When the news broke that Putin henchman and mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin had died in a plane crash – for the sin of threatening a mutiny, he was sentenced to fall from 30,000 feet rather than from a window – I somehow assumed that the mainstream media would remind Americans that the dead warlord was a key player in Russia’s 2016 campaign to help elect Donald Trump.
But since virtually none of the news stories have noted that salient fact, I might as well give it a try.
This is not ancient history. Russia’s mission to degrade our democracy, sow domestic chaos, and convert the Republican party into a pro-Putin outpost is ongoing without end – abetted these days by useful idiots like Inmate# P01135809, Vivek Ramaswamy, and Tucker Carlson. (GOP presidential candidate Ramawamy said yesterday that we should let Putin keep parts of Ukraine: “Our goal should not be for Putin to lose.”)
And lest we forget (although we have), Yevgeny Prigozhin was at ground zero when the mission was launched. We know this because, in 2018, he was indicted in absentia by the U.S. Justice Department.
If you don’t remember that indictment – he was charged with 12 other Russians and three Russian companies – you’re certainly excused, because it’s not possible for the average person to track every player in the MAGA-Russian cesspool. Prigozhin provided the lavish seed money for the “Internet Research Agency” starting in 2014, and it latched onto Trump soon thereafter.
Trump’s mantra ever since has been NO COLLUSION, but he never needed to collude. The Russian operatives were more than capable, on their own, of waging what the indictment called “information warfare against the United States of America” on Trump’s behalf. On Facebook alone, 80,000 pieces of content – boosting Trump and lambasting Hillary Clinton with lies – reached more than 126 million Americans. Russian operatives did grassroots work in battleground states, posing as Americans (they “used the stolen identities of real U.S. persons”), and they coordinated rallies with “unwitting individuals associated with the Trump campaign.”
Excerpts from the indictment that few seem to remember:
“Beginning as early as 2014, Defendant ORGANIZATION (the Internet Research Agency) began operations to interfere with the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Defendant ORGANIZATION received funding for its operations from Defendant YEVGENIY VIKTOROVICH PRIGOZHIN and companies he controlled, including Defendants CONCORD MANAGEMENT AND CONSULTING LLC and CONCORD CATERING (collectively “CONCORD”). Defendants CONCORD and PRIGOZHIN spent significant funds to further the ORGANIZATION’s operations…to defraud the United States by impairing, obstructing, and defeating the lawful functions of the government through fraud and deceit for the purpose of interfering with the U.S.
political and electoral processes, including the presidential election of 2016.”
The indictment came and went because, obviously, Putin didn’t volunteer to extradite the 13 accused Russians – especially not Prigozhin, who did all kinds of dirty work for the Kremlin, most recently marauding around Ukraine with his fellow warlords. But earlier this summer he crossed the boss, and that was fatal mistake; all the work he’d done to help elect Putin’s favorite American candidate suddenly didn’t matter. As Russian dissident Garry Kasoparov has written, the best way to understand Putin is to read The Godfather: “Mafia, violence, symbols, loyalty and betrayal.”
So we’re all fine with Prigozhin being dead. But we’d be wise to remember something he said in 2018, on the day he was indicted stateside: “The Americans are very impressionable people; they see what they want to see.”
And if a sizable share of Americans continue to marinate in credulous ignorance, the risk is high that Prigozhin’s successors will run rampant on our soil.