A former Breitbart News reporter who quit the alt-right publication in protest plans to launch a radio show for Sputnik, a Russian propaganda network.
“I’m on the Russian payroll now. When you work at Sputnik you’re being paid by the Russians,” Lee Stranahan, who served as a Breitbart investigative reporter, told The Atlantic.
“That’s what it is. I don’t have any qualms about it. Nothing about it really affects my position on stuff that I’ve had for years now.”
Stranahan abruptly quit Breitbart in March, alleging its Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, pulled him out of covering White House press briefings.
Sputnik is a radio broadcast created in 2014 by the Russian government-controlled news agency Rossiya Segodnya. It has editorial offices in Washington, London, Edinburgh, Cairo and Beijing.
“There’s no restrictions on what I can say, what I can do, anything like that,” Stranahan said. “I’m not easily controllable.”
Stranahan also severed ties with Breitbart before, back in 2013.
The FBI is investigating whether far-right news websites and outlets, including Sputnik, contributed to Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, according to a McClatchy report in March.
The probe is focused on exploring whether Russian operatives used conservative outlets to help spread stories favoring then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
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McClatchy’s sources said bots created millions of Facebook and Twitter posts linking to stories and articles on far-right websites including Breitbart News, InfoWars and Sputnik.
