Welcome back to the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. I am your host Tom Church,

joined as always by the Libertarian Professor Richard Epstein. Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's the Lawrence A. Tis Professor of Law at NYU and his senior lecturer at the University

of Chicago.

Today we're talking about Russian influence operations in the

United States and why you should always ask where the money is coming from

especially if your politics aligned with Vladimir Putin. Hello Richard, how are you today?

Well, I'm, shall we say somewhat disillusioned.

I feel like that might be our default position recently.

So Richard, news this week from the Justice Department, which just indicted two employees of our T, it's Russia today, formerly Russia today, for covertly funding and directing a Tennessee-based online content creation company in order to spread Russian

propaganda and influence public opinion. So Richard people quickly figured out

that the company is tenant mediates run by Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan who famously

hosts content for Tim Poole of the Poole cast, Dave Rubin, several other right-wing

online influencers, basically a big YouTube and Tik-Toc and you know online influencing channel.

So the Russians spent almost $10 million supporting tenant media.

It's represented 90% of their revenue and paid for example $100,000 for each video that

Tim Pool produced on Ukraine.

There's a clip of going around of Pool from maybe a year ago ago calling Ukraine one of America's greatest enemies.

Pool and Rubin have been very loud voices on the neo isolationist rights since the invasion of Ukraine.

And I think that makes a lot of sense now but Poole Rubin you

know speaking in their defense say they had no idea where the money was coming from

it was Chan and Donovan running the company who I think made this arrangement and then tried to bring on

...