“I have been notified by the FBI that I have been the victim of a crime. [US Attorney General] Merrick Garland said the same thing at his press conference. I am the only person who has ever had editorial control over my program. Period,” said Johnson, whose Youtube channel has nearly 2.4 million subscribers.
Although the US Justice Department did not mention the name of the company in its charges, US media believe the company in question is Tenet Media, which represented Johnson and a number of other conservative influencers. According to the US Justice Department, the company was allegedly secretly funded from Russia by RT employees. The bloggers themselves were not charged because the company allegedly did not tell them the source of the funds.
The US imposed sanctions against the Rossiya Segodnya media group, RIA Novosti, RT, Sputnik and Ruptly. The new sanctions affected Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Sputnik's parent media group Rossiya Segodnya, and a number of top managers of the RT broadcaster.
Simonyan later claimed that the Western media "have plunged into a fit of paranoia,” adding that bloggers allegedly hired by RT, according to US authorities, “deny everything, but what else can they do?”
Earlier, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the US presidential election will be won by the candidate chosen by the American people, and it is up to Russia not to interfere and to observe the process. Russian authorities have repeatedly emphasized that Russia does not interfere in American electoral processes.