Trump official who shut down Russia propaganda unit has links to Kremlin

Telegraph

7 days ago

A senior official who dismantled the US government's Russian disinformation unit is married to a Russian woman with links to the Kremlin, The Telegraph can reveal.
Darren Beattie has provoked alarm within the State Department since being appointed in February for his ardent pro-Russian views and focus on destroying the agency tasked with tackling Kremlin propaganda.
Mr Beattie, the acting under-secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, is married to a woman whose uncle has taken several roles in Russian politics and once received a personal 'thank you' message from Vladimir Putin.
In the years before joining the government, Mr Beattie wrote social media posts suggesting Western institutions should be 'infiltrated' by Putin, while he also attacked what he described as the 'globalist American empire'.
Donald Trump is under pressure from many in his party, particularly senators, to take a tougher stance on the Russian leader while he continues to refuse to sign a ceasefire deal as the war in Ukraine drags on.
Many of Mr Beattie's social media posts also concern China, repeatedly calling on the US to surrender Taiwan to Beijing, and labelling Britain a 'poor and pathetic kingdom' that would be 'far better off under Chinese dominion'.
State Department sources expressed scepticism over whether he had undergone security vetting, a process which has been relaxed under Mr Trump.
Mr Beattie was a member of the first Trump administration, but after being sacked in 2018 for allegedly attending a white nationalist conference, he reinvented himself as an ' alt-Right ' media figure.
In May 2021, public records show, he married a Russian woman called Yulia Kirillova in a ceremony in Broward County, Florida.
Ms Kirillova, who according to her Facebook page was educated in Moscow before studying abroad in Canada and Washington DC, is the niece of Sergei Chernikov, a Russian drinks magnate who part-owns a flat with her mother, Natalia.
Mr Chernikov, whose net worth was estimated to be $150 million in 2005, reportedly received a letter of thanks from Putin for his help in the election campaign which first brought the Russian leader to power.
The same year, Mr Chernikov took his first step into politics, taking a role in the ministry of natural resources, before becoming deputy governor of the Nenets region in Siberia.
From 2008 to 2010, he was a member of Russia's civic chamber, which was founded following a proposal by Putin and is notionally meant to scrutinise the activities of the Russian government.
When the chamber was set up, critics claimed that it would be staffed by Kremlin allies and used to diminish a rival power base in the Russian State Duma.
Both before and after his marriage to Mr Chernikov's niece, Mr Beattie has repeatedly attacked what he called the 'globalist American empire' while praising both Russia and China as counterweights to its 'woke' ideology.
'The rise of non-woke (China) and anti-woke (Russia) geopolitical competitors to the Globalist American Empire is not a bad thing,' he wrote in October 2021.
He also said he looked forward to its 'prestige and power' collapsing on the world stage and claimed that its 'position in the global order [is] rapidly deteriorating'.
Mr Beattie, and Revolver, the news outlet he founded after leaving the first Trump administration, argues that the US has sought to engineer 'colour revolutions' around the world – a common trope in Russia and China to dismiss pro-democracy movements as Western-backed coup attempts.
The businessman has claimed the US is running 'colour revolution ops' in Ukraine, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Myanmar, and that an American 'colour revolution brigade' is pushing for a 'forever war in Ukraine'.
Two months before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he said: 'Imagine the whining from the Globalist American Empire if Putin 'invades' Ukraine… I love it when our national security bureaucrats fail!'
He has also praised Putin as 'brave and strong', and claimed the Russian leader had 'done more to advance conservative positions in the US than any Republican'. He also declared: 'Nato is a much greater threat to American liberty than Putin ever was.'
'The funny thing is just about every Western institution would improve in quality if it were directly infiltrated and controlled by Putin,' he wrote in September 2021.
Many of his posts focus on Britain, claiming it treats white people 'far worse' than the Uyghur population that Chinese authorities have imprisoned in camps in Xinjiang.
He has labelled Britain a 'sewage pit' and 'the most utterly repulsive dystopia on earth'.
In a post more than two years after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, he criticised the UK's policy of 'antagonising Russia'.
All of these social media posts were still online at the time of writing, although Mr Beattie has deleted disparaging tweets about Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, having previously claimed his now-boss attended 'gay foam parties'.
According to Ms Kirillova's Facebook page, she moved to Washington on Jan 28, roughly a week before her husband began his role at the State Department.
Despite his wide-ranging brief at the heart of the US government, Mr Beattie is said to have focused a disproportionate amount of time on seeking to dismantle the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, known as R/Fimi, while building cultural ties with Russia.
'Censorship network'
R/Fimi, which tracked and countered propaganda from sources including Russia, China and Iran, was a relatively small agency with a budget of just over $50 million at the time it was shut down.
The US's adversaries are estimated to spend tens of billions of dollars a year on foreign disinformation.
Mr Beattie's news outlet Revolver had spent years attacking R/Fimi, accusing it of being part of a 'censorship network' designed to silence conservative voices.
Sources said Mr Beattie had doggedly pursued the agency after being appointed, taking it apart piece by piece.
Contractors were sacked and officials were ordered to stop communicating with others in the State Department or external partners without explicit permission.
Even before it was disbanded in mid-April, when Mr Beattie told staff in a brief speech that it was 'severely misaligned' with the administration's priorities, its work had essentially wrapped up.
Mr Rubio confirmed in an interview distributed by the State Department the same day that Mr Beattie had played a major role in abolishing R/Fimi.
At the same time as Mr Beattie was working on dismantling the agency, he is said to have pushed to rebuild relations with Russia, insisting on instituting cultural exchange programmes in fields such as ballet and hockey.
He is also said to have taken a significant interest in classified material related to Russia, prompting widespread concern about turning over sensitive information to him.
Sources were highly sceptical if it had undergone a security vetting process, which the State Department's website notes can take anywhere from a couple of months to over a year to complete.
Beattie limited to 210 days in post
On his first day in office, Mr Trump unilaterally granted top-secret security clearances to personnel in the Executive Office of the President citing a backlog in processing. The office is not part of the State Department.
MIT Technology Review reported this month that Mr Beattie had launched a sweeping effort to obtain records from R/Fimi staff shortly before it closed, apparently with the intention of characterising it as an organisation dedicated to smearing conservatives.
He asked for communications with or about reporters who write about foreign disinformation, along with references to Mr Trump and his allies. One official said the move amounted to a 'witch hunt'.
Mr Beattie would need confirmation by the Senate to take on the under-secretary role full-time: as an acting official, he is limited to 210 days.
Allies in the media have suggested he is unlikely to survive his time in the spotlight, and have suggested permanent posts where he could be installed without requiring backing from senators.
A senior State Department official said: 'No one in America cares about a British gossip column. This is all fake news and low even for tabloid standards.
'Darren is a tremendous colleague who is committed to advancing President Trump's America First agenda.
'In a few short months, he has been able to spearhead high-level projects that have been critical in advancing a foreign policy that puts our national interests first.'
Mr Chernikov and Ms Kirillova have been approached for comment.