How the Kremlin Penetrated Fox News and Right-Wing Media

Chapter 6 of our series on how Russia attacked the 2016 U.S. election to help Trump win

Well in advance of the U.S. 2016 presidential election, the Kremlin employed a broad, coordinated influence operation across U.S. right-wing media. Its aim: to sow discord, promote Donald Trump, and damage Hillary Clinton. 

The seeds of this effort began years earlier, shortly after Barack Obama was first inaugurated. The birther conspiracy had dogged Obama since he first ran for the presidency. Even after he released his short-form Hawaiian birth certificate in 2008, right-wing sites insisted it was a forgery and continued to harp on it ad nauseam. By 2010, birtherism had become a fixture on conservative blogs and forums. 

In August 2009, a crank named Wayne Madsen appeared on Russia Today, the Kremlin propaganda network that was then breaking into the U.S. market, to report that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was behind the creation of the Obama "birther" movement — that is, the conspiracy theory that Obama was not a natural born American citizen and was therefore ineligible to serve as president. 

By 2010, RT was running segment after segment promoting the notion that Obama was not born in the United States, aligning its messaging with an emerging right-wing blogosphere that was taking root in the United States. RT’s propaganda on this front was quite effective, not least because that year, it ranked among the top 10 most-viewed news and political channels of all time on YouTube. 

Perhaps the single most prolific birther amplifier was WorldNetDaily (WND), which ran dozens of articles alleging Obama’s birth certificate was fake. Founder Joseph Farah launched petitions and billboards reading, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” that popped up along highways across the country in 2010. WND columnist Jerome Corsi made birtherism his singular mission, writing books and columns about it. RT and WND repeatedly created a loop where they would mirror each other’s “reporting,” helping to legitimize the conspiracy theories that each was promoting.

The birther conspiracies, helped by RT’s massive reach on YouTube, was eventually picked up by the most trusted name in cable news: Fox News. The biggest Fox stars –  from Sean Hannity to Bill O’Reilly to Greta Van Susteren to Steve Doocy – ran stories raising doubts about Obama’s birthplace. The segments varied in tone, with some overtly flirting with birtherism and others hedging, while giving “birther truthers” airtime. But the net effect was to move WND’s and RT’s fringe narrative into millions of mainstream households.

Users on the influential Free Republic forum, a conservative message board, circulated “Kenya birth” rumors, often recycling debunked claims (like fake Kenyan birth certificates). These discussions later bled into Tea Party Facebook groups during the 2010 midterms. Right-wing blogs like Gateway Pundit gave oxygen to lawsuits filed by right-wing activists, presenting them as credible challenges to Obama’s legitimacy.

Chief among these activists was Orly Taitz, a Soviet-born U.S. attorney and dentist who became an early figure of the birther movement. Through relentless (and unsuccessful) lawsuits, she gave the conspiracy a veneer of legal legitimacy and helped it migrate from fringe blogs to right-wing media, including Fox.

Amplifying all this was RT, which had already spent a considerable amount of time promoting other fringe conspiracy theories, including that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were really an inside job. In 2010, RT ran segment after segment with Taitz and others promoting the Obama birther conspiracy theory. 

RT’s efforts, coupled with the relentless focus on birtherism by right-wing media and blogs, helped pave the way for Donald Trump to mainstream it in 2011. 

In March of that year, Trump appeared on Good Morning America, where he said of Obama, “I have real doubts. He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him.” He repeated the same claim days later during an appearance on The View. Both appearances — and Trump’s specious claims — received widespread pickup across mainstream news outlets. Conservative talkers Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage cited the GMA remarks almost immediately, while fringe blogs and WND celebrated Trump and his claims “going mainstream.” Fox News ran and re-ran Trump’s segments. 

In early April, Trump appeared on the Today Show to claim that he had deployed investigators to Hawaii to get to the bottom of Obama’s birth certificate. “I’m not convinced that he has one,” Trump told host Meredith Vieira. “Three weeks ago when I started, I thought he was probably born in this country and now I really have a much bigger doubt than I did before.” He added, “I have people that actually have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding.” 

Trump never produced any evidence of his “people” going to Hawaii or what they might have found there.

By April, Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes signed Trump to appear on the network’s flagship morning show, Fox & Friends, for a weekly segment called “Monday Mornings with Trump.” Though the segment was scheduled to run only for several months, Trump used the opportunity, relentlessly amplified by Fox, to push the birther conspiracy. These appearances coincided with his flirtation with a 2012 presidential run, giving him a national political platform on a network favored by Republican primary voters, even as he was still hosting The Apprentice on NBC. 

Trump’s birther narrative only solidified his standing with the right-wing media ecosystem that was already playing footsie with RT. As Trump began talking about birtherism on TV, Corsi published a WND-branded book in May 2011 titled Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President. While Trump was taking the narrative mainstream, the right-wing echo chamber was buttressing his messaging relentlessly. 

Trump chose not to run in 2012, and Obama was re-elected to his second and final term that November. Even then, it was apparent that Hillary Clinton was likely to make a second run for the White House in 2016. Both the Kremlin and right-wing outlets were paying attention. 

On September 11, 2012, armed militants attacked U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, murdering Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. What began as a national tragedy quickly morphed into a polarizing political saga. While multiple bipartisan investigations eventually found no intentional wrongdoing by Clinton, who was serving as Secretary of State during the Benghazi crisis, the attacks became a recurring symbol of alleged Democratic incompetence or malfeasance on Fox News and the right-wing blogosphere.

A feedback loop emerged: partisan blogs and talk radio floated accusations; Fox News and other conservative outlets amplified them; Russian state media like RT picked up and repackaged those same narratives for U.S. and international audiences; and the stories cycled back into American discourse. This loop kept Benghazi alive long after initial facts were established, shaping Clinton’s public image through the 2016 campaign.

In the days after the attack, conservative blogs such as The Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, and Hot Air began to frame Benghazi as the result of the Obama administration’s weakness, while suggesting a deliberate cover-up by Clinton.

These outlets highlighted early discrepancies in administration statements —such as whether the attack was linked to an anti-Muslim video — and framed them as evidence of intentional deception. Right-wing media’s incentive structure, which depends on speed and outrage, ensured that the most conspiratorial claims spread fastest, even before investigations began.

Fox News soon took up the Benghazi story with intensity, devoting extensive coverage in the months before the 2012 election. Congressional Republicans launched hearings, often with coverage that mirrored blog talking points.

Right-wing media created a feedback loop in which claims from blogs flowed into Fox News, which then legitimized them for mainstream conservatives.

This loop meant that even minor revelations — emails, testimony snippets, drafts of talking points — were framed as scandalous. By 2014, “Benghazi” had become a shorthand for government betrayal in the conservative media ecosystems.

At the same time, Russian propaganda outlets, especially RT and Sputnik, amplified American right-wing media’s most damaging narratives about Benghazi. RT produced segments questioning Clinton’s honesty and suggesting the attack was emblematic of U.S. decline. Coverage often mirrored U.S. conservative framing, focusing on “cover-up” narratives, Clinton’s “dereliction of duty,” and the idea that mainstream American media was complicit in ignoring the truth.

This alignment wasn’t coincidental. U.S. intelligence later concluded that Russia sought to undermine trust in American institutions and damage Clinton politically. Benghazi coverage fit neatly into both goals: it undermined U.S. foreign policy credibility abroad and fueled partisan attacks against Clinton at home.

The feedback loop created a mutually beneficial symbiosis. Once RT or Sputnik published a story, right-wing blogs or commentators sometimes cited those reports to reinforce their own claims. This lent an air of international validation to narratives that originated domestically.

For example, RT’s commentary on Clinton’s Benghazi testimony in 2015 circulated widely on Twitter and was shared in conservative Facebook groups. Once recycled into the domestic ecosystem, it became difficult for audiences to distinguish between right-wing U.S. media and Kremlin state propaganda because they were saying the same things.

By the 2016 election, Benghazi was fused into Clinton’s political identity. The chant “Lock Her Up!” was as much about Benghazi as about her private email server.

Russian disinformation campaigns, through troll accounts and memes, continued to highlight Benghazi alongside emails and health conspiracies. The Senate Intelligence Committee later confirmed that Russian troll farms heavily targeted conservative voters with anti-Clinton messaging, often bundling Benghazi into memes portraying her as corrupt or murderous.

As the 2016 campaign kicked into high gear, “Benghazi” became less a specific event than a symbol of Clinton’s alleged untrustworthiness – a case study in how domestic partisanship and foreign influence can reinforce one another. The feedback loop blurred the line between homegrown outrage and foreign propaganda, leaving U.S. audiences with a distorted sense of scandal that was ginned up by a foreign adversary as much as by domestic partisan media.

Benghazi was not the only issue where Kremlin propagandists and right-wing media mirrored each other’s talking points. After Clinton’s widely covered 9/11 memorial incident, where she stumbled and left the event early (which was later attributed to pneumonia), RT published pieces that pushed rumors and suspicion, citing mainstream outlets as admitting “concerns” about her health after the pneumonia disclosure. Conservative networks and blogs then flooded the zone, reinforcing the same doubts. 

As RT and Sputnik pushed stories on Clinton’s health, alleged corruption, and the WikiLeaks email dumps, Breitbart News, under Steve Bannon, and Alex Jones’s Infowars produced near-identical content for American audiences. Breitbart headlines about Clinton’s “crookedness” and supposed physical frailty dovetailed with RT’s speculative health coverage, while Infowars segments went further into conspiracy, alleging Clinton had Parkinson’s or seizures – claims that originated in the same ecosystem Russia was amplifying abroad.

In fact, Kremlin propaganda seeped into right-wing media outlets with such ease that Alex Jones’ Infowars actually republished RT’s articles more than 1,000 times between 2014 and 2017. At the same time, Jones became a regular on RT, expounding on conspiracy theories ranging from Osama Bin Laden’s “staged” death to whether 9/11 was an inside job.

In 2014, Steve Bannon opened Breitbart’s London bureau, aligning closely with Nigel Farage, then a populist Member of the European Parliament, and his party, UKIP. Its coverage railed against the EU, NATO, and immigration in language that tracked word-for-word with Moscow’s propaganda. Farage showed up on RT as a plain-spoken “outsider,” while Breitbart sold Europe’s “decline” to American readers. Russian outlets like RT and Sputnik hammered the same themes, boosting Brexit as a blow to the EU while amplifying U.S. right-wing coverage that cast Clinton as corrupt and Trump as the nationalist alternative.

The timing was critical. This transatlantic echo chamber unfolded alongside the Brexit referendum in Britain in the summer of 2016 and the run-up to the U.S. election, synchronizing populist nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Bannon used Breitbart London as his bridge to Trump’s campaign, tightening the pipeline between Kremlin narratives, European populism, and America’s far right. Farage himself later campaigned with Trump in advance of the presidential election, turning the echo chamber into a literal alliance on stage. The Kremlin seeded the themes, Breitbart amplified them, and Farage gave them a political face.

In the summer of 2015, Russian hackers (linked to GRU Unit 26165, often called “Fancy Bear”/APT28) gained initial access to the Democratic National Committee’s network. In the spring of 2016, as Trump consolidated his hold on the Republican presidential nomination, GRU spear-phishing emails began targeting Democratic officials. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, fell victim to one such email in March 2016, allowing Russian intelligence to access his Gmail account. That spring, GRU hackers expanded their penetration of the DNC’s network, stealing emails, opposition research, and other internal files.

That summer, the GRU created the persona “Guccifer 2.0” to leak hacked documents. In July, WikiLeaks published thousands of DNC emails, just before the Democratic National Convention.

In October, weeks before the election and after Trump had publicly urged Wikileaks more than 160 times to release Clinton-related emails, the group obliged with the trove of hacked Podesta documents. RT ran a drumbeat of pieces highlighting “revelations,” curating “top 10” lists, and framing the dumps as proof of elite corruption — coverage that matched the right-wing blogosphere’s editorial appetite. Examples included RT’s day-one posts on the first tranches and a steady stream of follow-ups as more batches dropped.

At the same time, Fox News, Breitbart and The Gateway Pundit turned the leaks into a rolling storyline – “October Surprise,” “most explosive revelations,” and long bullet lists of supposed smoking guns – often relying on content that maximized outrage and dissemination. The framing was spectacularly similar, even when the specific claims differed. 

The Podesta and DNC email leaks provided fertile ground for this alignment. Russian military hackers stole the material, WikiLeaks published it, and RT and Sputnik framed it as proof of elite corruption. Breitbart ran wall-to-wall stories highlighting salacious details from each batch, packaging them in ways designed to inflame conservative outrage. Jones celebrated WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange as truth-tellers, casting them as allies against “globalists.” This language mirrored the Kremlin’s own propaganda, which depicted the leaks as evidence of Western rot while denying Russian responsibility for the hack.

The relationship wasn’t just parallel play; there were moments of explicit cross-referencing. On October 28, 2016, The Gateway Pundit amplified a false claim about an impending WikiLeaks revelation that would lead to Clinton’s arrest and “sourced it“ via a Russia Today reporter in London. (There were signals of affinity in the other direction as well. When Google demoted RT and Sputnik in late 2017, Breitbart framed the move as censorship of legitimate news — an implicit defense of the very Kremlin outlets whose 2016 narratives had fed the right-wing ecosystem while serving as foreign disinformation.) 

To deflect blame from its 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails, RT, Sputnik, and social media troll accounts floated alternative theories, suggesting that the leaks came from a DNC insider rather than a Russian cyberattack. To push this narrative, the Kremlin found a useful idiot in Fox News’ Sean Hannity, one of the most-watched and trusted voices in media. Hannity relentlessly spread the conspiracy theory that the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was an inside job connected to Clinton or her allies – and that it might have been Rich who leaked the damaging DNC email to WikiLeaks. 

As early as July 2016, days after Rich’s murder, Wikileaks tweeted a link to its “Reward for information” program, offering $20,000 for information about Rich’s murder – which immediately fueled speculation that Rich was the source of their DNC emails.

This was all the GRU and the Kremlin needed in order to distract from the truth. Instead of focusing on who was really culpable for the hack, Fox News and right-wing media and blogs framed the murder as suspicious, suggesting that it was a political assassination by Democrats and implying that Rich was the DNC hacker who turned the emails over to Wikileaks. This aligned with Russia’s strategic objective: to cast doubt on the U.S. intelligence community’s attribution of the DNC hack to Russia, sow division inside the U.S. political system and – critically – take attention away from the truth: that it had interfered in the upcoming election to harm Clinton and help Trump .

The Rich story has a sorry coda. In early 2017, Ed Butowsky — a Dallas financier, Trump supporter, and frequent Fox News guest — inserted himself into the tragedy. Butowsky presented himself to Joel and Mary Rich, Seth’s grieving parents, as a Good Samaritan offering to fund a private investigation into their son’s murder. He volunteered to pay for the services of Rod Wheeler, a former D.C. police detective turned media commentator, assuring the family that his only motive was to help uncover the truth. The Riches, who were desperate for answers about the murder of their son, accepted his offer.

Behind the scenes, however, Butowsky was pursuing a different agenda. Texts, emails, and later court filings showed that he was coordinating with Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman to produce a story framing Rich as the source of the DNC’s hacked emails to WikiLeaks — a narrative that would undercut U.S. intelligence findings that Russian intelligence had carried out the cyberattacks. Butowsky bragged in messages that the White House was aware of the effort and that “the president [Trump] himself” wanted the story published. 

The resulting Fox News piece, which ran on May 16, 2017, quoted Wheeler as if he had evidence tying Rich to WikiLeaks. Wheeler quickly disavowed the quotes, and the Rich family denounced the article. Within a week, Fox retracted the story, acknowledging that it did not meet editorial standards. In 2018, the Rich family filed a lawsuit against Fox News, Zimmerman, and Butowsky, accusing them of intentionally inflicting emotional distress. Litigation revealed further communications showing Butowsky boasting about his political connections, including his friendship with Trump adviser and former Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon.

But despite Fox’s decision to pull its story down shortly after it ran, Hannity continued to amplify it night after night for months, framing Rich’s death as part of a sinister Democratic cover-up. Hannity characterized the case as “the single biggest fraud… perpetrated… by the media and the Democrats” –  exactly as Russia intended.

The Kremlin-Fox feedback loop expanded well beyond the Rich conspiracy. RT aired multiple stories speculating about Clinton’s stamina and health after the 9/11 memorial incident, even as online Russian trolls circulated memes of Clinton collapsing. In turn, Hannity and other Fox hosts devoted repeated segments to Clinton’s “stamina” and “coughing fits.” RT and Sputnik described NATO as obsolete and a threat to peace and promoted the narrative that the West was collapsing under “globalist elites.” At Fox, Tucker Carlson questioned NATO’s relevance and advocated for an effective end to American foreign involvement. Kremlin outlets tied the migrant crisis in Europe to chaos and terrorism, painting globalism as destabilizing. At the same time, Fox hosts highlighted immigration as a security threat. “Build the wall” rhetoric, amplified on Fox, paralleled Kremlin anti-migrant frames.

A big nexus between RT and right-wing media, especially Fox, was former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Michael Flynn. In December 2015, Flynn, a retired lieutenant general, traveled to Moscow to attend the Russian state media outlet RT’s 10th anniversary gala, where he and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein were seated at the head table with Vladimir Putin. For the Kremlin, they were trophies—proof that U.S. insiders would legitimize a propaganda outlet. But they were also more. 

RT funneled roughly $45,000 to Flynn for attending the gala and delivering a speech that criticized U.S. foreign policy and praising the potential of cooperation with Russia. (Flynn also failed to properly disclose the speech fee when renewing his security clearance.) Upon his return, Flynn became a fixture on Fox News and Fox Business, criticizing the Democratic Party and Clinton. He delivered a fiery speech at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland that summer, shouting “Lock her up!” from the dais. 

Meanwhile, in an effort to promote a candidate who might syphon votes away from the Democratic nominee, RT hosted a Green Party presidential debate in July 2016. Two months later, Fox Business hosted a Green Party town hall featuring Stein, where she discussed her policy priorities, particularly environmental issues such as ending reliance on fossil fuels and moving toward 100% renewable energy. Fox, which routinely extolled fossil fuels and questioned man-man climate change, was an odd forum for a Green Party candidate. Just over a month later, Stein’s campaign peeled off just enough votes from Clinton in key swing states to hand the election to Trump.

But Fox was not alone in mirroring Kremlin talking points. In fact, most right-wing media participated enthusiastically. 

Russian outlets consistently attacked NATO, the European Union, and immigration policies, arguing that Western elites were leading civilization into decline. Breitbart echoed these themes almost verbatim, publishing anti-EU and anti-immigration stories that amplified Russian depictions of a collapsing West. Infowars added its conspiratorial twist, telling listeners that NATO and “globalists” were plotting war with Russia, a line that tracked closely with Moscow’s claim that U.S. foreign policy was aggressive and illegitimate.

Together, these outlets created a feedback loop. Russia seeded themes through state media and troll networks; Breitbart and Infowars translated those themes into red-meat content for partisan U.S. audiences; and Russian outlets then cited Breitbart or Infowars as evidence that even American media recognized Clinton’s corruption or Western decline. The effect was to launder Kremlin talking points through American voices with built-in credibility for their audiences. When Hannity or Breitbart ran a story, RT and Sputnik cited it as “American media reports.” When RT floated conspiracies, blogs and Fox segments later echoed them.

Kremlin talking points didn’t just run through Fox, InfoWars or Breitbart – they seeped into local television. Ben Swann, a local news anchor, built a following with his “Reality Check” segments, which looked like news but trafficked in conspiracies. After leaving Cincinnati’s Fox affiliate in 2013, he appeared regularly on Russia Today through 2015, raising his profile inside Kremlin media circles, before bringing his conspiracy-laden segments to a local CBS affiliate in Atlanta. 

That same year, Swann launched his “Truth in Media” brand, pushing Kremlin-aligned narratives about NATO, U.S. wars in Syria, denial of Assad’s chemical attacks, and Clinton’s corruption. His clips were embedded on pro-Kremlin sites and spread widely on Facebook and YouTube. In January 2017, just weeks after the election, he used his CBS affiliate platform to air a “Pizzagate” segment –  a conspiracy Russian trolls had amplified – showing how deeply Kremlin disinformation had penetrated U.S. newsrooms. He later worked directly for Russian state media, with FARA filings showing his company took in over $6 million from RT-linked entities like TV Novosti to produce programming that pushed Kremlin propaganda. 

Rather than relying on legacy media channels alone, Moscow also turned to social media, fake personas, algorithmic targeting, and tailored narratives to harm Clinton and benefit Trump.

The Internet Research Agency (IRA), a St. Petersburg–based troll farm tied to oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, played a central role. (Prigozhin would later meet a grisly end after attempting a coup against Russian President Vladimir Putin.) The IRA was founded in 2013 to target Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, but in 2015, it pivoted toward U.S. audiences, promoting right‑wing outlets in its attempt to tilt the election toward Trump.

The IRA hired hundreds of operators to produce blog posts, memes, comments, and videos. Its strategy wasn't necessarily to persuade, but to overwhelm social media with fake content, making the internet hostile to democratic discourse.

The IRA’s Facebook efforts were effective and viral. Ads featuring absurd imagery (e.g., Jesus arm-wrestling Satan over Clinton) tapped into existing institutional distrust and partisan divides. These ads loaded onto feeds with remarkable click-through rates and helped validate Trump’s messaging.

At the same time, the IRA targeted traditionally Democratic audiences in order to divide and suppress their votes. For instance, the IRA deployed fake accounts across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to target Black voters. Messaging such as “Our Votes Don’t Matter” or “Don’t Vote for Hillary Clinton” aimed to suppress turnout by sowing cynicism and distrust.

Russian operatives, leveraging U.S.-trained programmers, harnessed social media algorithms to target specific individuals, including political reporters and Defense Department staffers. Fake news stories and conspiracies (e.g., Clinton having Parkinson’s and Pizzagate) were injected into tailored networks to maximize psychological impact.

In the run‑up to the 2016 election, American conservatives retweeted content from Russian troll accounts about 30 times more often than liberals, supercharging the spread of Russian-planted narratives to harm Clinton and benefit Trump. Simultaneously, the IRA used mostly organic posting, rather than paid ads, to deepen political divides. Tactics included urging voters (especially African Americans) to boycott elections or mistrust institutions, and encouraging confrontational behavior among the far right.

Russian trolls also leaned more on local news outlets than on broad fake‑news sites. By citing or impersonating local sources, troll content gained credibility and seeped into regional political coverage more effectively. At the same time, coordinated social feeds, ads, browser traffic, and search indexing worked together to manipulate opinion across multiple platforms.

By the fall of 2016, the incentives of Kremlin-aligned outlets and the U.S. right-wing media ecosystem lined up neatly: both benefited from stories that damaged Hillary Clinton and energized Donald Trump’s base. U.S. intelligence later assessed that Moscow’s information campaign aimed to “undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process,” “denigrate Secretary Clinton,” and “harm her electability,” while aiding Trump. 

This amplification only required a convergence of interests. The Kremlin and right-wing media all sought to energize American audiences in service of its goals: to elect Trump and defeat Clinton. The result was a mutually reinforcing cycle that magnified disinformation far beyond what the Kremlin could ever have achieved alone.