‘Socialists’ charged with aiding Russia after FBI raids

Four radical American socialists have been charged with election meddling and spreading Vladimir Putin’s propaganda after they were arrested in dramatic FBI raids.

The four, two of them white, are members of the African People’s Socialist Party, a 50-year-old black empowerment organization.

Omali Yeshitela, the group’s founder and chairman was one of the four Americans and three Russian nationals indicted Tuesday for “sowing discord, spreading pro-Russia propaganda and interfering in elections within the United States.”

Yeshitela said he was zip-tied outside his St. Louis home in a raid last July by FBI agents who used flashbangs as they stormed in.

He claims the FBI has been targeting his group for decades.

The DOJ says that the 81-year-old veteran leader of the far-left group conspired along with three others — one of whom is alleged to run a cult-like group called Black Hammer — to help Russian efforts to meddle in elections.

Yeshitela has called the charges an “asinine” attack on his organization.

Moscow-based Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, the head of the Kremlin-funded Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia, allegedly worked with the Russian Federal Security Service to carry out a “malign influence campaign” on US elections, the DOJ wrote in a statement.

It also named Natalia Burlinova as part of the alleged plot and put her on the FBI’s most wanted list.

The indictment alleged that four Florida and Missouri-based members of the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement joined the effort.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights — freedoms Russia denies to its own citizens — to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.

“The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt US elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are US citizens or foreign individuals abroad,” Olsen said in a news release.

Yeshitela is the leader of the African People’s Socialist Party, which includes the Uhuru movement.

Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus Romain Jr. were the others named in the indictment.

Romain is also the head of Black Hammer, a fringe black separatist group. Romain is also known as Gazi Kodzo.

Kodzo was thrown out of the Uhuru group in 2018 and started up the Black Hammer group which has been described as “cult-like.”

He has been charged in the past with sexual assault and a corpse was found in his house last summer.

Yeshitela, who declined to comment and referred questions to his lawyer, who was not reachable Friday, has previously denied being a Russian agent.

He says the US government targeted him because of his activism for the black community — and because he has been to Russia.

“This case is not about whether or not I went to Russia, or whether or not I have a position around the war in Ukraine that was the same as what the Russians had,” Yeshitela wrote in an article late in 2022.

“This attack was perpetrated against us because we have always fought for the liberation of Africa and African people everywhere.”

Yeshitela said he and his wife were shocked and traumatized when the FBI raided their St. Louis home in July 1922.

“At five o’clock in the morning, pre-dawn, an army of assault weapon-toting, camouflage-wearing military sources identifying themselves as the FBI attacked my home,” Yeshitela said at a rally last month.

“They used flashbang grenades, and vehicles. They threaten my wife. They use drones.

” This was in St. Louis Missouri, and it was in the economically depressed sector of that city.”

“It seems to be a lot of BS from what I can see,” a source familiar with the defense told The Post.

“There doesn’t seem to be any actual evidence that they did the actual bidding of Russia.”

Yeshitela spoke to left-wing outlet Democracy Now last year after the raid.

“They use Russia, they use this nonsense, even at a time when we’ve seen white people scaling the walls of the Capitol, threatening to kill the vice president, the feet on the desk of Nancy Pelosi,” Yeshitela said.

“And you talk about we have some role under the Russians of contaminating the pristine elections that happen in this country?”