Inside a Propaganda Machine: The Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository
Explore how one key figure, John Mark Dougan, helps drive Russia’s election disinformation campaign in the U.S. and beyond.
Welcome to Reality Check, your inside look at how misinformation online is undermining trust — and who’s behind it.
Introducing the Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository: A Showman at Work

We are launching The Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository to give a name, a face, a personality, a personal modus operandi, and a personal history to the sometimes nebulous phenomenon of Russian disinformation.
John Mark Dougan, a former deputy Florida sheriff who fled to Moscow, isn’t solely responsible for the Kremlin’s propaganda and malign influence campaigns. It’s a massive operation with bosses who outrank Dougan and dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of other propagandists.
But Dougan — whose work NewsGuard has been documenting for nearly two years — is clearly an appropriate figure to personify it.
His contributions to efforts directed from Moscow at the United States and other democracies are breathtaking in their range and scale — from producing phony documentaries about the Nord Stream Pipelines and a non-existent U.S.-funded bioweapons lab in Ukraine, to launching 171 websites posing as local news publishers that promote Russian hoaxes about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky being so corrupt that he was able to buy King Charles’s High Grove estate and Sting’s Tuscan vineyard, to promoting a series of stories charging vice presidential candidate and former school teacher Tim Walz with pedophilia, to threatening our co-CEO in a call to his unlisted home phone after a NewsGuard report resulted in some of Dougan’s disinformation videos being removed from YouTube.
At the same time, Dougan has engaged repeatedly in online chats with NewsGuard, during which he has shared some of his methods, hinted about his upcoming disinformation operations, and painted a picture, whether true or false, of his life in Moscow — where he was granted political asylum and Russian citizenship after being investigated by authorities for extortion and hacking in Florida.
We have documented all of that and more in what we’re calling The Dougan Russian Disinformation Depository. By assembling all of our reports, hoaxes he has promoted, associated screenshots and videos, related press coverage, and even a recording of Dougan’s threatening phone call to NewsGuard co-CEO Steven Brill, we have cataloged in one place what we believe to be a comprehensive documentation of Dougan’s considerable contributions to Russian disinformation efforts.
We will update the Depository as Dougan’s efforts continue in the run-up and aftermath of the U.S. presidential election.
You can access the Depository by clicking here.
2024 U.S. Election Misinformation Monitoring Center
Our team of analysts is keeping you up to date as we cover misinformation surrounding this year’s U.S. presidential election. See below for the latest misinformation claims we’ve identified, and visit NewsGuard’s 2024 U.S. Election Misinformation Monitoring Center for detailed debunks of each claim.
MYTH: Donald Trump paid $35 million to settle child rape claims
MYTH: Mike Pence endorsed Kamala Harris
MYTH: Donald Trump sat on a towel during an October 2024 Fox News interview due to incontinence
MYTH: Dominion Voting Systems machines in Whitfield County, Georgia, switched votes from Trump to Harris in 2024
MYTH: Voting machines in Tarrant County, Texas, are flipping votes
MYTH: Victim testimony proves that as a high school teacher in Nebraska, Tim Walz sexually abused a minor student
MYTH: McDonald’s does not hire convicted felons
Misinformation Quiz: Want to see how well you can distinguish fact from fiction? Select whether you think this narrative is real or fake to test your misinformation spotting skills. Scroll to the bottom to see if you were correct.
Become a Reality Check Member and Get These Exclusive Benefits
Want to get smarter about misinformation? Become a Reality Check Member today and you'll get:
A free copy of the definitive book on the misinformation crisis, The Death of Truth by bestselling author Steven Brill ($30 value)
Exclusive members-only content and digital briefings
Free access to NewsGuard's browser extension that shows reliability ratings for 10K+ news sites right in your browser ($25 value)
Misinformation Quiz Answer: Truth!
Dasha Navalnaya, daughter of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and activist Yulia Navalnaya, Navalny’s widow, does in fact work for the Kamala Harris campaign. According to her LinkedIn profile, Dasha graduated from Stanford in 2024 and joined the Harris campaign in August. She works as a full-time field organizer to mobilize voters and engage the community in Philadelphia, according to U.K. newspaper The Times (Trust Score: 100/100).
Reality Check is produced by co-CEOs Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, and the NewsGuard team.
We launched Reality Check after seeing how much interest there is in our work beyond the business and tech communities that we serve. Subscribe to this newsletter to support our apolitical mission to counter misinformation for readers, brands, and democracies. Have feedback? Send us an email: realitycheck@newsguardtech.com.