Officials from NASA and Russia’s space agency don’t see eye to eye on the causes and risks of small but persistent air leaks on the International Space Station.

That was the word from the new chair of NASA's International Space Station Advisory Committee last week. The air leaks are located in the transfer tunnel of the space station's Russian Zvezda service module, one of the oldest elements of the complex.

US and Russian officials "don't have a common understanding of what the likely root cause is, or the severity of the consequences of these leaks," said Bob Cabana, a retired NASA astronaut who took the helm of the advisory committee earlier this year. Cabana replaced former Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford, who chaired the committee before he died in March.

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For eight years, an article of faith within Trumpworld and the right-wing media cosmos has been that the Trump-Russia scandal was a hoax, a canard cooked up by nefarious Deep State actors and bolstered by their co-conspirators in the press and the Democratic Party to sabotage and destroy Donald Trump. Trump himself continues to rail in shorthand about “Russia, Russia, Russia.” He has pointed to this “witch hunt” as evidence of extensive corruption within the intelligence and law enforcement communities of the federal government and called for the criminal prosecution of those whom he accuses of orchestrating this diabolical plot against him.

How then to explain his decision to tap for top national security slots in his Cabinet two Republican legislators with access to top-secret information who have previously confirmed that Vladimir Putin in 2016 attacked the US election to help elect Trump president and that Trump failed as an American leader to acknowledge and condemn this devious assault on the republic? One of these lawmakers even oversaw an investigation that concluded the most senior Trump campaign aide in 2016 had colluded with a Russian intelligence officer while the Kremlin was mounting its information warfare against America.

The pair are Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), whom Trump has picked to be UN ambassador, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Flas), whom Trump has selected to be secretary of state. Each is a veteran member of the intelligence committee of the chamber in which they serve and privy to the most sensitive secrets of US intelligence.

After the 2016 contest, Trump tried to con the public about the Russian attack—which included a hack-and-leak operation that disseminated stolen Democratic emails and materials to harm Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and a covert social media scheme to spread messages, memes, and disinformation to sow discord and benefit Trump. The intelligence community and cybersecurity firms had concluded the Kremlin had waged this secret campaign against the United States to boost Trump, but Trump claimed no such thing happened. He dismissed all talk of the multiple contacts between the Trump camp and Russian representatives during the 2016 contest. He also covered up his own secret business dealings with Russian developers and Putin’s office during the campaign, as well as a hush-hush meeting held between his senior campaign advisers and a Moscow intermediary. 

Stefanik didn’t buy Trump’s subterfuge. In an interview with the Watertown Daily Times in March 2018, she said, “Russia meddled in our electoral process.” And she noted the Kremlin skullduggery was designed to benefit Trump: “We’ve seen evidence that Russia tried to hurt the Hillary Clinton campaign.” Moreover, she fretted about the curious Trump-Russia contacts: “I am concerned about some of the contacts between Russians and surrogates within the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign.”

A year later, with Trump still pushing his phony “Russia hoax” claim, Stefanik, at a town hall meeting, disagreed with the Trump line that the Moscow assault was no big deal. It was, she said, “much more systemic, much more targeted, with very sophisticated hacking efforts, disinformation efforts targeted to specific campaigns.” Stefanik added that the Trump administration needed to be pressed “to take the threat from Russia very seriously.” She criticized the Trump campaign for holding that covert meeting with the Moscow go-between. 

There was no Russia witch-hunt, Stefanik contended. According to her view, Trump was peddling a self-serving and false narrative about an important issue of national security: an attack by a foreign adversary on the United States.

Rubio went much further than this.

As chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Rubio, in August 2020, released a massive 966-page report on the Russian assault. In a press release, he noted, “Over the last three years, the Senate Intelligence Committee conducted a bipartisan and thorough investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election and undermine our democracy. We interviewed over 200 witnesses and reviewed over one million pages of documents. No probe into this matter has been more exhaustive.” And he stated the committee “found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.”

That is, no hoax.

The detailed report confirmed what other investigations had concluded: “Putin ordered the Russian effort to hack computer networks and accounts affiliated with the Democratic Party and leak information [via WikiLeaks] damaging to Hillary Clinton and her campaign for president. Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the U.S. democratic process.”

Worse for Trump, the report pointed out that he and his campaign had tried to exploit the Russian assault and had aided and abetted it by denying the Russians were engaged in such activity, thus helping Moscow cover up its effort to subvert an American election: “The Trump Campaign sought to maximize the impact of those leaks to aid Trump’s electoral prospects. Staff on the Trump Campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks. The Trump Campaign publicly undermined the attribution of the hack-and-leak campaign to Russia and was indifferent to whether it and WikiLeaks were furthering a Russian election interference effort.”

Rubio’s report was full of damning information for Trump.

A large chunk focused on Paul Manafort, who was a senior Trump campaign official in 2016. The committee noted that Manafort, who was imprisoned in 2018 for committing fraud and money laundering (and pardoned by Trump in 2020), posed a “grave counterintelligence threat” due to his Russian connections. The report detailed his extensive dealings during the campaign with a onetime business associate named Konstantin Kilimnik, who the committee described as a “Russian intelligence officer.” The committee put it bluntly: “Kilimnik likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services.” Throughout the election, according to the report, Manafort “directly and indirectly communicated with Kilimnik,” Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and several pro-Russian oligarchs in Ukraine.

When the report was released, Rubio declared in a press release that the committee had uncovered “absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.” Yet that was misleading. The report stated, “The Committee obtained some information suggesting Kilimnik may have been connected to the [Russian intelligence service’s] hack and leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election.” That meant Trump’s campaign manager was in close contact with a Russian intelligence officer possibly tied to Putin’s covert attack on the 2016 campaign. The committee also revealed it had found “two pieces of information” that “raise the possibility” that Manafort himself was connected “to the hack-and-leak operations.” Perhaps there was some collusion. But the report’s discussion of that information was redacted.

Rubio’s report was a slam-dunk counter to the Trump-Russia deniers on the right who had strived mightily to turn this serious matter into nothing but a left-wing fantasy, and to Trump himself. It declared that Trump’s campaign was run by a counterintelligence threat who had covertly huddled with a Russian intelligence officer and that Trump and his lieutenants assisted the Kremlin’s attack on the United States by echoing Putin’s denials.

The report was proof Trump had betrayed the nation. This is a truth that he and his enablers within the GOP and the conservative movement have attempted to smother for years. To do so, they concocted the notion of a Deep State conspiracy and relentlessly derided Democrats, liberals, journalists, and anyone else who voiced concern about or interest in Russian interference and Trump’s acquiescence to Moscow.

Now Trump has embraced two senior Republican lawmakers who challenged Trump’s claim of a hoax and who affirmed the reality of the Trump-Russia scandal and Trump’s role in it. Were they part of that Deep State scheme against Trump? Neither have renounced their previous statements. Rubio has not disavowed the report he once proudly hailed. As the denizens of MAGA World—and Trump himself—should see it, Rubio and Stefanik were part of the traitorous cabal that pushed disinformation to demolish Trump. In their eyes, Rubio even produced a nearly 1000-page-long report to advance this treasonous con job.

Their appointments show the absurdity of Trump’s Russia-denying endeavors—though these efforts succeeded. Now Trump has included in his new administrations two prominent Republicans who know that he has been lying all along about Russia. While both Stefanik and Rubio were once critics of Trump, they have, like most within the GOP, bent the knee, and they don’t mind serving a fellow who provided cover for Putin and who cared more for his own political interests than the country’s security. Nevertheless, it would be worthwhile for Democrats to question Stefanik and Rubio on this matter during their Senate confirmation hearings. They ought to be asked about their previous statements and Rubio’s report. This will probably yield a fair amount of squirming. More important, it will serve as a reminder that Trump has gotten away with a foul deed that has profoundly shaped the nation.

The morning of Election Day, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger blamed Russia for creating bomb scares at polling places in the swing state of Georgia. “They’re up to mischief it seems,” Raffensperger said at a press conference of Russia’s efforts. “They don’t want us to have a smooth, fair, and accurate election.”

The bomb threats temporarily closed two voting sites in Union City, Georgia, just outside Atlanta, according to the Election Protection Coalition, which monitors Election Day disruptions. Union City is nearly 90 percent Black and therefore tends to be overwhelmingly Democratic. The county is attempting to extend voting hours at the affected locations.

Five non-credible bomb threats were called in on Tuesday morning. Raffensperger said Russia was the culprit and that federal law enforcement had helped make that determination.

The presidential race in Georgia is expected to be very close and it is one of the states that could determine who wins the White House. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a clear interest in former president Donald Trump retaking the White House. Trump is much more interested in appeasing Putin’s war in Ukraine, has expressed little loyalty to other allies, and is generally solicitous of the authoritarian leader. Vice President Kamala Harris, conversely, has stated her commitment to supporting Ukraine as well as strengthening NATO.

Georgia appears to be a target of Russian meddling this year. A fake video purporting to show recent Haitian immigrants illegally voting for Harris in the state was produced and disseminated by a Russian disinformation outfit, US intelligence officials revealed last week. And this is only the most recent example of a months-long effort by Russian-backed propaganda to target the Harris campaign. As Mother Jones previously reported, the disinformation group responsible for the Georgia video also is believed to be behind another fake video purporting to show ballots for Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania.

Earlier this week, North Korea apparently completed a successful test of its most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, lofting it nearly 4,800 miles into space before the projectile fell back to Earth.

This solid-fueled, multi-stage missile, named the Hwasong-19, is a new tool in North Korea's increasingly sophisticated arsenal of weapons. It has enough range—perhaps as much as 9,320 miles (15,000 kilometers), according to Japan's government—to strike targets anywhere in the United States.

The test flight of the Hwasong-19 on Thursday was North Korea's first test of a long-range missile in nearly a year, coming as North Korea deploys some 10,000 troops inside Russia just days before the US presidential election. US officials condemned the missile launch as a "provocative and destabilizing" action in violation of UN Security Council resolutions.

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A video purporting to show recently arrived Haitian immigrants illegally voting in Georgia for Kamala Harris was produced by a Russian government-backed disinformation unit, according to US authorities. Three agencies—the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—said in a joint news release Friday that the video, which circulated widely on Twitter/X, was manufactured by “Russian influence actors.” The same group, they wrote, was also behind “a video falsely accusing an individual associated with the Democratic presidential ticket of taking a bribe from a U.S. entertainer.”  

Though the agencies didn’t specifically name a particular source for the videos, disinformation experts, including Darren Linvill of Clemson University, pointed out that the voting video strongly resembles earlier ones produced by Storm-1516, a Russian government-backed propaganda unit that has been targeting the Harris-Walz campaign for months. In the voting video, a man declares that he and others emigrated from Haiti, were given citizenship, and are now driving around to multiple counties to cast ballots for Harris. “Yesterday, we voted in Gwinnett County, and today we’re voting in Fulton County,” he says. “We have all our documents, driver’s license. We invite all Haitians to come to America and bring families.” He also displays four different drivers licenses with four different signatures.

The agencies didn’t not identify the “U.S. entertainer” named in the faked video, but a site Linvill says is run by Storm-1516 recently posted footage depicting someone with a blurred face alleging that Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff were bribed by Sean “Diddy” Combs for “tipping him off” ahead of a raid on his homes this spring.

The group is also believed to be behind a fake video from earlier this month which purported to show mail-in ballots for Donald Trump being destroyed in Pennsylvania. It is also believed to have helped spread false sexual abuse claims against Minnesota Governor and vice presidential candidate Tim Walz. (Those claims were initially promulgated in part by a U.S.-based person, a Twitter account calling himself Black Insurrectionist, who the Associated Press revealed last week is a white upstate New York man named Jason G. Palmer.) 

Even before the U.S. intelligence agencies issued their statement, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had already called on X and other social media sites to take the video down, saying it was clearly part of a disinformation campaign while suggesting Russian involvement. “We have discussed this with State and Federal authorities,” he wrote on X. “This is obviously fake, and likely it is a production of Russian troll farms. As Americans we can’t let our enemies use lies to divide us and undermine faith in our institutions—or each other.” 

One of the Twitter users whose post containing the video was widely shared goes by “AlphaFox78,” a verified Twitter user who pays to use the service, and whose posts and replies are therefore boosted in visibility by the site. While AlphaFox78’s post has been deleted, screenshots of the video are still spreading widely on X. 

“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans,” the intelligence agencies wrote. “In the lead up to election day and in the weeks and months after, the IC expects Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine trust in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.”

The latest alleged foreign influence efforts echo domestic disinformation about migrants that abounded throughout this campaign season. A key element of GOP-allied efforts to generate distrust ahead of another Trump possible loss has been to gin up unsubstantiated concerns about non-citizen voting. And in September, both Donald Trump and JD Vance repeated racist lies about Haitian people in Ohio eating household pets.

On May 10, 2017, President Donald Trump hosted two special guests in the Oval Office: Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. The meeting was curious. It was closed to American media. No American journalists were allowed to witness it or take photos or video of the meeting. But a Russian photographer was permitted to shoot a few pics, and the Russian government posted them.

There was much else odd about this get-together. Only a few months earlier, the US intelligence community had released a report confirming that Russian leader Vladimir Putin had mounted a covert operation against the United States to help Trump win the 2016 election. The Kremlin’s clandestine warfare had included the cyber-swiping and dissemination, via WikiLeaks, of Democratic emails and documents and a secret social media campaign that sought to sow discord in the United States and boost Trump’s chances of claiming the White House. The hack-and-leak op fomented conflict at the Democrats’ convention and then, in the final month of the race, impeded Hillary Clinton’s campaign by releasing, nearly on a daily basis, internal documents that prompted negative news stories about her and the Democrats. Throughout all this, Trump and his top aides denied Russia was intervening, essentially aiding and abetting Putin by providing cover for him.

Though there were numerous factors that contributed to Clinton’s defeat, the Russian operation was clearly one of them.

After the election, the Kremlin’s intervention and the ties between the Trump campaign and Moscow were the subjects of a federal investigation and congressional inquiries. Trump, though, kept denying Russia had meddled in the race and repeatedly called the whole thing a hoax and a witch hunt. (At the time, it was not yet publicly known that during the campaign his top aides met with a Russian emissary who was introduced to them as a participant in a secret Kremlin project to help Trump win or that Paul Manafort, the chair of the Trump campaign, regularly huddled with a former business associate who was a Russian intelligence officer and shared internal campaign data with him.) Irate about the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation, Trump, on May 9, 2017, fired the bureau’s director, James Comey.

The following day—with the Comey dismissal dominating the news—Trump warmly greeted the two Russians at the White House. The photo that the Russians released showed the three of them yukking it up. Here was Trump with representatives of a foreign adversary that had attacked an American election, and they appeared to be having a jolly time. And the public wasn’t told what they discussed.

A few days later, the Washington Post reported that during the meeting Trump had revealed highly classified information about a possible Islamic State plot and jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on this terrorist group. According to the newspaper:

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State.

One intelligence official noted that Trump had “revealed more information to the Russian ambassador than we have shared with our own allies.” Intelligence officials were shocked by this breach.

More about this meeting continued to come out. The New York Times soon reported that Trump had told the Russians that by dismissing Comey he had gotten himself out of a jam: “I just fired the head of the F.B.I. He was crazy, a real nut job. I faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” The Times noted how bizarre this was: “The comments represented an extraordinary moment in the investigation, which centers in part on the administration’s contacts with Russian officials: A day after firing the man leading that inquiry, Mr. Trump disparaged him—to Russian officials.”

But there was even more to the meeting that the public wouldn’t learn about for more than two years. In September 2019, the Washington Post revealed that Trump had told Lavrov and Kislyak that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s intervention in the 2016 election and that this assertion had caused alarmed White House officials to limit access to the memo chronicling the conversation.

The Trump White House had fretted about this part of the discussion becoming public. According to the newspaper, the “memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly…White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him.”

By the time this part of the conversation was disclosed, Trump was mired in his first impeachment for having pressured the Ukrainian president to dig up dirt on Joe Biden and to find information discrediting the Trump-Russia scandal. And this revelation, like so many about Trump, quickly faded from the national discourse.

It had taken over two years for Americans to learn that Trump had told the Russians he didn’t care about their efforts to subvert a US election. But it was obvious as soon as that original photo was released that Trump had no interest in holding Putin accountable for messing with the election—and for helping him reach the White House.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov lifted off Saturday from Florida's Space Coast aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, heading for a five-month expedition on the International Space Station.

The two-man crew launched on top of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at 1:17 pm EDT (17:17 UTC), taking advantage of a break in the stormy weather to begin their climb to space. Nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines powered the first stage of the flight on a trajectory northeast from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, then the booster detached and returned to landing at Cape Canaveral as the Falcon 9's upper stage accelerated SpaceX's Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft into orbit.

"It was a sweet ride," Hague said after arriving in space. With a seemingly flawless launch, Hague and Gorbunov are on track to arrive at the space station around 5:30 pm EDT (2130 UTC) Sunday.

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NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov lifted off Saturday from Florida's Space Coast aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, heading for a five-month expedition on the International Space Station.

The two-man crew launched on top of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket at 1:17 pm EDT (17:17 UTC), taking advantage of a break in the stormy weather to begin their climb to space. Nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines powered the first stage of the flight on a trajectory northeast from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, then the booster detached and returned to landing at Cape Canaveral as the Falcon 9's upper stage accelerated SpaceX's Crew Dragon Freedom spacecraft into orbit.

"It was a sweet ride," Hague said after arriving in space. With a seemingly flawless launch, Hague and Gorbunov are on track to arrive at the space station around 5:30 pm EDT (2130 UTC) Sunday.

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US space officials do not like to talk about the perils of flying astronauts on the aging International Space Station, elements of which are now more than a quarter of a century old.

However, a new report confirms that NASA managers responsible for operating the space station are seriously concerned about a small Russian part of the station, essentially a tunnel that connects a larger module to a docking port, which is leaking.

Russian and US officials have known that this small PrK module, which lies between a Progress spacecraft airlock and the Zvezda module, has been leaking since September 2019. A new report, published Thursday by NASA's inspector general, provides details not previously released by the space agency that underline the severity of the problem.

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Enlarge / This photo of the International Space Station was captured by a crew member on a Soyuz spacecraft. (credit: NASA/Roscosmos)

A little more than two years ago, Dmitry Rogozin, the bellicose former head of Russia's space agency, nearly brought the International Space Station partnership to its knees.

During his tenure as director general of Roscosmos, Rogozin was known for his bombastic social media posts and veiled threats to abandon the space station after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin tersely dismissed Rogozin in July 2022 and replaced him with Yuri Borisov, a former deputy prime minister.

While the clash between Russia and Western governments over the war in Ukraine has not cooled, the threats against the International Space Station (ISS) ended. The program remains one of the few examples of cooperation between the US and Russian governments. Last year, Russia formally extended its commitment to the ISS to at least 2028. NASA and space agencies in Europe, Japan, and Canada have agreed to maintain the space station through 2030.

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Enlarge / The Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN (credit: Adam Nieman/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Since its founding in 1954, high-energy physics laboratory CERN has been a flagship for international scientific collaboration. That commitment has been under strain since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. CERN decided to cut ties with Moscow late last year over deaths resulting from the country's "unlawful use of force" in the ongoing conflict.

With the existing international cooperation agreements now lapsing, the Geneva-based organization is expected to expel hundreds of scientists on November 30 affiliated with Russian institutions, Nature reports. However, CERN will maintain its links with the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), an intergovernmental center near Moscow.

CERN was founded in the wake of World War II as a place dedicated to the peaceful pursuit of science. The organization currently has 24 member states and, in 2019 alone, hosted about 12,400 users from institutions in more than 70 countries. Russia has never been a full member of CERN, but collaborations first began in 1955, with hundreds of Russia-affiliated scientists contributing to experiments in the ensuing decades. Now, that 60-year history of collaboration, and Russia's long-standing observer status, is ending. As World Nuclear News reported earlier this year:

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Enlarge / Landspace's reusable rocket test vehicle lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. (credit: Landspace)

Welcome to Edition 7.11 of the Rocket Report! Outside of companies owned by American billionaires, the most imminent advancements in reusable rockets are coming from China's quasi-commercial launch industry. This industry is no longer nascent. After initially relying on solid-fueled rocket motors apparently derived from Chinese military missiles, China's privately funded launch firms are testing larger launchers, with varying degrees of success, and now performing hop tests reminiscent of SpaceX's Grasshopper and F9R Dev1 programs more than a decade ago.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Landspace hops closer to a reusable rocket. Chinese private space startup Landspace has completed a 10-kilometer (33,000-foot) vertical takeoff and vertical landing test on its Zhuque-3 (ZQ-3) reusable rocket testbed, including a mid-flight engine reignition at near supersonic conditions, Aviation Week & Space Technology reports. The 18.3-meter (60-foot) vehicle took off from the Jiuquan launch base in northwestern China, ascended to 10,002 meters, and then made a vertical descent and achieved an on-target propulsive landing 3.2 kilometers (2 miles) from the launch pad. Notably, the rocket's methane-fueled variable-thrust engine intentionally shutdown in flight, then reignited for descent, as engines would operate on future full-scale booster flybacks. The test booster used grid fins and cold gas thrusters to control itself when its main engine was dormant, according to Landspace.

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The Justice Department on Thursday charged Dimitri Simes, pro-Russian pundit and former head of a Washington think tank, along with his wife, Anastasia Simes, with violating US sanctions by accepting millions of dollars from a Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds.

Reached by phone in Moscow, where he has a home, Dimitri Simes, who was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, declined to comment on the allegations against him. But he denounced the charges against his wife as “lies and half-truths” and argued that the Biden administration is targeting the couple to punish him for expressing pro-Russian views.

“If you think this is a law abiding administration [it] would be shocking, but no, I am not terribly surprised,” Simes said, of the charges against his wife.

“I think that Mr. Garland would have to be ashamed of producing something like that,” Simes added. “It is beneath the dignity of the Department of Justice.”

Simes indicated that he does not plan to return the US to face the charges. He said he believes the Justice Department charged him “to stop me from coming to the US.”

“They want to punish me” for criticizing US support for Ukraine, he claimed.

Simes said he “would most certainly welcome an opportunity to come to a trial in Washington as a witness” to testify against Biden administration officials “who betrayed the US…and are trying to start World War III.”

The indictment against the couple alleges that they received $1 million, a personal car and driver, and a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, in exchange for work they did for Russia’s state-owned Channel One after the US sanctioned the network over Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” Matthew Graves, the US Attorney for Washington DC, said in a statement announcing the indictments. “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 US citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”

Simes is the former longtime head of the Center for National Interest, which was founded by Richard Nixon in 1994 and advocates for “strategic realism” in US foreign policy. Simes’ efforts in 2016 to arrange contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia drew scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller, but Simes was not accused of wrongdoing.

The charges against the Simes couple are part of a Justice Department crackdown on Russian influence efforts. Federal prosecutors yesterday indicted two employees of Russian state-controlled network Russia Today with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by secretly running a right-leaning media company they used to push pro-Kremlin messaging.

The site featured content from pro-Trump pundits including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool. Both Johnson and Pool said they are victims of the scheme.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the defendants in the Tenet case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.” 

DOJ alleges that Anastasia Simes received funds from a Russian businessman named Alexander Udodov, whom the Treasury Department sanctioned last year for his support for the Russian government. Prosecutors allege that Anastasia Simes helped Udodov evade sanctions by “purchasing art and antiques for the benefit of Udodov from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe, and having the items shipped to her residence in Huntly, Virginia, where they were stored for onward shipment to Russia.”

Anastasia Simes could not be reached, but Dimitri Simes said his those charges against his wife are false. “She started working with [Udodov] before the sanctions and was never aware of any sanctions” against the oligarch, Simes said.

He also said his wife took no steps, such as contacting a shipping company, “to ship goods to Russia.”

“There was no conspiracy, nothing,” Simes said. “She has a legitimate business. I am proud of my wife. I am very supportive of what she is doing.”

Simes’ attorney David Rivkin declined to comment.

A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that a Tennessee-based media company which played home to several prominent right-leaning online commentators was secretly a Russian government-backed influence operation. The company is accused of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today (RT), a Russian state-backed media company, as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Tenet Media worked with American conservative or heterodox media figures, including Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern, who variously present themselves as independent journalists, documentarians, and political commentators. Not all of them immediately commented on having been publicly linked to a foreign propaganda site, but Johnson soon tweeted that he and other influencers had been “victims in this alleged scheme.” In his own tweet, Pool echoed that line, writing, in part, “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims.” Rubin, too, described himself as a victim, adding, “I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”

The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that RT and two specific employees, Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov and Elena “Lena” Afanasyeva, worked to funnel money to Tenet Media as part of a series of “covert projects” to shape the opinions of Western audiences. RT has faced cancellations and sanctions in the United States, Europe, Canada, and the UK after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; federal authorities allege those travails led the company to instead create more covert means of influencing public perception.

While Tenet is only referred to in the indictment as “U.S. Company 1,” details made it readily identifiable. The indictment alleges that Tenet’s coverage “contain[ed] commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics…consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”  

The indictment also alleges that not everyone affiliated with Tenet was unaware of the scheme, stating that “Founders 1 and 2” of the company knew the source of their funding. The founders of Tenet Media are Lauren Chen and her husband; Chen is a conservative influencer and YouTuber who’s hosted a show on Blaze TV and who’s affiliated with Turning Point USA. Her husband, Liam Donovan, identifies himself on Twitter as the president of Tenet Media. 

The indictment alleges that the RT officials and Founders 1 and 2 “also worked together to deceive two U.S. online commentators (“Commentator-I” and “Commentator-2″), who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers.” Dave Rubin has 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, while Tim Pool has 1.37 million.

The indictment indicates that even some of the people working at Tenet found their content heavy-handed. On February 15 of this year, Afanasyeva, using the name Helena Shudra, shared a video in a company Discord channel of what the indictment calls “a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia.” While he’s not named in the indictment, it clearly matches Tucker Carlson, who toured such a grocery store, declaring himself slackjawed in wonder at how nice it was.

“Later that day,” the indictment adds, “Producer-I privately messaged Founder-2 on Discord: ‘They want me to post this’—referencing the video that Afanasyeva posted—but ‘it just feels like overt shilling.’ Founder-2 replied that Founder-I ‘thinks we should put it out there.’ Producer-I acquiesced, responding, ‘alright I’ll put it out tomorrow.'”

Tenet’s recent content on sites like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok has been heavily larded with critical commentary about Kamala Harris. Conservative political commentator and documented plagiarist Benny Johnson, for instance, recently starred in a video about her “empty words.”

The allegations against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering, were part of a broader effort against what US authorities allege were Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections. Earlier on Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had seized 32 internet domains used in what they called “Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns.” 

At an Aspen Institute event on Wednesday afternoon, a DOJ official, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the Russians charged in the case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.” 

One of the last things Tenet posted on their social media sites before the indictment was unsealed concerned—ironically enough—a government employee accused of secretly acting as a foreign agent. Tenet posted a video of Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul who has been charged with using her position to benefit the Chinese government. Tenet seemed to suggest that a few words Sun offered on a video call endorsing diversity, equity, and inclusion measures were part of an alleged foreign-backed messaging plot.

“Why would the Chinese government want to push DEI in America?” a tweet from Tenet read.

Abby Vesoulis contributed reporting.

Update, September 4: This story has been updated to include Johnson, Rubin and Pool’s comments.

The Justice Department on Thursday charged Dimitri Simes, pro-Russian pundit and and former head of a Washington think tank, along with his wife, Anastasia Simes, with violating US sanctions by accepting millions of dollars from a Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds.

Reached by phone in Moscow, where he has a home, Dimitri Simes, who was an adviser to Trump’s 2016 campaign, declined to comment on the allegations against him. But he denounced the charges against his wife as “lies and half-truths” and argued that the Biden administration is targeting the couple to punish him for expressing pro-Russian views.

“If you think this is a law abiding administration [it] would be shocking, but no, I am not terribly surprised,” Simes said, of the charges against his wife.

“I think that Mr. Garland would have to be ashamed of producing something like that,” Simes added. “It is beneath the dignity of the Department of Justice.”

Simes indicated that he does not plan to return the US to face the charges. He said he believes the Justice Department charged him “to stop me from coming to the US.”

“They want to punish me” for criticizing US support for Ukraine, he claimed.

Simes said he “would most certainly welcome an opportunity to come to a trial in Washington as a witness to testify against Biden administration officials “who betrayed the US…and are trying to start World War III.”

The indictment against the couple alleges that they received $1 million, a personal car and driver, and a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, in exchange for work they did for Russia’s state-owned Channel One after the US sanctioned the network over Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

“These defendants allegedly violated sanctions that were put in place in response to Russia’s illegal aggression in Ukraine,” US Attorney Matthew M. Graves said in a statement announcing the indictments. “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 US citizen, should have uniquely appreciated.”

Simes is the former longtime head of the Center for National Interest, which was founded by Richard Nixon in 1994 and advocates for “strategic realism” in US foreign policy. Simes’ efforts in 2016 to arrange contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia drew scrutiny from special counsel Robert Mueller, but Simes was not accused of wrongdoing.

The charges against the Simes couple are part of a Justice Department crackdown on Russian influence efforts. Federal prosecutors yesterday indicted two employees of Russian state-controlled network Russia Today with violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act by secretly running a right-leaning media company they used to push pro-Kremlin messaging.

The site featured content from pro-Trump pundits including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool. Both Johnson and Pool said they are victims of the scheme.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the defendants in the Tenet case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.” 

DOJ alleges that Anastasia Simes received funds from a Russian businessman named Alexander Udodov, whom the Treasury Department sanctioned last year for his support for the Russian government. Prosecutors allege that Anastasia Simes helped Udodov evade sanctions by “purchasing art and antiques for the benefit of Udodov from galleries and auction houses in the United States and Europe, and having the items shipped to her residence in Huntly, Virginia, where they were stored for onward shipment to Russia.”

Anastasia Simes could not be reached, but Dimitri Simes said his those charges against his wife are false. “She started working with [Udodov] before the sanctions and was never aware of any sanctions” against the oligarch, Simes said.

He also said his wife took no steps, such as contacting a shipping company, “to ship goods to Russia.”

“There was no conspiracy, nothing,” Simes said. “She has a legitimate business. I am proud of my wife. I am very supportive of what she is doing.”

Simes’ attorney David Rivkin declined to comment.

A federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday alleges that a Tennessee-based media company which played home to several prominent right-leaning online commentators was secretly a Russian government-backed influence operation. The company is accused of receiving nearly $10 million from employees of Russia Today (RT), a Russian state-backed media company, as part of “a scheme to create and distribute content to U.S. audiences with hidden Russian government messaging,” according to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Tenet Media worked with American conservative or heterodox media figures, including Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern, who variously present themselves as independent journalists, documentarians, and political commentators. Not all of them immediately commented on having been publicly linked to a foreign propaganda site, but Johnson soon tweeted that he and other influencers had been “victims in this alleged scheme.” In his own tweet, Pool echoed that line, writing, in part, “Should these allegations prove true, I as well as the other personalities and commentators were deceived and are victims.” Rubin, too, described himself as a victim, adding, “I knew absolutely nothing about any of this fraudulent activity. Period.”

The indictment, filed in the Southern District of New York, alleges that RT and two specific employees, Kostiantyn “Kostya” Kalashnikov and Elena “Lena” Afanasyeva, worked to funnel money to Tenet Media as part of a series of “covert projects” to shape the opinions of Western audiences. RT has faced cancellations and sanctions in the United States, Europe, Canada, and the UK after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; federal authorities allege those travails led the company to instead create more covert means of influencing public perception.

While Tenet is only referred to in the indictment as “U.S. Company 1,” details made it readily identifiable. The indictment alleges that Tenet’s coverage “contain[ed] commentary on events and issues in the United States, such as immigration, inflation, and other topics…consistent with the Government of Russia’s interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions.”  

The indictment also alleges that not everyone affiliated with Tenet was unaware of the scheme, stating that “Founders 1 and 2” of the company knew the source of their funding. The founders of Tenet Media are Lauren Chen and her husband; Chen is a conservative influencer and YouTuber who’s hosted a show on Blaze TV and who’s affiliated with Turning Point USA. Her husband, Liam Donovan, identifies himself on Twitter as the president of Tenet Media. 

The indictment alleges that the RT officials and Founders 1 and 2 “also worked together to deceive two U.S. online commentators (“Commentator-I” and “Commentator-2″), who respectively have over 2.4 million and 1.3 million YouTube subscribers.” Dave Rubin has 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, while Tim Pool has 1.37 million.

The indictment indicates that even some of the people working at Tenet found their content heavy-handed. On February 15 of this year, Afanasyeva, using the name Helena Shudra, shared a video in a company Discord channel of what the indictment calls “a well-known U.S. political commentator visiting a grocery store in Russia.” While he’s not named in the indictment, it clearly matches Tucker Carlson, who toured such a grocery store, declaring himself slackjawed in wonder at how nice it was.

“Later that day,” the indictment adds, “Producer-I privately messaged Founder-2 on Discord: ‘They want me to post this’—referencing the video that Afanasyeva posted—but ‘it just feels like overt shilling.’ Founder-2 replied that Founder-I ‘thinks we should put it out there.’ Producer-I acquiesced, responding, ‘alright I’ll put it out tomorrow.'”

Tenet’s recent content on sites like YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok has been heavily larded with critical commentary about Kamala Harris. Conservative political commentator and documented plagiarist Benny Johnson, for instance, recently starred in a video about her “empty words.”

The allegations against Kalashnikov and Afanasyeva, who are charged with conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) and conspiracy to commit money laundering, were part of a broader effort against what US authorities allege were Russian influence sites seeking to subvert the elections. Earlier on Wednesday, the Justice Department announced it had seized 32 internet domains used in what they called “Russian government-directed foreign malign influence campaigns.” 

At an Aspen Institute event on Wednesday afternoon, a DOJ official, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, said the Russians charged in the case “used American-based individuals and entities to exploit, frankly, our free society to try to undermine our election,” including by deploying “unwitting influencers to push Russian propaganda and pro-Russian messaging.” 

One of the last things Tenet posted on their social media sites before the indictment was unsealed concerned—ironically enough—a government employee accused of secretly acting as a foreign agent. Tenet posted a video of Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governors Andrew Cuomo and Kathy Hochul who has been charged with using her position to benefit the Chinese government. Tenet seemed to suggest that a few words Sun offered on a video call endorsing diversity, equity, and inclusion measures were part of an alleged foreign-backed messaging plot.

“Why would the Chinese government want to push DEI in America?” a tweet from Tenet read.

Abby Vesoulis contributed reporting.

Update, September 4: This story has been updated to include Johnson, Rubin and Pool’s comments.

Enlarge / A Falcon 9 booster returns to landing at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station following a launch Thursday with two WorldView Earth observation satellites for Maxar. (credit: SpaceX)

Welcome to Edition 7.07 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX has not missed a beat since the Federal Aviation Administration gave the company a green light to resume Falcon 9 launches after a failure last month. In 19 days, SpaceX has launched 10 flights of the Falcon 9 rocket, taking advantage of all three of its Falcon 9 launch pads. This is a remarkable cadence in its own right, but even though it's a small sample size, it is especially impressive right out of the gate after the rocket's grounding.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

A quick turnaround for Rocket Lab. Rocket Lab launched its 52nd Electron rocket on August 11 from its private spaceport on Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, Space News reports. The company's light-class Electron rocket deployed a small radar imaging satellite into a mid-inclination orbit for Capella Space. This was the shortest turnaround between two Rocket Lab missions from its primary launch base in New Zealand, coming less than nine days after an Electron rocket took off from the same pad with a radar imaging satellite for the Japanese company Synspective. Capella's Acadia 3 satellite was originally supposed to launch in July, but Capella requested a delay to perform more testing of its spacecraft. Rocket Lab swapped its place in the Electron launch sequence and launched the Synspective mission first.

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Enlarge / Liftoff of ULA's Atlas V rocket on the US Space Force's USSF-51 mission. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

United Launch Alliance delivered a classified US military payload to orbit Tuesday for the last time with an Atlas V rocket, ending the Pentagon's use of Russian rocket engines as national security missions transition to all-American launchers.

The Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 6:45 am EDT (10:45 UTC) Tuesday, propelled by a Russian-made RD-180 engine and five strap-on solid-fueled boosters in its most powerful configuration. This was the 101st launch of an Atlas V rocket since its debut in 2002, and the 58th and final Atlas V mission with a US national security payload since 2007.

The US Space Force's Space Systems Command confirmed a successful conclusion to the mission, code-named USSF-51, on Tuesday afternoon. The rocket's Centaur upper stage released the top secret USSF-51 payload about seven hours after liftoff, likely in a high-altitude geostationary orbit over the equator. The military did not publicize the exact specifications of the rocket's target orbit.

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