French authorities said they had detected a disinformation operation, linked to the Russian Storm-1516 network, that aimed to suggest that President Emmanuel Macron was implicated in the scandal surrounding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a government source told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Friday, February 6.

Viginum, the French government agency tasked with countering foreign interference operations online, detected the operation on Wednesday. The campaign was based on “the creation of a website impersonating France-Soir,” a controversial news website, on which “an article accusing the president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, of being implicated in the Epstein affair” was published, the source said, confirming a report by the news channel BFM-TV. The disinformation was then “amplified on X,” the source added.

US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the “more than three million pages” of files from the Epstein case, published by the United States Department of Justice on January 30, did not contain any new elements that could lead to further prosecutions. Nevertheless, although the mere mention of someone’s name in the Epstein files does not, in and of itself, imply that they had committed any reprehensible acts, many public figures have already been caught up in the shockwave the revelations have provoked.

Macron is regularly targeted

On Wednesday evening, France-Soir published a statement denying any connection to the disinformation on social media. “Important alert for France-Soir readers. Warning: brand and content impersonation. The site france-soir.net has no connection to France-Soir,” the website said in a statement posted on X.

According to the government source, “Viginum attributes this site with a high degree of confidence to the CopyCop information operation method.” CopyCop is linked to a former American police officer, John Mark Dougan, who has been living in exile in Russia since 2016. The source added that Dougan “registers and maintains part of the digital infrastructure used by the Storm-1516 information operation method.”

On X, the first account to share the video was “@LoetitiaH, a historic and frequent amplifier of Storm-1516 information operations,” the source said. The video content was then “picked up and amplified by many other accounts monitored by Viginum and very likely paid by the operators of this method,” the source added.

Nevertheless, “visibility does not mean impact,” the source said, specifying that “this operation is very similar” to the operations the Storm-1516 network typically carries out “targeting political figures (including the president) and quickly capitalizing on current events.”