A Trump official who dismantled a counter-disinformation office in the United States government has links to the Kremlin, the Telegraph reported on June 3.
Darren Beattie, who was appointed to the State Department in February 2025 as under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, has come under scrutiny for his pro-Russian views. According to the Telegraph, Beattie is married to a Russian woman with links to the Kremlin.
His wife – Yulia Kirillova – is the niece of Sergei Chernikov, a former Russian official who reportedly helped Russian President Vladimir Putin in the election campaign which first brought him to power in 2000.
Beattie notably played a role in dismantling the Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference office, or R/FIMI, which was previously tasked with tracking and countering disinformation from Russia, China, and Iran.
R/FIMI was officially shut down in April 2025, according to a press statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who claimed that the office "spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving."
According to sources cited by the Telegraph, Beattie relentlessly pursued R/FIMI after his appointment to the State Department. Secretary Rubio confirmed that Beattie played a significant role in dismantling the agency.
Beattie also showed a keen interest in classified materials related to Russia, raising concerns about granting him access to sensitive information. The sources also expressed concerns about whether he had been adequately vetted – a process that can take anywhere from a couple of months to over a year to complete.
Beattie previously served in the first Trump administration but was ousted after allegedly attending a white nationalist conference in 2018. Since then, he reinvented himself as an "alt-right media" figure and founded the news outlet Revolver.
Through Revolver, Beattie has long criticized R/FIMI and promoted narratives aligned with Kremlin disinformation. He has argued that the U.S. orchestrates "color revolutions" around the world, including in Ukraine – a common narrative used in Kremlin propaganda to delegitimize pro-democracy movements as Western-backed coups.
Beattie has also written social media posts suggesting that Western institutions should be "infiltrated" by the Kremlin, and has attacked the so-called "globalist American empire."
Two months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Beattie wrote on X: "Imagine the whining from the Globalist American Empire if Putin 'invades' Ukraine... love it when our national security bureaucrats fail!"
The Trump administration has repeatedly come under fire for its perceived sympathies toward Russia. It has also been criticized for shuttering R/FIMI, particularly amidst a global "information war."
According to the National Endowment for Democracy, Russia spends an estimated $1.5 billion annually on disinformation and foreign influence campaigns. In Europe alone, the Kremlin is believed to be behind 80% of disinformation operations.
Read also: US House Speaker Johnson backs Senate bill to toughen sanctions on Russia
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