Facebook sued by Russian firm linked to woman charged by U.S.

A Russian company whose accountant was charged by federal prosecutors for attempting to meddle in U.S. elections sued Facebook Inc on Tuesday, claiming it is a legitimate news outlet and its Facebook account should be restored. The Federal Agency of News LLC, known as FAN, and its sole shareholder, Evgeniy Zubarev, filed the lawsuit in federal court in the Northern District of California, seeking damages and an injunction to prevent Facebook from blocking its account. Facebook deleted FAN’s account in April as it purged pages linked to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, which was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year for flooding social media with false information in a bid to sow discord in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. election. Facebook did not respond to a request for comment. Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment.

FAN and Zubarev said they were improperly swept up in Facebook’s purge, which took down more than 270 Russian language accounts and pages, according to the complaint. “FAN is an independent, authentic and legitimate news agency which publishes reports that are relevant and of interest to the general public,” the company said in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit argued that Facebook had effectively acted as an arm of the government in improperly impinging on its right to free speech, and cited the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in claiming Facebook discriminated against it due to its Russian origins. Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, described those arguments as weak and predicted the plaintiffs would have a hard time gaining any traction in the courts.

FAN acknowledged previously sharing the same office building as the Internet Research Agency and said it has employed Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, the Russian woman charged by prosecutors last month for attempting to meddle in the 2018 congressional elections, as its chief accountant since August 2016. But the plaintiffs said Khusyaynova’s role at the company has been limited to overseeing day-to-day bookkeeping, and that she was not an officer and had no discretion over editorial content. The plaintiffs also said they were not involved in “Project Lakhta,”, a Kremlin-backed information warfare campaign U.S. prosecutors say was started in 2014 and financed by Evgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin, an oligarch close to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Prigozhin, known as “Putin’s chef” due to his catering company and its ties to the Kremlin, was indicted in February along with the Internet Research Agency, which he controls. Khusyaynova was the chief accountant for Project Lakhta, according to the charging documents in her case, which is being prosecuted by assistant U.S. attorneys in the Justice Department’s Eastern District of Virginia. A spokesman for the district did not respond to a request for comment. Mueller is not handling Khusyaynova’s case because his focus is on the 2016 presidential election and the charges against her relate to the 2018 midterm elections.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-facebook/facebook-sued-by-russian-firm-linked-to-woman-charged-by-u-s-idUSKCN1NP2HE

Election fraud scheme on L.A.'s skid row got homeless to sign fake names for cigarettes and cash, D.A. says

A forged signature swapped for $1 — or sometimes a cigarette. The crude exchange played out hundreds of times on L.A.’s skid row during the 2016 election cycle and again this year, prosecutors said Tuesday as they announced criminal charges against nine people accused in a fraud scheme. Using cash and cigarettes as lures, the defendants approached homeless people on skid row and asked them to forge signatures on state ballot measure petitions and voter registration forms, the district attorney’s office said. The defendants — some of whom were scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday — face several criminal charges, including circulating a petition with fake names, voter fraud and registering a fictitious person. The charges, which were filed three weeks ago but made public Tuesday, followed a Los Angeles Police Department crackdown on suspected election fraud on skid row earlier in the year. “They paid individuals to sign the names,” Officer Deon Joseph, the senior lead officer on skid row, told The Times in September. “That’s an assault on our democracy.”

State officials said petition signature scams aren’t widespread in California, but Joseph said they do pop up from time to time on skid row. People hired to help qualify initiatives for the ballot are often paid per signature collected, typically $1 to $2, but officials said a recent slew of proposed ballot initiatives had pushed the rate as high as $6 a signature. It is illegal for the collectors, however, to pay people for signatures.

Los Angeles police Capt. Marc Reina said officials used undercover officers and security camera video before arresting Kirkland Kauzava Washington, 38, one of the nine individuals charged by prosecutors. Washington allegedly set up a card table outside the Midnight Mission, where homeless people line up for meals and shelter, Reina said. Two other people arrested at the same time as Washington were either homeless or living in a single-room-occupancy apartment on skid row, but neither of them were among the nine defendants charged by L.A. County prosecutors. “We didn’t charge any homeless people,” said district attorney spokeswoman Shiara Davila-Morales.

L.A. County elections chief Dean Logan previously said it was unlikely the forgeries eluded his staff, who manually compare petition signatures with those on registration forms. But, Logan said, he worried about “any activity that causes voters to lose faith in the process.” Washington, Harold Bennett, 53, and Louis Thomas Wise, 36, face up to six years and four months in prison. The others charged — Richard Howard, 62, Rose Makeda Sweeney, 42, Christopher Joseph Williams, 59, Jakara Fati Mardis, 35, Norman Hall, 61, and Nickey Demelvin Huntley, 44 — face up to four years and eight months in prison.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/california/la-me-ln-skid-row-voter-fraud-20181120-story.html