Trump Official Behind Controversial Russia Move Has Ties to Kremlin
Senior State Department staffer Darren Beattie, a passionate Putin supporter behind the move to dismantle a key agency fighting Russian propaganda, is married to a Russian woman whose uncle is a longtime Kremlin ally, according to The Telegraph.
Yulia Kirillova grew up in Moscow, studied abroad in North America, and married Beattie in 2021 in Florida. She moved to D.C. in January. Her uncle Sergei Cherniko is a drinks magnate who had an estimated net worth of $150 million in 2005. That year, he served in Russia's ministry of natural resources and was then deputy governor of Siberia's Nenets region. Cherniko later served in Putin's civic chamber from 2008 to 2010.
The relationship raises even greater scrutiny around Beattie's April decision to eliminate the Global Engagement Center, a State Department office tasked with dealing with Russian disinformation campaigns. Beattie has been a staunch supporter of Putin, setting himself apart from the traditional conservative right in Bannon-esque fashion.
'US gov't has been supporting Ukranian neo-nazi groups in its obsessive proxy war against Russia,' he wrote on X in 2022.
'State Department could sell butt plugs and forward proceeds to fund resistance effort in ukraine,' he wrote again that year. 'Iran Contra but with a modern American twist.'
'A big part of American ruling class' hatred of Russia is that Russia is a major power that rejects the woke ideology at the core of American regime,' he wrote in 2021.
This is a clear conflict of interest that is extremely typical within the Trump administration. And on top of that, Beattie was initially fired from the Trump administration in 2018 for attending a white nationalist conference. He has a long history of many other deeply problematic views.
'Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,' Beattie wrote on X in October. 'Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.' On January 6, 2021, he spent the day on X warning Senator Tim Scott, 'BLM,' Ibram X. Kendi, and Kay Cole James to 'learn their places' and 'take a knee' to MAGA.
That, on top of this personal in at the Kremlin, is highly questionable behavior for a ranking official, which has been overly normalized by this administration.
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