As the first season of the Trump administration draws to a close, they are already looking deep into the wallet. According to a report from The Bulwark, D-list media celebrity and alleged Russian propagandist Lauren Chen appears to have been granted a visa by the Trump State Department and is back in the United States.
In a text to X on Christmas Day, Chen announced that she and her husband are in Nashville and thanked the State Department’s Joe Rittenhouse, senior adviser on consular affairs, for doing so, saying he helped “move mountains to make sure we can get back in time for the holidays!” Chen also credited “CBP, the new FBI leadership, and the administration” for helping him return.
The whole situation is just “Who’s Who” to “Who’s that again?” So, as a refresher: Lauren Chen is a longtime conservative news commentator who made it “big” to play footsie with the alt-right during Trump’s first administration while posting as “Millennial Roaming.” He gained attention for interviewing white man Richard Spencer shortly before his involvement in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in the death of a protester and the injury of several others after a neo-Nazi drove their car into a crowd.
After a series of failed independent media ventures, he established himself in the right-wing ecosystem, contributing 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 business, Tenent Media.
According to a lawsuit filed by the Justice Department in 2024, Tenet Media received millions of dollars from the Kremlin-owned news agency RT, which Chen previously contributed to, and funneled that money to conservative commentators in an effort to spread pro-Russian content. Recipients of those funds, which were thought to be unknowingly coming from Russian interests, included Internet influencers Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and David Rubin, all of whom were allegedly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Tenent Media for their content.
While the Justice Department’s case against the Russian sponsors of Tenet Media is still open, according to The Bulwark, Chen has not faced any legal consequences — even though his visa was “rescinded” by the Biden administration and, at least for the time being, he cannot return to the United States.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 awarded an executive role and apparently used his position to bring Chen back into the country. Rittenhouse appears to be deeply involved in the Online Right, based on the fact that he posted a photo of himself in a government office watching a video of Sargon of Akkad. So it should come as no surprise that he would know and want to help Chen. The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo; We will update this post when we receive a response.
Accordingly, Rittenhouse also briefed the media 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 genocide gets you out of the country, but accepting money from the Kremlin and distributing it to create propaganda gets you an instant invitation. As Rittenhouse says, that’s just what “First Stories of American Lawyers look like.”
