US investigators have charged a prominent Russian state television personality and his wife with sanctions violations and money laundering, as the White House attacks the Kremlin’s influence-peddling efforts ahead of the US presidential election.
Dimitri Simes, a television presenter and producer for Russia’s state-owned Channel One, was accused of receiving more than $1 million (£759,000) in compensation, a private car and driver, and an apartment allowance in Moscow, Russia, despite the station’s 2022 designation by the US Office of Foreign Assets Control. He and his wife, Anastasia, were accused of money laundering to conceal the proceeds of his work for Channel One.
Anastasia, 55, was also accused of buying art and antiques for a sanctioned Russian oligarch, Aleksandr Udodov, and then storing the works in their Virginia home before shipping them to Russia. The works were purchased from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe.
The couple faces up to 20 years in prison on each charge if convicted. They left the U.S. after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and are now believed to be in Russia, the Justice Department said.
“Joe Biden and his cronies are impotent cowards,” their son, Dimitri Simes Jr, wrote on X. “Our family is safe and sound in Russia. We will not be intimidated. In fact, we will only get louder. Stay tuned!” He claimed the Biden administration wanted to jail his father for “exposing his suicidal policies in Ukraine.”
Simes, who had contacts with several members of Donald Trump’s inner circle, also played a prominent role in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence in the 2016 election. He was never charged with a crime as part of that investigation.
The new charges against Simes come a day after the US Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Margarita Simonyan, who works for state broadcaster RT, and nine other employees for running a covert disinformation network in the US that included well-known conservative American influencers who unknowingly accepted millions of dollars in Kremlin money.
American influencers Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson have responded to allegations that the American content creation company they were affiliated with received nearly $10 million from Russian state media employees to publish videos with messages that advanced Moscow’s interests and agenda, including coverage of the war in Ukraine.
On Thursday, conservative media company Blaze Media said it had terminated its contract with YouTuber Lauren Chen. Chen and her husband founded Tenet Media, which received as much as $10 million from Russian government intermediaries, according to a Justice Department indictment and U.S. media reports, and then paid large sums of money to conservative figures to produce online videos intended to influence the 2024 election. The U.S. influencers and media personalities acted unwittingly, the indictment said.
Related: US files charges against Russian-born former Trump campaign adviser
“Three things are certain in life: death, taxes and RT’s interference in the US elections,” Simonyan joked in response.
Simes, 76, who until recently lived in Huntly, Virginia, had emerged as a prominent Russian political commentator, regularly expressing pro-Kremlin views on television and in print media in his accented but fluent English.
Simes is also a former chairman of the think tank The Center for the National Interest, which was founded by Richard Nixon and calls itself “America’s voice for strategic realism.”
“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves said in a statement. “Such violations harm our national security interests — a fact that Dimitri Simes, with the deep experience he gained in national affairs after fleeing the Soviet Union and becoming a U.S. citizen, should have been uniquely aware of.”
