Cato Institute's Mystery Million
Did Russia money fund anti-Ukrainian talking points?
BLUF: Cato Institute never pays for Google Ads, except the one time they spent a bit more than a million in three episodes, two of which were promoting overtly anti-Ukrainian views.
I have showed this to half a dozen reporters and it always runs aground on the same issue.
“Who paid for it?”
This is never going to be available from their public IRS filings, but I think there was enough here to serve as a probable cause for a search warrant, so this was submitted via IC3. What follows is what can be seen using publicly available data.
Attention Conservation Notice:
The above BLUF is the overall meaning, what follows are the technical details. If you’re not going to tinker with Google Analytics and Semrush part of this are liable to not look like English for you.
Analysis:
I started Rushing Into Semrush six months ago, and the big motivation was this study, which showed me what a fantastic source it can be in skilled hands. If you look at Cato Institute’s Google Ads history, they never pay for anything, which makes sense as the organization has a good “retail” donor stream - lots of small monthly donations from people who support their views.
They published a set of articles in late May that mirror Russian propaganda, one focused on Nazis in the Ukrainian military, the other called for an end to U.S. support for Ukraine so that the way would end on Russia’s terms. Then in August of 2023 they spent over $560,000 pushing those articles.
So when they do a sudden six figure buy, it’s easily seen.
Here are the keywords they were funding.
The digital ad marketplace and competitor analysis tools do not imagine a world where an unaffiliated party would pay to send traffic to another’s site. But these ads appear to have been paid for by someone with access to Cato’s official account, which requires EIN, billing, and an email to set up. (These are the words of the original analyst, who could walk someone through how they know this, I’m too much of a n00b to be able to explain this (yet)).
Both RT and Sputnik are using links to Cato’s site, and the most cited URLs are in the second table. The report also notes that Kremlin mouthpiece ZeroHedge makes extensive use of Cato links.
There are three bursts of spending, what you see above is the first $560k. The second and third were $500k and $150k respectively.
More Broadly:
Cato has been carrying the Kremlin’s water since before the invasion. This Atlantic Counsel piece The dangers of echoing Russian disinformation on Ukraine appeared in June of 2021.
One of the latest examples of this trend was a May 30 article by Cato Institute senior fellow Ted Galen Carpenter that appeared in The National Interest. This article is worthy of closer inspection as it repeats some of the most common myths and distortions used by the Kremlin to justify its war in Ukraine.
Carpenter employs a selection of half-truths, misinterpretations, and cherry-picked facts to paint a dark picture of rising authoritarianism and nationalism in today’s Ukraine. His talking points would be instantly recognizable to Russian TV viewers, who have encountered similar disinformation on a virtually daily basis for the past seven years.
Ted Galen Carpenter is entitled to his view, no matter how wrongheaded we may find them to be, but if the Cato Institute took money from a Russian source to run those ad campaigns, this is similar to the reasoning behind the Tenet Media indictment, or perhaps more like the Dmitry Simes sanctions violation indictment.
Overall, right wing think tanks are not just a domestic problem any more.
Conclusion:
Cato has plenty of wealthy patrons in addition to their retail funding stream. Looking from the outside, we have no way of knowing what the source(s) of those funds were. Given the Tenet indictment, as well as the other attention on Russian influence operations, all we can do here is cross our fingers that this qualifies as probable cause for a search warrant.
