Russia, if you're listening . . ." American in Russia creating Russian-funded deep fakes targeting Harris campaign - washingtonpost.com or archive.ph
Former deputy Palm Beach County sheriff, John Mark Dougan, who fled to Moscow in 2016 has became one of the Kremlin’s most prolific propagandists is working directly with Russian military intelligence to pump out deepfakes and circulate misinformation that targets the Harris’s campaign.
Former deputy Palm Beach County, Florida sheriff, John Mark Dougan poses for a portrait in a park near Moscow in 2016. (Olga Leonova)
Dougan’s use of websites to attack perceived enemies stretches back to his time in law enforcement in the United States. He said he clashed with people in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office after he complained about abuses by a sergeant in his unit who boasted on Facebook about beating people he arrested.
Dougan had worked at the sheriff’s office in Palm Beach from 2005 to 2008 and faced 11 internal affairs investigations before he left, according to the Palm Beach Post. A jury also awarded a fellow Palm Beach sheriff’s deputy $275,000 after it found that Dougan had pepper-sprayed and arrested the officer without cause. Dougan claimed the internal affairs investigations were a result of his blowing the whistle on the sergeant’s alleged assaults.
After Dougan resigned his post in Palm Beach, he moved to Maine, where he was soon dismissed from a police department over complaints alleging sexual harassment, officials in Maine said.
In the Marine Corps, he also had a checkered career. Dougan served from May 1996 to July 1998, an abbreviated stint; most Marines serve at least four years. He also left as a lance corporal, a rank most Marines attain after just a few months, and he never deployed, according to the Pentagon, which wouldn’t characterize his discharge status, citing privacy concerns. Dougan’s rank as he was discharged and the date at which he became a lance corporal, in April 1998, nearly two years into his time in uniform, are “indicative of the fact that the character of his service was incongruent with the Marine Corps’ expectations and standards,” said Yvonne Carlock, a service spokeswoman.
After returning to Florida from Maine, Dougan created PBSOTalk, a site he said he intended as a place to air complaints by other deputies about the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office but that soon became home to corruption allegations and smears involving his former superiors.
In 2016, Dougan posted confidential data about thousands of police officers, federal agents and judges on PBSOTalk, prompting the FBI and local police to search his home. The next year, he was indicted on 21 state charges of extortion and wiretapping.
By then he had fled to Moscow, a city he said he had visited several times before after establishing an online relationship with a Russian woman. It’s not clear how Dougan first came to the attention of Russia’s propagandists, but some of the skills he honed in Florida are a hallmark of his work in Moscow, researchers say — using an online authentic gloss to make outlandish claims.
As early as June 2019 — more than two years before the invasion of Ukraine — Korovin had proposed in a letter to Russia’s Ministry of Defense that his center organize “an internet war against the U.S. on its territory.”
Korovin and Khoroshenky ostensibly supported Dougan as he sought to parlay the political asylum he won in Russia in 2017 into Russian citizenship, while pointing out that Dougan had few other options since he was wanted in the United States, the documents show. The process continued until summer 2023, when Dougan finally obtained citizenship; at one point, a frustrated Dougan said he was on the verge of going to the Chinese Embassy to seek Beijing’s support, the documents show.
“The time comes when it’s enough,” Dougan said, according to one document.
By then, Dougan felt he had established his worth. Before the Russian invasion, he had traveled to Ukraine and posted a video on YouTube that the United States was running bioweapons labs there, a false claim that Russia used as one of the pretexts for its war.
As Russian forces foundered in the first weeks of the invasion, Dougan told Korovin he felt he would be of greater assistance using his background in the Marines to train Russian troops. Korovin told him he would achieve more in securing “our victory” by promoting his fake biolabs report, the documents show.
Dougan’s liaison at the GRU is a senior figure in Russian military intelligence working under the cover name Yury Khoroshevsky, the documents show. The officer’s real name is Yury Khoroshenky, though he is referred to only as Khoroshevsky in the documents, and he serves in the GRU’s Unit 29155, which oversees sabotage, political interference operations and cyberwarfare targeting the West, according to two European security officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence.
The more than 150 documents — which were shared with The Post to demonstrate the extent of Russian interference through Dougan and focus mostly on the period between March 2021 and August 2024 — for the first time expose some of the inner workings of a network that researchers and intelligence officials say has become the most potent source of fake news emanating from Russia and targeting American voters over the past year.
Disinformation researchers say Dougan’s network was probably behind a recent viral fake video smearing Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz, which U.S. intelligence officials said Tuesday was created by Russia. It received nearly 5 million views on X in less than 24 hours, Microsoft said.
Since September 2023, posts, articles and videos generated by Dougan and some of the Russians who work with him have garnered 64 million views, said McKenzie Sadeghi, who has closely followed Dougan’s sites and is a researcher at NewsGuard, a company that tracks disinformation online.
“Compared with other Russian disinformation campaigns, Dougan has a clear understanding of what would resonate with Western audiences and the political atmosphere, which I think has made this more effective,” Sadeghi said.
The documents show that Dougan is also subsidized and directed by a Moscow institute founded by Alexander Dugin, a far-right imperialist ideologue sometimes referred to as “Putin’s brain” because of his influence on the revanchist thinking of the Russian president; Dugin’s ideas became a driving force behind Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One 2022 document shows that Dugin’s Eurasia movement, which promotes his theories of a Russian empire, “actively cooperates with the Russian Defense Ministry.”
Dougan’s contact at the Moscow institute, the Center for Geopolitical Expertise, is its head, Valery Korovin. According to Korovin’s social media page on the Russian version of Facebook, he was awarded a medal by President Vladimir Putin in 2023 for “services to the Fatherland” for “carrying out special tasks.” Korovin also works closely with Khoroshenky, who under his cover name serves as the institute’s deputy director, the documents show.
The documents show payments directly from Khoroshenky to Dougan’s bank account in Moscow starting in April 2022 and frequent meetings between Khoroshenky, Dougan and Korovin.
“We will not be beaten,” Khoroshenky said in one discussion with Korovin, according to the documents, after a new server was launched this summer allowing Dougan to add to the myriad sites he’d already created and to restart one of the domains that had been blocked.
Dougan is responsible for content on dozens of fake news sites with names such as DC Weekly, Chicago Chronicle and Atlanta Observer, according to the documents and disinformation researchers. In the months that followed his reboot with the new GRU-facilitated server and AI generator, the sites and fake news videos spread by Dougan and his associates have produced some of the most viral Russian disinformation targeting Harris, according to Microsoft and NewsGuard, including a deepfake audio in August that purported to show Barack Obama implying that the Democrats had ordered the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump.
Most recently, Dougan was the initial source for a false claim behind the viral fake video that alleged Walz abused a student at the high school where he taught, and NewsGuard believes Dougan’s network may be behind its further dissemination. Eleven days before a video appeared with what NewsGuard says was probably an AI-generated persona claiming to be a former Walz student, Dougan appeared on a podcast making a similar but separate false claim, presenting an anonymous man claiming to be a former exchange student from Kazakhstan.
Other Kremlin-directed efforts to sway the U.S. presidential election have included the Doppelgänger campaign run by Kremlin political strategists that was recently targeted by the Department of Justice for its cloning of legitimate news outlets, including Fox News and The Post — a Russian operation about which The Post had previously reported. The Justice Department has also accused RT, the Russian state media outlet, of funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to American social media influencers to parrot Kremlin talking points.
In a telephone interview with The Post, Dougan denied being behind sites such as DC Weekly, and he said he didn’t know Korovin or Khoroshenky or have any connections with Russian military intelligence or the Russian government.
Dougan insisted he operated independently and said that “no one sends me money for anything.” He later claimed he worked as an IT consultant for an American company and said the documents The Post referred to must have been fabricated.
“I will tell you hypothetically, if they were my sites,” he said, “then I am merely fighting fire with fire because the West is f------ lying about everything that’s happening. They are lying about everything.”
Korovin said he was an academic who was interested only in thoughts, ideas and philosophy, adding that the claims related to the documents appear to represent “a collection of accidentally combined moments of information taken from who knows where, most of which seem absurd and ridiculous” and many of which he said he was “hearing for the first time.”
Dugin said, “Any suggestion about our supposed affiliation with the GRU or to any attempts to manipulate foreign journalists or influence the political landscape in the U.S. are completely unjustified.” He said his Eurasian movement did not participate in any official partnerships with Russian government organizations, including the Defense Ministry.
Khoroshenky did not respond to requests for comment. |
