Chad Lewis

Ever since backpacking through Europe in his teenage years, Chad Lewis has sought to understand the world. He focused his studies at the University of Maryland around American foreign policy vis-à-vis post-Soviet politics. He spent over a decade abroad, living in Europe, Russia and South America, exploring how those parts of the globe differed from America in cultural, socio-economic and political senses.

The years-long close observation of Russia helped Lewis notice early signs Kremlin trolls who were promoting Putin’s talking points in the Western media. They masqueraded as Americans, but had English grammar mistakes common for Russian-speakers. Juxtaposing those comments with Russia’s increasing foreign aggression, Lewis quickly understood the potential national security ramifications. Concerned, in the fall of 2014 he reached out to the US government and alerted them to his findings. Years later the intelligence community would admit that the US had fallen victim to a Kremlin disinformation effort.

In 2019 alarm bells rang for Chad Lewis with the arrest of Rudy Giuliani’s associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. While most of the media focused on their connections to Donald Trump’s first impeachment, Lewis started weaving isolated reports of their actions into an integrated picture. By doing so, he discovered layers of influence peddling, both domestic and foreign, by Giuliani and his associates, that eroded America’s institutions. Lewis turned his research into his first book, The Persuasion Game, in an effort to illuminate the gravity of the damage and to protect American democracy from future treachery.