The U.S. Department of Justice has charged three Russian nationals and four U.S. citizens connected to black nationalist movements with taking part in a malign influence campaign in the United States on behalf of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence agency.
The four U.S. citizens charged are Omali Yeshitela, Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nevel, and Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo.
The four U.S. citizens are accused of working with Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov, and Yegor Sergeyevich Popov, who are Russian nationals accused of working on behalf of the FSB and the Russian government.
All seven are charged with conspiring to recruit U.S. citizens to act as illegal agents of the Russian government in the United States, for which they face a maximum penalty of five years in prison. Yeshitela, Hess, and Nevel are charged with acting as agents of Russia within the United States without prior authorization, for which they face a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
APSP and Black Hammer
The APSP was established in 1972, with Omali as one of its original co-founders. A website for the APSP lists a party platform, which was adopted in 1979 and amended in 1981, that denounces what it describes as “U.S. and western European political, economic, and military interference in the affairs of Africa and African people around the world.”The APSP platform also denounces capitalism and calls for the United States and European nations to pay reparations to African countries and their descendants. The APSP platform further calls for an end to taxation of black people in the United States.
The Black Hammer Party was founded in 2019 by Romain. The organization states that its mission is to “take the land back for all colonized people worldwide.”
Alleged Ties to Russia
A federal indictment (pdf) alleges that the Russian nationals were in contact with Yeshitela, Hess, Nevel, and Romain for several years. The Russian nationals allegedly paid for Yeshitela to travel to Russia in 2015. Ionov also allegedly prompted Hess to draft and promote a “petition on Genocide of African people in U.S.”Ionov also allegedly prompted the APSP to issue a statement in 2016 opposing a proposal to ban the Russian national team’s participation in the 2016 Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro.
Ionov is the founder of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow and funded by the Russian government. According to federal prosecutors, Ionov used AGMR as a tool to advance Russia’s malign influence campaign.
In July 2017, Ionov allegedly reached out to Nevel, who was a candidate for mayor of St. Petersburg at the time. Ionov allegedly requested an interview with Nevel to talk about “reparations” and proposed lending support to Nevel’s campaign, including “campaign finance,” through AGMR. It wasn’t clear from the charging documents whether Nevel’s campaign accepted this support.
At Ionov’s invitation, Yeshitela allegedly spoke at a 2020 conference in the so-called Donestk People’s Republic, an area along the border of Ukraine and Russia that Ukrainian government forces and pro-Russian Ukrainian separatists have been fighting over since 2014.
After Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Ionov contacted the APSP members with a message declaring that “Russia has exhausted all possible tools to prevent conflict” in Ukraine. Ionov said the war truly began in 2014 when the United States and European Union member nations promoted a change in political leadership in Ukraine and that “pro-Western neo-fascists” had “burned people in Odessa and shot thousands of civilians in the Donbas.”
Thereafter, the APSP hosted Ionov on a March 2022 video conference during which he said anyone who supported Ukraine also supported Nazism and white supremacy, and the APSP allegedly issued statements of solidarity with the Russian government.
In June 2022, Romain promoted a demonstration at the Georgia Capitol building in opposition to U.S. support for the war in Ukraine.
Romain issued a statement that reads, in part, “[The United States] is sending Billions of OUR Tax dollars to kill the Russian people who have done us no harm.”
Romain subsequently shared the press statement with Ionov and said: “This is the press release! Hope you like it.”
Federal agents searched the homes of Yeshitela, Hess, Nevel and another APSP member during pre-dawn raids in July 2022. Ionov was the first to be indicted, in July 2022, but the two other Russian nationals and four U.S. citizens were indicted in a subsequent superseding indictment on April 18.
Response to Federal Investigation and Charges
NTD News reached out to the APSP and the Black Hammer Party for comment, but neither organization responded by press time.The organization stated, “The U.S. government and its ‘Department of Justice’ will attempt to put us on trial and imprison us for fighting for the liberation of African people in the U.S. and around the world.”
