DOJ Charges Russian With Conspiring to Disrupt 2018 Elections

Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova is accused of managing the finances of multi-million-dollar interference effort.

Kremlin pool/Zumapress

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The Justice Department on Friday filed a complaint against Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, a 44-year-old Russian national who, prosecutors allege, was the chief accountant managing the finances for Project Lakhta, Russia’s political influence operation aimed at disrupting elections in the United States and other countries. 

Khusyaynova is charged with participating in a conspiracy to disrupt US elections, including the upcoming 2018 midterms. The complaint alleges that Khusyaynova controlled millions of dollars in Project Lakhta’s operating budget, including money spent in the US on domain names, proxy servers, advertisements on social media, and more. The DOJ alleges that she managed the financing of “media and influence activities” directed at the US, the European Union, Ukraine, and Russia itself. 

Project Lakhta is an umbrella effort funded by Russian oligarch Yevgeniy Prighozin and the companies he controls, Concord Management and Consulting and Concord Catering. In February, Special Counsel Robert Mueller charged both Concord companies and Prighozin himself with conspiring to interfere in the 2016 US election.

You can read the full complaint below:

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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