The Justice Department indicted two employees of a Russian media outlet in a $10 million scheme to influence American voters using popular conservative commentators as their unwitting mouthpieces.

Two employees of Russian state media organ RT, Kostiantyn Kalashnikov, 31, and Elena Afanasyeva, 27, were charged with acting as unregistered foreign agents and money laundering.

Russian influence operation

The indictment accuses the Russians of funneling millions through shell companies to a U.S. company that produces English-language political content, Tenet Media.

Tenet was founded by Canadian-born conservative influencer and former RT commentator Lauren Chen and her husband Liam Donovan.

Lucrative sums were paid to the company's influencers, such as Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson. The influencers were "deceived" about the Russian source of the money, which they were told came from a fictitious Western investor, "Eduard Grigoriann."

"The company never disclosed to the influencers or to their millions of followers its ties to RT and the Russian government. Instead, the defendants and the company claimed that the company was sponsored by a private investor, but that private investor was a fictitious persona," attorney general Merrick Garland said.

Either Chen or Donovan introduced Kalashnikov to Tenet's employees as an "outside editor." Kalashnikov steered content for Tenet, in one instance directing the company's employees to blame an ISIS terror attack in Moscow on America and Ukraine.

Conservative influencers respond

Tenet is not named in the indictment, but it describes itself as a "network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues," a description that appears in the indictment.

The company produced hundreds of videos that racked up 16 million views on YouTube alone. The videos encouraged domestic divisions in the U.S. "to weaken U.S. opposition to core Government of Russia interests, such as its ongoing war in Ukraine," the DOJ said.

Benny Johnson and Tim Pool separately said they were unwitting victims of the scheme.

“Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims,” Pool said in a statement posted on X. “I cannot speak for anyone else at the company as to what they do or to what they are instructed.”

Neither Chen nor her husband have been indicted. Chen has been fired by conservative media company Blaze Media, where she worked as an independent contractor.