Five Questions with Asha Rangappa

Former FBI Agent and Counterintelligence Expert

Asha Rangappa is an Assistant Dean and Senior Lecturer at the Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs and a former Associate Dean at Yale Law School.

Before that, Asha was an FBI Special Agent, stationed in the New York Division and specializing in counterintelligence investigations. At Yale, she teaches courses on national security law, Russian information warfare, and leadership and ethics. She writes The Freedom Academy on Substack, a publication about disinformation and its impact on democracy.

Asha has this incredible knack for diagramming court cases and making the complicated comprehensible. Given that and her subject matter expertise, I knew she would be just the person to help us understand DOJ’s recent indictment of two employees of Russian state-controlled Media Outlet RT. The two spent nearly $10 million to push out pro-Russia social media content through a covertly funded company in Tennessee. The case reads like a spy thriller, and Asha helps us understand what it’s about and why it matters, starting with her fabulous diagram, which she explains below.

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