WASHINGTON—In January 2023, a representative claiming to work with a European finance professional named Eduard Grigoriann shared instructions with a popular U.S. conservative media influencer to start a new YouTube channel.
“Find a personality that could serve as the face of the channel,” Grigoriann’s representative said. “For the right candidate we’re willing to pay around $1-2 million per year.”
The representative was a fictitious persona, as was Grigoriann, U.S. prosecutors said this week. They were fake identities being secretly operated by two Russian nationals seeking to advance Moscow’s desires to interfere in the 2024 presidential election.
