Via the Daily Beast:
Kristian Brunovich Rouz, originally from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, has been living in San Diego, where OAN is based, since August 2017, reporting on U.S. politics for the 24-hour news channel. For all of that time, he’s been simultaneously writing for Sputnik, a Kremlin-owned news wire that played a role in Russia’s 2016 election-interference operation, according to an assessment by the U.S. intelligence community.
Let that sink in.Rouz’s on-air reports for OAN include a wholly fabricated 2017 segment claiming Hillary Clinton is secretly bankrolling antifa through her political action committee. Clinton, Rouz claimed falsely, gave antifa protesters $800,000 that “went toward things like bricks, hammers, bats, and chains.”
Other smears target billionaire financier George Soros, a longtime Kremlin bête noire. In one segment, Rouz amplified a thoroughly debunked claim that Soros collaborated with the Nazis during World War II, when the Jewish philanthropist was 14 years old. Another Rouz story accused Soros of secretly funding migrant caravans.
But the story about the Buffalo protester was a whole new level of mendacity. The Wapo takes a crack at explaining. In this case, Rouz claims that Gugino was part of a “false flag provocation by far left group antifa.” In other words, that the elderly Gugino intentionally injured himself to make the police look bad, as though there were no other available evidence of the police treating protesters in questionable ways.
The evidence that Gugino is antifa? That he was holding his phone in his hand.
“Newly released videos appear to show Gugino using a police tracker on his phone trying to scan police communications during the protest,” Rouz says. “The tactic, known as skimming, is an old trick used by antifa to locate police officers and plan violence activities, bypassing the police response.”
First, there are no “newly released videos” — just the original video of Gugino approaching the police.
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