As season one of the Trump administration reboot comes to a close, they are already rooting around deep in the bag of fringe characters. According to a report from The Bulwark, D-list conservative media personality and alleged Russian propagandist Lauren Chen appears to have been granted a visa by Trump’s State Department and is once again back in the United States.
In a post on X on Christmas Day, Chen announced that she and her husband were in Nashville and thanked the State Department’s Joe Rittenhouse, a senior adviser on consular affairs, for making it happen, saying he helped in “moving mountains to ensure we were able to return in time for the holidays!” Chen also offered appreciation for the “CBP, the new leadership at the FBI, and the administration” for helping her return.
The whole situation is a bit of a “Who’s Who” of “Who is that again?” So, as a refresher: Lauren Chen is a long-time conservative media commentator who made it “big” playing footsie with the alt-right during the first Trump administration while posting as the “Roaming Millennial.” She got attention for interviewing white supremacist Richard Spencer shortly before his involvement in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of a counter-protester and injuries to many others after a neo-Nazi drove their car into a crowd of people.
After a series of unsuccessful independent media ventures, she settled into the right-wing ecosystem, becoming a contributor to Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. But in 2022, she and her husband, Liam Donovan, launched her most notable venture, Tenent Media.
According to an indictment filed by the Justice Department in 2024, Tenet Media received millions of dollars from the Kremlin-run media company RT, which Chen previously contributed to, and funneled that money to conservative commentators in an effort to disseminate pro-Russian content. Recipients of those funds, who supposedly were unaware that they came from Russian interests, included online influencers Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and David Rubin, all of whom allegedly were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Tenent Media for their content.
While the Justice Department’s case against the Russian funders of Tenet Media is still open, per The Bulwark, Chen never really faced legal consequences—though she did have her visa “nuked” by the Biden administration and was, at least for a time, unable to return to the United States.
That appears to have changed thanks to another Trump Show backbencher, Joe Rittenhouse. According to The Daily Beast, Rittenhouse is a former actor turned Trump campaign booster who was rewarded with a role in the administration and has apparently used his position to get Chen back into the country. Rittenhouse appears deeply engaged in the Online Right, based on the fact that he posted a picture of himself in a federal office watching a Sargon of Akkad video. So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that he’d know and want to help out Chen. The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo; we’ll update this post when we receive a reply.
Fittingly, Rittenhouse also previously briefed the press on the Trump administration’s decision to revoke the visas of students who participated in the anti-genocide protests that took place on college campuses earlier this year. So if you’re keeping score at home: Protesting a genocide gets you kicked out of this country, but accepting money from the Kremlin and distributing it to create propaganda gets you an expedited invite in. As Rittenhouse says, that’s just what “American First Consular Affairs looks like.”
Read the full article here
