The Kremlin propagandist who boasted on his Facebook page that he worked with Trump, WikiLeaks, and a team of hackers to influence the 2016 US election was appointed in 2012 as one of Putin’s “trusted confidants”. Konstantin Rykov was personally summoned by Putin’s election campaign chief Stanislav Govorukhin to serve in this role as a trusted representative of the Putin campaign.

Days after the 2016 US election, Rykov posted on Facebook a detailed story of how he received a Direct Message from Trump in 2012, the beginning of a four year plan to elect Trump to the Presidency.

It’s time for wonderful stories. I’ll tell you about (now it’s possible) how Donald Trump and I decided to free America and make it great again. This took us as much as 4 years and 2 days… At the beginning of the brave and romantic [story] was not very much. A pair of hacker groups, civil journalists from WikiLeaks and political strategist Mikhail Kovalev. The next step was to develop a system for transferring tasks and information, so that no intelligence and NSA could burn it.

Since the moment Trump announced his candidacy, Rykov was an ardent public supporter. In the Washington Post, Rykov was described as a “Putin supporter”, in The Atlantic he’s portrayed as a “ pro-Kremlin blogger.” A fuller picture paints a different story of Rykov — an asset utilized by the Kremlin to do its dirty work with a level of deniability.

Elections of the Premier of the Russian Federation on March 4, 2012 CERTIFICATION OF Konstantin I.RYKOV trusted confidant of V. Putin- Candidate for the post of President of the Russian Federation 2012

In order to drum up support and promote his message, Putin created an institution of trusted representatives — in Russian “trusted faces” — according to Ilya Zaslavskiy, the Head of Research at the Free Russia Foundation, a US non-profit. Zaslavskiy said that the group of trusted confidants usually consists of around five hundred “cultural figures and celebrities who meet [Putin] and get televised as his supporters.” These representatives are trusted by Putin himself and are often rewarded with “various small and not so small privileges after elections,” according to Zaslavskiy.

Personally appointed by Putin’s election chief, Rykov was one of the most important members of the 2012 group of trusted confidants. His boisterous, unwavering support of Putin was broadcast daily to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers.