U.S. Indicts Dimitri Simes for His Russian Talk Show
Sept. 8—Dimitri Simes, selected by former President Richard Nixon to be the head (1994-2022) of the Center for the National Interest, was indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for his role as the moderator of the Russian political TV show “Big Game,” on Channel One Russia. Simes was a young dissident in the Soviet Union who immigrated to the U.S. in 1973 and then became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
He moved back to Russia in 2022. On Aug. 16, the FBI raided his unoccupied estate in Huntly, Virginia. A week earlier, the FBI had raided the upstate New York home of NATO critic and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, seizing his personal journalistic and other files; Ritter has not yet been charged, but he says that he has been forced to cancel contracts with Russian media, including Sputnik and RT, for fear of being indicted.
Yesterday, the DOJ unsealed criminal indictments against both Dimitri Simes and his wife Anastasia, for allegedly scheming to violate U.S. sanctions. Simes’ employer, Channel One Russia, was sanctioned on May 8, 2022 “for being owned or controlled by, or for having acted or purported to act for or on behalf of, the Government of the Russian Federation.” That series of “or’s” allows for Simes’ employer standing accused of no more than having “purported to act … on behalf of” Russia; and Simes and his wife are accused of “providing services to Channel One Russia, including by serving as a presenter and producer of programming,” for which he received over 26 months “over $1 million, a personal car and driver, a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, Russia, and a team of 10 employees” from the station. They face a maximum of 60 years of prison.
Of note, Simes, besides serving as a political advisor to the former President Nixon, also contributed to former President Donald Trump’s April 2016 foreign policy speech, calling for greater cooperation with Russia and was an advisor to Trump Russian and strategic policy matters.
Simes’s mother, Dina Kaminskaya, was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1977 for serving as a lawyer for Soviet dissidents. Simes’ work on behalf of moderation between Washington and Moscow has effectively, in 2024, expelled him from the U.S
