The US Justice Department on Tuesday charged the founder of a black nationalist group and three other members of it with working for Russian intelligence to influence the US election.
The US Justice Department on Tuesday charged the founder of a black nationalist group and three other members of it with working for Russian intelligence to influence the US election.
African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) and Uhuru Movement founder Omali Yeshitela and two other APSP members, Penny Joanne Hess and Jesse Newell, were charged with acting as unregistered Russian agents, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years.
All three, along with APSP member Augustes Romain, were also charged with conspiring to act as Russian agents, which carries a penalty of up to 10 years in prison.
According to the indictment, the four APSP members received money and other support from Alexander Yonov, a US-based Russian citizen, and Moscow-based Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers who directed Yonov.
Yonov was accused last year of running a political influence operation led by the FSB, but his US contacts were not named, although the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) raided APSP facilities at the time.
The indictment, filed Tuesday in Tampa, Florida, updated the charges against Yonov. He is believed to have returned to Russia.
As president of the Moscow-based Russian Anti-Globalization Movement, Yonov used the APSP, the Uhuru Movement and Romain’s Georgia-based group Black Hammer to promote Russian views on politics, the war in Ukraine and other issues.
Yeshitela visited Russia in 2015, where he entered into a partnership with the Yonova movement, the indictment states.
In 2016, Yonov financed the APSP protest action in four cities, in which the “Petition on the crime of genocide against Africans in the United States” was supported, the Ministry of Justice informed.
This group also actively tried to influence municipal elections in the city of St. Petersburg, Florida in 2017 and 2019 and the US national election in 2020.
In 2022, Romain and “Black Hammer” received funding from Yonov and his movement “to promote Russian interests in connection with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” according to the indictment.
All four Americans knew that Yonov was working for the Russian government, the US Department of Justice said.
The indictment, which also charges two Russian-based FSB officers, says Yonov also provided funding to an unnamed political group in the state of California that promoted California secession from the United States.
In another indictment filed in parallel in Washington, the United States accused Russian citizen Natalia Burlinova, head of the academic cooperation organization PICREADI, of collaborating with the FSB to recruit Americans.
“Today’s announcement paints a harrowing picture of the actions of the Russian government and the lengths to which the FSB will go to interfere in our elections, sow discord in our country, and ultimately recruit US citizens to their efforts,” said FBI Assistant Director Kurt Ronow.
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