the indictment.
Still frustrated, according to prosecutors, Afanasyeva invented a second alias to put more pressure on Tenet’s influencers to promote the site.
As the indictment news shook up the right-wing media world, much of the reaction, naturally, came in the form of YouTube live streams. On his show Wednesday, Pool claimed that he was skateboarding when he heard of the indictments, and said he talked to Chen — the head of a company that was paying him $100,000 a week — only twice in the past year.
On Wednesday night, Christiansen insisted on a YouTube stream that he had never been influenced by the Russians in his coverage and merely promoted values dating back to America’s founding.
“I guess if that aligns with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, then I’ve been had,” Christiansen said.
Gerrit De Vynke contributed to this report.
