US investigators have indicted a prominent Russian state television personality and his wife for violating sanctions and for money laundering as the White House targets Kremlin influence operations before the US presidential election.
Dimitri Simes, a television presenter and producer for Russia’s state-owned Channel One, was charged with receiving more than $1m (£759,000) in compensation, a personal car and driver and a stipend for a flat in Moscow, despite the television station’s designation as sanctioned in 2022 by the US’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. He and his wife, Anastasia, were charged with money laundering to hide the proceeds of his work for Channel One.
Anastasia Simes, 55, was also charged with buying arts and antiquities for a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Aleksandr Udodov, and then storing the works in their home in Virginia before they were shipped onward to Russia. The works were bought from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe.
The couple faces 20 years in prison for each count if convicted. They left the US after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and are now believed to be in Russia, the justice department said.
“Joe Biden and his stooges are impotent cowards,” wrote Dimitri Simes Jr, their son, on X. “Our family is safe and sound in Russia. We will not be intimidated. In fact, we’re only going to get louder. Stay tuned!” He claimed that the Biden administration wanted to jail his father for “exposing its suicidal Ukraine policy”.
Simes, who had had contact with a number of members of Donald Trump’s orbit, also figured prominently in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 elections. He was never charged with a crime as part of that investigation.
The new allegations against Simes come one day after the US treasury department sanctioned Margarita Simonyan, who works for the state-controlled broadcaster RT, and nine other employees for running a covert disinformation network in the US that included well-known conservative American influencers who unwittingly took millions of dollars in Kremlin cash.
The US influencers Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson have addressed allegations that the US content creation company they were associated with had been provided with nearly $10m from Russian state media employees to publish videos with messages in favour of Moscow’s interests and agenda, including over the war in Ukraine.
On Thursday, the conservative media company Blaze Media said it had terminated its contract with the YouTuber Lauren Chen. Chen and her husband founded Tenet Media, which received as much as $10m from intermediaries to the Russian government, according to the justice department indictment and US media reports, and then paid out large sums of money to conservative figures to produce online videos meant to influence the 2024 election. The American influencers and media personalities acted unwittingly, according to the indictment.
“Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the US elections,” Simonyan quipped in response.
Simes, 76, resided until recently in Huntly, Virginia, and had established himself as a prominent Russian political commentator who frequently voiced pro-Kremlin views on television and in print in his accented but fluent English.
Simes is also the former president of The Center for the National Interest thinktank, which was established by Richard Nixon and calls itself “America’s voice for strategic realism”.
“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” the US attorney Matthew Graves said in a statement. “Such violations harm our national security interests – a fact that Dimitri Simes, with the deep experience he gained in national affairs after fleeing the Soviet Union and becoming a US citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”
