Certain content, most of which was pro—russian content or content that was aimed at exploiting divisions in us society. So everything from being against the war in ukraine to exploiting divisions on race, on lgbtq issues, on criminal issues. And this was quite an interesting conspiracy in that it really was two employees of rt, which is a company that is banned basically from broadcasting in the united states, europe, the uk, has been since the start of the ukrainian war, and they were both working but representing multiple individuals behind the scenes, trying to make it seem as legitimate an operation as possible, and posing as a billionaire who ended up being fictitious. To say that it was a billionaire with a background in france, in brussels, who was a banker, who was trying to get this information out. And really, it was these two rt employees posing as him and employees that worked for him. Ok, let's, yeah, let's unpick it a bit more. You mentioned that company, that tennessee firm, tenet media. Just tell us about the company. What does it do? yeah, so the company itself was actually formally established last year. And it is definitely more an analysis, i would say, than a news company, very much right leaning, conservative focus. Uh, they have, they started with six individuals who were commentators who were working for them. And at least two of these commentators were targeted by this espionage effort. Um, and the company, tenet, it was founded by two individuals who have not been indicted by the us government, but were certainly called out in the indictment for potentially not taking as much effort to double check who was funding them, and not telling their employees that potentially this was russian funding and not from france and belgium. So it is a media company that i think many may not have heard of. However. . . They've heard of it now. Certainly in america. Yes! i mean, it's worth saying, of course, that tenet has not responded to the allegations and they haven't commented publicly. So we don't know what they're saying. But in terms of the influence, so tenet works with influencers, does it? is that how it works? indeed, yes. I was going to say you may not have heard of tenet media, but you would certainly, especially if you're in the conservative space, likely have heard of some of their influencers. They have several that have very robust youtube channels, several million followers for several of them, including one of the commentators who was likely a victim of this. I mean, just yesterday had on former president donald trump's daughter—in—law, lara trump, and representative jimjordan, the head of the housejudiciary committee. So he has some very key figures on the right, on their channels, and on any of these channels, as i said, they speak about divisive issues in us politics along with cultural divisions. So while tenet media, as i said, may not be known, the commentators for sure are. And what were the narratives that rt allegedly wanted them to push? and what are they saying about whether they did push them? yes, absolutely. Well, clearly a big focus was the war in ukraine and trying to undermine support for ukraine in the west. There has been a clip that has since gone viral, since these allegations came out of one of the commentators who was targeted, talking about how ukraine is an enemy of the united states. A very clear russian propaganda talking point, but also one of russia's sort of playbook decisions they usually use in targeting us elections is, as i've mentioned, exploiting cultural divisions. So going after issues in race, in crime, in abortion issues and all of these cultural issues were mentioned by some of these commentators and very much with a right wing viewpoint. So even though, yeah, it may not have been russia by name, but a lot of the divisions were exploited. 0k, and these charges against rt are just one part of a vast alleged campaign by russia to interfere with the election, we're told. I mean, what else did the us accuse them of? absolutely. So not only were these two rt employees indicted, they were also sanctioned by the us government as part of sanctions against a total of ten rt employees, who included the editor in chief of rt. They also, the us government seized more than 30 websites that were tied to spreading disinformation around the us election, many of them posing as fake news sites that might look similar to us news sites such as the washington post or fox news. And, you know, it was interesting that they were announced by, as i mentioned, the attorney general in a very publicised press event. And it does show that the biden administration is working to put the spotlight on some of these russian efforts. 0k, well, maggie, stick with us. Butjust to understand more about the evolution of russian disinformation tactics, i want to bring in catherine belton, who is international investigative reporter for the washington post and also author of putin's people. Catherine, welcome to the show. Just talk me through how significant you think this indictment is. Yes. Like maggie is saying, the biden administration is now really making a big point of this. They don't want a repeat of what happened in 2016, when russia had much more crude tactics and it was kind of likea smash and grab campaign. Russian military intelligence operatives were caught basically hacking into dnc servers of the democratic committee, and then they leaked all the emails, just at a crucial point in the election campaign, ahead of the election, when donald trump was under scrutiny for various allegations of sexual misdemeanours. But basically this russian hack and leak campaign completely changed the narrative. All of a sudden, the us media was scurrying to cover this infighting exposed by the hacked emails from the democratic party servers. And now, since then, we can see this very clear evolution in the russian tactics. It's much, much more sophisticated now, i guess, because they're using us talking heads. They're getting access to them, and they're getting them to promote narratives which essentially leverage splits and divisions which are already existing in us society. No doubt in part to some of the russian propaganda efforts over the last ten years that us society has become increasingly polarised. And russia studies these splits very closely and seeks to leverage them for its own advantage, to weaken support for ukraine and promote american isolationism and so on. And it's interesting. You talk about leveraging. I suppose they're also leveraging the change in the media landscape, are they? the rise of digital media, of influencers and of a more polarised climate. Yes, for sure. I mean, i was talking to the head of microsoft's digital threat analysis team, clint watts, who's been following all of this very closely for the last ten years. And he says 14 years ago, you wouldn't have been able to get sort of prominent media commentators arguing against nato, arguing against support for ukraine. Itjust wouldn't have happened. And i remember russian officials, when i was reporting in moscow for the financial times back in 2007, 2008, and they'd been gnashing their teeth at the power of the bbc and cnn because they knew they wouldn't be able to break into it. But when social media came, that was it, basically. The world divided, all of a sudden it was, you know, open season. You could. . . The media world was fragmented and you could get access to all kinds of audiences. And as we've seen through these influencers, like some of the ones who've appeared through this indictment against tenet media, they have millions and millions of followers. And yet, although in the us there's regulation against paid election advertising, this is a big loophole because there's no regulation against paid for social media influencers. And some of these guys were getting $100,000 a pop just for one podcast for an hour. It's crazy money. And how surprising is it that it's being orchestrated, if it is, by rt employees? i mean, it's worth saying that rt said, you know, they effectively mocked the us government's accusations. They said in a statement to the bbc that 2016 called and it wants its cliches back. And they said three things are certain in life — death, taxes and rt's interference in the us elections. That was obviously said sarcastically. Yes, they've been very sarcastic and since then, margarita simonyan, the head of rt, the russian propaganda chief, has essentially admitted in a tv interview this weekend that, yes, rt is running covert propaganda campaigns to spread disinformation in the us, even though the kremlin has denied it. When simonyan was given the airwaves this weekend, she couldn't help but boast about it. I mean, it's also an evolution because, like maggie was saying, rt, i mean, it used to be on the airwaves officially in the us and across europe, but after russia's invasion of ukraine, it was banned. But after that, it seems they've gone underground. Then they've created these covert networks of front companies and funnelling money through shell companies, and using this billionaire banker, a nonexistent billionaire banker, as a frontman to claim he's the sponsor behind these tv media campaigns. Well, we did approach some of the influencers allegedly involved, and we haven't heard back, but the commentators have publicly said they're victims of the alleged plot. I wonder, catherine, the presidential debate, as everyone who's been paying attention to the us, watched by millions of people, how much of an impact do you think this sort of interference can have in comparison with 50 million people or whatever it is watching that debate? yes, i mean, it depends how many views you get. But as we know, these influencers, who are getting paid $100,000 a pop for their campaigns, they have millions and millions of viewers. They're kind of already. . . They've already built themselves up as personalities. They would claim, of course, that many of them have said since this exposure in the doj indictment that, you know, we're just representing views that have been held in america since the time of the founding fathers. And, yes, there has always been strains of american isolationism in us politics, but it's become much more prominent over the last ten years because of the explosion of social media and the, basically, the division and the splintering of the western media landscape. And i think over this time, we've seen an aggregate build—up in influence, because like i was saying, maybe ten years ago, you wouldn't have heard some of these narratives and now they're given more and more prominence. You have conservative tv hosts like tucker carlson, who was on fox news. Now he's got his own youtube broadcast show. And, you know, one of his broadcasts from moscow was. . . They wouldn't even, er, they wouldn't. . . Some of these paid—for influencers wouldn't even air his comments because they said it sounded like he was shilling for the kremlin. Thank you so much, catherine belton. Lucy letby is one of the most notorious child killers in modern times. She was a neo—natal nurse working in a hospital in chester in the north of england, and between 2015 and 2016, she murdered seven babies and attempted to kill seven more. Her murder trial last year was one of the longest in british legal history. Evidence was presented that she deliberately injected babies with air, force—fed others milk and poisoned two with insulin. She was sentenced to multiple whole—life terms, one for each offence, and she joins a small list of prisoners in the uk who will never be released. The case of lucy letby has also become a source of fascination for online detectives, who think they know better than the jury and that it is, in fact, a monumental miscarriage of justice. They claim statistics presented in court had been misinterpreted, they say key facts were withheld from the jury, that letby�*s defence was incompetent and that if she'd had better representation, she would have walked free. The mainstream media has picked up on it all. Endless newspaper articles. Netflix is said to have a documentary in the works. The daily mail runs a podcast that reports the latest developments. And this week, when the official inquiry opened into events at the hospital, the judge had this to say. There has been a huge outpouring of comment from a variety of quarters on the validity of the convictions. So far as i'm aware, it has come entirely from people who were not at the trial. Parts of the evidence have been selected and criticised, as has the conduct of the defence at trial, about which those defence lawyers can say nothing. All of this noise has caused enormous additional distress to the parents. To examine the media's role in reporting the case and whether it was at times irresponsible, i spoke tojudith moritz, the bbc correspondent who was in court for the duration of the letby trial, and to james coney from the sunday times, which last weekend published its own investigation. What we've heard from is numbers of statisticians, neonatologists, other paediatricians, who have voiced concerns about the way that evidence was presented at trial, and that includes what has become known as the rota, which was basically a kind of spreadsheet that showed lucy letby was on duty during all of the unexpected collapses in the health of the baby, things like whether the insulin evidence presented at trial, because some of the babies died allegedly from an insulin overdose, about the use of the breathing tubes in the babies. Examining each one of these little bricks that built up the wall of the prosecution case and picking holes in them. And there has been a. . . What started as a kind of drip, drip, drip on social media and from bloggers then became a kind of. . . Made its way into the mainstream media, there's been a documentary on channel 5 about it, and most notably, actually, what there was was a big article in the new yorker, which was published in the us during the time of her second trial, geoblocked so that you can't access it on the internet for readers over here, but of course, inevitably did the rounds during the trial. So people were talking about it. It was brought up by david davis in the house of commons as to why we were banned from it. And so therefore, what we've had since then is just a real pattern ofjust building up of people highlighting different, what they see as faults in the evidence. And you published a long piece in the sunday times, as i said, last weekend, having spoken to the families of some of the babies. Talk us through how you approached them and what they told you. Well, what we actually wanted to do was go right back to the start and explain to readers everything that has happened so far and bring in every single side of the debate. So that meant speaking to the families. And so the families haven't spoken. . . The parents of babies e and f, as they were known, one who died, one who survived an attack by lucy letby. And we wanted to get their voices across, as well as trying to explain to readers what was going on with the claims about the mistakes in the trial and also who was leading them and how they became involved with all of those sides of it. And i think what we had to do when we approached the families, and we approached them through their lawyers, was basically explain to them that we wanted to give them a voice to, um. . . And in a robust fashion because we also wanted to, you know, they are part of this as well, but also to give them a voice to try and have their side and reflect on what they've heard. Because, again, just like the. . . I think there's only four or five journalists that spent the entire time in the trial, and the family spent most of the time in the trial as well. So along with the jury and the defence and the prosecution teams, they're one of the few people who have actually been there and saw the whole case, as justice thirlwall was saying. 0k. James, just stay with us. But i want to bring injudith moritz, the bbc�*s north of england correspondent. You are also one of the people who spent, you know, many hours at the hearings about lucy letby. The national media are out in force as well at the inquiry. I wonderjust how that compares in terms of the interest between the trial and the inquiry. Well, gosh. Well, katie, i mean, the interest has obviously escalated, um, notjust recently with this inquiry, but over the last year, 18 months. And just to give you some context, james has just talked about there being just a small number of reporters who were in the courtroom, and i was one of them actually in the courtroom itself throughout letby's trial. There were only five seats for the media, and there were only three of us who were there the whole way through, and there was also an annexe, an overspill annexe for lots of other reporters. And there was a lot of interest during the trial. But what we didn't have during that case, which lasted for the best part of a year, where i would say, you know, the wider community of writers, bloggers, um, people running forums, they were not in the courtroom, certainly, and they weren't in the media annexe. What i noticed when i went back to court for the retrial, because the jury at the first case was unable to decide on all of the charges, and one of them was brought back to court — it was an attempted murder charge — was brought back to court for a retrial. By that point, and that was in the spring of this year, interest had grown. There were bloggers and commentators and others who had joined the media pack, if you like. Here at the inquiry, and i was talking to you now from outside the inquiry at liverpool town hall, the traditional mainstream, however you would like to describe it, media are here in the courtroom again, just a small number of seats in the hearing room. There is an overspill area as well, but it's also this. . . It's not being live streamed, the inquiry, but clips of it. . . It is being recorded so that clips of it can be shown. And actually, the last two days, today and yesterday, have been the opening statement to the inquiry, and they have been, all the way through that has been recorded and will be shown online so people can watch to a degree as well. Do you think. . . They externally can watch. . . Is that an effort to provide information to try and combat the misinformation that might be swirling, do you think, in any sense? um, possibly. And the context of that is that before the inquiry got under way, there were preliminary sort of preliminary discussions and, in fact, a preliminary hearing at which the families, and james talked about the families, the families of the babies, their lawyers made representations about this inquiry and about how it would be covered. And they talked about the need, they said, to have it live streamed fully. And by the way, that is something that they were turned down on. But the reason they were arguing for it, they said, through their lawyers, was that there has been a proliferation of conspiracy theories, they said, which have sprouted, i'm quoting here from their address, sprouts, spread and faster on social media blogs and on websites. And that has been grossly offensive and distressing for those families. And they saw live streaming as a way in which to throw this entire process very much into the open. Now, ladyjustice thirlwall didn't go with the suggestion of full live streaming, but she is allowing, as i said before, this to be recorded and then for broadcasters to be able to replay it. So it's a sort of, i suppose, a compromise position. Let me just bring james coney back in, because i know the mirror was reporting thousands of people have joined facebook groups devoted to discussing the case. For your article, your team spoke to some of the individuals behind anonymous accounts that are driving speculation about the lucy letby case. Did you get a sense of what's motivating them? um, they were very reticent to speak about it, but i think that their initial starting point was that they felt that there had been largely just a discomfort and a lot of sympathy towards the nurse. And i think the difficulty for most of those people now joining the kind of calls is that right from the moment of lucy letby�*s arrest, before we'd even seen any case, um, there was general disbelief that a young nurse could have done this. A young nurse who was, you know, well regarded on her unit and actually a hard worker, and that that's not up for doubt. Even during the trial, before the trial had been completed, there were bloggers, there were people trying to find flaws in the evidence and disputing the way that it had been presented. And what we do know is that, you know, the jury in this case didn'tjust take individual bits of evidence. They used the mountain of evidence that they were presented with and showed an ability to be able to pick through it, because, of course, letby was not convicted on every single charge, they did find her not guilty on some and they found her guilty on others. So the difficulty for those now calling for faults in the trial is that this rhetoric was building, even before the trial had finished, online. Judith, in terms of the inquiry, are you encountering people who are commenting about it online? are there individuals you've come to recognise, perhaps, from the trial? well, there is regular comment online, katie. Absolutely. And, yeah, i think that's just the nature of where we are in the modern world, isn't it? i think, though, that there are, if i may say, i think perhaps two parallel universes running here. There is the universe of the courtroom, of the judicial process, of the trial process, of the inquiry, the way those systems work, the court of appeal, the judgment that the court of appeal published, which i would urge everybody to read, because that is absolutely, you know, a very, very key moment in this entire saga. And then there is, if you like, the court of public opinion and what is being said online. And those two things do not currently, across the entire piece, match up. And in fact, they're rubbing up against each other in some ways and in some places. And that is why you hear parents like those of e and f, who notjust. . . They're notjust seeing this, by the way, through the eyes of being the parents of babies affected, but they also went to the trial. They and the other parents were there in the courtroom throughout the first trial, and after that. And there are parents here at the public inquiry as well. And they say, you know, we saw all of this evidence, we saw the evidence that the jury was presented with as well, and we feel that the people who are commenting out there, who are saying that they have problems with this, were not in court. They didn't see, for example, lucy letby in the witness box. They didn't take the whole picture into account. That was judith moritz from the bbc. And that is all we've got time for this week. Goodbye. And if you'd like to hear a longer version of today's show, search bbc the media show wherever you get your bbc podcasts. Hello there. It was an unseasonably chilly start to friday morning with a touch of frost for some, but lots of blue sky and sunshine throughout the day and we started to draw in that warmer feeling air. Now that trend is just set to continue over the next few days. So warmer by day, milder by night, too. For the weekend — some sunshine, but also some outbreaks of rain here and there, too. You can see all of the sunshine clearly with the lack of cloud on the satellite picture here. We will see this front just gradually continue to push its way further eastwards through the rest of the night, bringing outbreaks of rain across northern ireland and western scotland. More cloud here, too, and some of the cloud will seep down into northern england. It's windy out towards the northwest, but look at much of england and wales — dry with clear skies again. And while it's not quite as cold as it was last night here, temperatures rurally could still drop, perhaps as low as 3 or 4 degrees celsius. And then on saturday, well we're set to keep a lot of that sunshine across england and wales through the day. It will stay dry here, more cloud towards the north and probably some more in the way of high cloud through the afternoon turning the sunshine hazy. Meanwhile, across northern ireland, western scotland we'll see outbreaks of rain push eastwards. Taking their time to reach eastern scotland — dry here for much of the day. Windy across the border, fresh south—westerly wind. Highs of16 to 19 degrees celsius, so already feeling warmer. And then on sunday, our front continues to slip southwards and eastwards across from northern england, down through wales, the midlands and eventually into south east england, but there will be some sunshine ahead of our front. It will stay dry during the daylight hours, 20 degrees so warm and sunshine developing behind the front, too, with some showers scattered across northern and western scotland. So here's our area of high pressure that's going to keep us largely dry and settled into next week. It's gradually pushing further eastwards over the next few days, but on monday we could start off the day with those lighter winds, with some areas of mist and fog that could take a little time, perhaps to lift and clear through the morning. But they will do so and there'll be some sunshine emerging and temperatures will be higher. So we're looking at 15 to 21 degrees celsius, perhaps north to south. And those temperatures could rise even further — low to mid 20s potentially, especially in the south as we head through the middle of next week. Lots more sunshine to come. Live from london, this is bbc news. The uk prime minister, sir keir starmer, says the next few months could be crucial in the fight for ukraine after talks with the us presidentjoe biden at the white house. A former chief executive of the us chain abercrombie & fitch, faces further allegations of sexually exploiting men at events he hosted around the world. And with london fashion week well under way, we speak to some of the ukrainian designers showcasing their work on the catwalk this year. Hello. Welcome to the programme. Sir keir starmer says talks with president biden in washington have been wide—ranging and productive but wouldn't say whether he'd persuaded the us to allow ukraine to fire long—range missiles into russia. President zelensky has repeatedly called for permission to use the weapons on targets across the border. He claims it is the only way to end the war. 0ur political editor, chris mason, has sent this report from the white house. I think the next few weeks and months could be crucial. 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The white house, the president, the white house, the president, the prime minister and their team spoke here for about an hour