Is Zero Hedge a Russian Trojan Horse?
The father of the founder of the conspiratorial site filed a criminal
complaint against me in Bulgaria. Then things got weird.

About a week before Christmas, I received a most unwelcome email. A
criminal complaint had been filed against me in Bulgaria, a country I have
never visited and with which I had no personal connection. I stood accused
of defamation; attempted censorship; illegally spreading personal, family,
and business information; and insulting the memory of someone�s parents
and grandparents.

The email was from a veteran Bulgarian journalist named Krassimir
Ivandjiiski, who took issue with an article I had written about Zero
Hedge, the hugely popular website founded by his 41-year-old son, Daniel.
My article, which appeared on my personal blog, was an outgrowth of a New
Republic story I wrote about the business of conspiracies, in which Zero
Hedge plays a major role. Millions of readers visit Zero Hedge each month,
drawn by the site�s deeply pessimistic view of Wall Street and its
alarmist, conspiratorial take on international affairs. In the world
according to Zero Hedge, the financial markets are always on the verge of
collapse and the United States is always a power in decline.

Zero Hedge is often blamed for spreading false information. In February,
Twitter permanently banned Zero Hedge�s account, which boasted more than
670,000 followers, for violating Twitter�s policy prohibiting fake
accounts and spam�part of a crackdown that intensified in response to
Russia�s use of social media to influence voters during the 2016
presidential election. Within hours of the ban, Zero Hedge posted a
counternarrative on its site, asserting�falsely, according to Twitter�that
it had been suspended over its conspiratorial, evidence-free claims that
the coronavirus was a Chinese biological weapon that escaped from a lab in
Wuhan, �accidentally or not.� Zero Hedge�s Twitter ban was big news, and
the knee-jerk response by journalists to cover both sides further spread
the bogus coronavirus conspiracy, which has continued to gain ground since
Republican Senator Tom Cotton repeated it on Fox News.
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At first, I thought the criminal complaint was a joke. I couldn�t fathom
why anyone would go to such lengths over a personal blog post that, at the
time I received the complaint, had been read by little more than 100
people. The rambling email seemed paranoid, and it was rife with
misspellings, including one for the word �comlpaint.� Ivandjiiski and his
Bulgarian attorney refused to provide me a copy of the original,
Bulgarian-language version of the complaint, leaving it unclear what laws
I might have violated or even what country�s laws I might have stood
charged with violating. Further checking, however, showed that a complaint
had been lodged with the office of the Bulgarian prosecutor general.

In Bulgaria, the news that the publisher of Zero Hedge had filed a
criminal complaint against an American journalist created a firestorm. I
appeared on Bulgarian TV twice to answer questions, and the story was
covered on multiple news sites. Journalists in Bulgaria were just as
confused as I was about the criminal complaint. �Is this a common practice
in the United States?� a journalist for a Bulgarian online publication
asked me. No, it certainly is not. �Did you feel you were in danger?� a
Bulgarian TV host asked me. Not really, though there was the possibility
that I might have a Bulgarian court judgment hanging over my head. Still,
an awful precedent could be set, so I decided to hire an attorney in
Bulgaria and fight it.
In Bulgaria, the news that the publisher of Zero Hedge had filed a
criminal complaint against an American journalist created a firestorm.

Among the various �crimes� of which I stood accused was posting publicly
available information that revealed Zero Hedge�s ties to Bulgaria. While
Ivandjiiski�s son, Daniel, lives in an affluent northern New Jersey
suburb, Zero Hedge�s domain was registered not in the U.S., but in Sofia.
Court records revealed that Zero Hedge was owned by a company called ABC
Media Ltd, a Bulgarian company whose sole manager was Krassimir
Ivandjiiski.

The Bulgarian connection intrigued me because Zero Hedge runs political
news and commentary that �frequently echo the Kremlin line,� as a 2018
RAND Institute study put it. Among Zero Hedge�s most Russia-friendly fare
were stories depicting the Mueller investigation as a hoax, pieces
claiming that the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was
staged by British intelligence, and posts asserting that the Steele
dossier was a work of �fanfiction� by internet trolls on 4chan. Andrew
Weisburd, a private intelligence analyst who has done work for the U.S.
intelligence community, has found that Zero Hedge is at the center of a
web of conspiracy sites with spokes extending out into the darkest fringes
of the internet.

Zero Hedge takes a particular interest in the controversy surrounding
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, a passenger jet that was shot down in Ukraine
in 2014, killing all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led criminal
investigation last year charged four people, three of whom had ties to
Russian intelligence, with shooting down the plane. A few days after the
criminal charges were filed, Zero Hedge published a story claiming,
without evidence, that the U.S. was using the MH17 crash as a pretext for
a NATO invasion of eastern Ukraine. An analysis by the Digital Forensic
Research Lab, a project of the Atlantic Council, found that even though
Zero Hedge is written in English, this disinformation narrative was picked
up by Russian-language media, demonstrating �the synergy between
conspiracy outlets in English and pro-Kremlin fringe media in Russian.�
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A former Zero Hedge employee named Colin Lokey, who says he earned more
than $100,000 in a year writing much of the site�s political content,
claimed that he felt pressure to frame issues in a misleading way. �I
tried to inject as much truth as I could into my posts, but there�s no
room for it,� Lokey told Bloomberg in 2016. �Russia=good. Obama=idiot.
Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir
Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.� In its published
reply, Zero Hedge blasted Lokey as �deranged� and said critics had falsely
called the website a Russian disinformation outlet �simply because we
refused to follow the pro-U.S. script.�

All this only made the criminal complaint against me more puzzling. Why
file a criminal complaint, instead of a lawsuit, in Bulgaria? Why call
attention to the site�s ties to Bulgaria, and possibly to Russia? And all
for a post hardly anyone had read?

It was clear I had touched a nerve. But how? What had I stumbled into?

The story of the criminal charges against me carried deeper meaning in
Bulgaria, which is still coming to grips with its Communist past. Bulgaria
today is a member of both NATO and the European Union, but it has close
historic and cultural ties with Russia, which continues to cast a shadow
over what had been one of its most loyal vassal states during the Cold
War. In 2006, as Bulgaria prepared to formally join the EU, Vladimir
Chizhov, Russia�s long-serving ambassador to the EU, said, �Bulgaria is in
a good position to become our special partner, a sort of a Trojan horse in
the EU.� Last year, authorities in Bulgaria charged a socialist lawmaker
in an espionage investigation examining how Russia was using nongovernment
organizations to influence the country�s policy to the West. As a result
of the investigation, Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian billionaire and
ultranationalist dubbed �Putin�s Soros,� was banned from the country.

�Bulgaria is working not as a country, not a state, but as a Russian
base,� Ivo Indzhev, a well-regarded Bulgarian political blogger, told me.
�They have plenty of people who are willing to work as proxies for the
Russian state.� American ignorance of the country made it a perfect
staging ground for Russia�s information war against the U.S. �Bulgaria is
a nobody,� he said, �unknown to the general American public.�
American ignorance of Bulgaria made it a perfect staging ground for
Russia�s information war against the U.S.

Several sources with connections to the Bulgarian government told me that
they suspected Zero Hedge may be a Trojan horse as well. �I trust it is a
project of Bulgarian intelligence,� a former senior Bulgarian government
official told me. �It is unlikely that they would embark on their own
without the backing or funding from Moscow.� An academic who asked not to
be named because of his ties to the government agreed, saying he saw the
criminal complaint against me as proof of Zero Hedge�s connections to
Moscow. �It is likely that Russians are the ones that have been affected,�
he said. �And they may have goaded the Bulgarians in the circle that runs
Zero Hedge to file a criminal complaint.�

The evidence for this was indirect and primarily stemmed from Krassimir
Ivandjiiski�s past associations. �If you read carefully his career, you
can see the possibilities of the KGB in the shadow of the mirror,� said
Nikolay Hadjigenov, the attorney who represented me in Bulgaria.