Associated Incidents
We are launching The Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository to give a name, a face, a personality, a personal modus operandi, and a personal history to the sometimes nebulous phenomenon of Russian disinformation.
John Mark Dougan, a former deputy Florida sheriff who fled to Moscow, isn't solely responsible for the Kremlin's propaganda and malign influence campaigns. It's a massive operation with bosses who outrank Dougan and dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of other propagandists.
But Dougan --- whose work NewsGuard has been documenting for nearly two years --- is clearly an appropriate figure to personify it.
His contributions to efforts directed from Moscow at the United States and other democracies are breathtaking in their range and scale --- from producing phony documentaries about the Nord Stream Pipelines and a non-existent U.S.-funded bioweapons lab in Ukraine, to launching 171 websites posing as local news publishers that promote Russian hoaxes about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky being so corrupt that he was able to buy King Charles's High Grove estate and Sting's Tuscan vineyard, to promoting a series of stories charging vice presidential candidate and former school teacher Tim Walz with pedophilia, to threatening our co-CEO in a call to his unlisted home phone after a NewsGuard report resulted in some of Dougan's disinformation videos being removed from YouTube.
At the same time, Dougan has engaged repeatedly in online chats with NewsGuard, during which he has shared some of his methods, hinted about his upcoming disinformation operations, and painted a picture, whether true or false, of his life in Moscow --- where he was granted political asylum and Russian citizenship after being investigated by authorities for extortion and hacking in Florida.
We have documented all of that and more in what we're calling The Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository. By assembling all of our reports, hoaxes he has promoted, associated screenshots and videos, related press coverage, and even a recording of Dougan's threatening phone call to NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill, we have cataloged in one place what we believe to be a comprehensive documentation of Dougan's considerable contributions to Russian disinformation efforts.
We will update the Depository as Dougan's efforts continue in the run-up and aftermath of the U.S. presidential election.
You can access the Depository by clicking here.