Separately, Antony Blinken, the US secretary of state, announced a new visa restriction policy and restrictions on RT’s parent company Rossiya Segodnya and its subsidiaries.
Mr Blinken said that RT (formerly Russia Today) “has moved beyond being simply a media organisation” and had contracted with a private company “to pay unwitting Americans millions of dollars to carry the Kremlin’s message to influence the U.S. elections and undermine democracy”.
Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said the indictments, unsealed in the Southern District of New York, were designed to expose “the hidden hand of adversaries pulling strings of influence from behind the curtain”.
According to the court documents, RT and its employees funnelled $10 million to covertly finance and direct an unidentified content company in Tennessee to publish English-language videos on the social media channels.
Since November last year, the indictment alleges, the company – named as US Company-1 – has posted nearly 2,000 videos containing commentary on events and issues in the US, such as immigration and inflation. The material has had more than 16 million views on YouTube alone.
While the views expressed in the videos are not uniform, most are directed to the publicly stated goals of the Government of Russia and RT — to amplify domestic divisions in the United States, prosecutors said