Russia, Russia, Russia… Treasonous Trump Should Be Tried As The Kremlin Asset He's Always Been

Rubio Warned Us— Then Helped A Putin/Trump Pawn Tear It All Down

Earlier today we saw how the Trump regime has disbanded the DOJ safeguards that help protect national security from the Kremlin. Benedict Smith reported on how a Kremlin asset working for Trump— the biggest Kremlin asset of all— dismantled the US government’s Russian disinformation unit. That would be Darren Beattie, married since 2021 to Yulia Kirillova, the niece of Sergei Chernikov, a Putin-aligned mini-oligarch.

Beattie has provoked alarm within the State Department since being appointed in February for his ardent pro-Russian views.

He has been noted for his focus on destroying the agency tasked with tackling Kremlin propaganda.

…In the years before joining the government, Beattie wrote social media posts suggesting Western institutions should be “infiltrated” by Putin, while he also attacked what he described as the “globalist American empire.

…State Department sources expressed scepticism over whether he had undergone security vetting, a process which has been relaxed under Trump.

Beattie was a member of the first Trump administration, but after being sacked in 2018 for allegedly attending a white nationalist conference, he reinvented himself as an “alt-Right” media figure.”

… Both before and after his marriage to Chernikov’s niece, Beattie has repeatedly attacked what he called the “globalist American empire” while praising both Russia and China as counterweights to its “woke” ideology.

“The rise of non-woke (China) and anti-woke (Russia) geopolitical competitors to the Globalist American Empire is not a bad thing,” he wrote in October 2021.

He also said he looked forward to its “prestige and power” collapsing on the world stage and claimed that its “position in the global order [is] rapidly deteriorating.”

Beattie, and Revolver, the news outlet he founded after leaving the first Trump administration, argues that the US has sought to engineer “colour revolutions” around the world— a common trope in Russia and China to dismiss pro-democracy movements as Western-backed coup attempts.

The businessman has claimed the US is running “colour revolution ops” in Ukraine, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Myanmar, and that an American “colour revolution brigade” is pushing for a “forever war in Ukraine.”

Two months before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine,  he said: “Imagine the whining from the Globalist American Empire if Putin ‘invades’ Ukraine… I love it when our national security bureaucrats fail!”

He has also praised Putin as “brave and strong,” and claimed the Russian leader had “done more to advance conservative positions in the US than any Republican.” He also declared: “Nato is a much greater threat to American liberty than Putin ever was.”

“The funny thing is just about every Western institution would improve in quality if it were directly infiltrated and controlled by Putin,” he wrote in September 2021.

Many of his posts focus on Britain, claiming it treats white people “far worse” than the Uyghur population that Chinese authorities have imprisoned in camps in Xinjiang.

He has labelled Britain a “sewage pit” and “the most utterly repulsive dystopia on earth.”

In a post more than two years after the outbreak of war in Ukraine, he criticised the UK’s policy of “antagonising Russia.”

All of these social media posts were still online at the time of writing, although Beattie has deleted disparaging tweets about Marco Rubio, the US secretary of state, having previously claimed his now-boss attended “gay foam parties.”

… Despite his wide-ranging brief at the heart of the US government, Beattie is said to have focused a disproportionate amount of time on seeking to dismantle the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference hub, known as R/Fimi, while building cultural ties with Russia.

R/Fimi, which tracked and countered propaganda from sources including Russia, China and Iran, was a relatively small agency with a budget of just over $50 million at the time it was shut down.

The US’s adversaries are estimated to spend tens of billions of dollars a year on foreign disinformation. 

Beattie’s news outlet Revolver had spent years attacking R/Fimi, accusing it of being part of a “censorship network” designed to silence conservative voices.

Sources said Beattie had doggedly pursued the agency after being appointed, taking it apart piece by piece.

Contractors were sacked and officials were ordered to stop communicating with others in the State Department or external partners without explicit permission.

Even before it was disbanded in mid-April, when Beattie told staff in a brief speech that it was “severely misaligned” with the administration’s priorities, its work had essentially wrapped up.

Rubio confirmed in an interview distributed by the State Department the same day that Beattie had played a major role in abolishing R/Fimi.

At the same time as Beattie was working on dismantling the agency, he is said to have pushed to rebuild relations with Russia, insisting on instituting cultural exchange programmes in fields such as ballet and hockey.

He is also said to have taken a significant interest in classified material related to Russia, prompting widespread concern about turning over sensitive information to him.

Sources were highly sceptical if it had undergone a security vetting process, which the State Department’s website notes can take anywhere from a couple of months to over a year to complete.

… Beattie would need confirmation by the Senate to take on the under-secretary role full-time: as an acting official, he is limited to 210 days.

Under Trump and Secretary of State Rubio, Beattie is being given the power to target and discredit the very institutions designed to detect foreign influence, monitor propaganda networks, and protect elections from hostile interference. In other words: Trump has handed the keys to the watchdogs over to someone who doesn’t believe watchdogs should exist. This isn’t some isolated case of fringe influence. It’s a roadmap. Trump is repopulating the federal government with people whose loyalty is to him personally, not to the Constitution. And the Republican establishment— Rubio included— is letting it happen. No public outcry. No hearings. No protests. Just silence. Don’t forget, back in 2016, Rubio cut through the noise and nailed it. He warned that Trump was a “con artist,” a man with “no foreign policy experience” who was “dangerous,” “erratic,” and would throw American interests under the bus for his own gain. Rubio said Trump was a menace who couldn’t be trusted with national security or nuclear codes. He was right. Then, like nearly every other Republican who briefly found their spine, he folded.

Beattie’s rise is not an accident—it’s the point. In his warped view of America, the “Globalist American Empire” must be destroyed from within, and Trump’s GOP has become the vehicle to do it. That makes this more than just a personnel decision. It’s a prelude to institutional collapse. What’s being dismantled now—quietly, methodically—is the ability of the United States government to even see disinformation threats coming, let alone stop them.

Rubio knows better. So do MAGA Mike, Thune, and the rest of them. They’ve seen what happens when Trump is left unchecked. They’ve watched him excuse Russian aggression, downplay the threat of foreign election interference, and elevate conspiracy theorists to positions of power. And now they’re watching again as he installs loyalists who believe liberal democracy is a failed experiment.

America’s national security infrastructure is not some deep-state conspiracy. It’s what keeps us from being overrun by foreign propaganda, cyberattacks, and influence operations. That Trump has entrusted its dismantling to someone like Beattie— a man with a history of promoting Kremlin talking points and racist ideology— should set off alarm bells in every direction. But instead, we get silence. Compliance. Complicity. Trump doesn’t need to stage a coup to undermine democracy this time. He’s doing it through staffing. Through institutional sabotage. Through the cowardice of Republicans like Rubio who once knew the stakes and now pretend not to see.