U.S. Embassy Exposes Fake Pro-LGBT Letter Published by Russian Newspaper

One of Russia's leading newspapers published an article alleging that the U.S. government ordered controversial Russian LGBT activist Nikolai Alekseyev (pictured above) to start outing government officials. But it didn't take long for the U.S. Embassy in Moscow to debunk the error-riddled claim. 

When the U.S. Embassy in Moscow read Izvestia's breathless report, staffers responded on Twitter, exposing the clearly fabricated nature of the letter by correcting the numerous grammatical and factual mistakes with a red pen.

The popular daily paper on Wednesday published excerpts from a letter it claimed was written by U.S. Special Envoy for the Human Rights of LGBTI Persons, Randy Berry, to Alekseyev. The newspaper alleged the letter was exposed by hackers in an effort to "discredit Russian officials," according to a Google translation of the article's headline. 

“By the order of U.S. Department of State, most effective members of Russian government and parliament are being accused of being of nontraditional sexual orientation,” a translation of Wednesday's article proclaimed.

It went on to allege that Alekseyev was following orders from the U.S. State Department to out several high-ranking Kremlin officials, including first deputy of the presidential administration Vyacheslav Volodin, and Mikhail Vasilenko, head of the Sheremetyevo airport.

“For now your main target will be first deputy of government,” the Russian paper claimed the letter said. “However, your main line of work, as we see it, will be to provoke [the deputy into] too overly emotional reaction to [mentions] of the LGBT-community in Russia.”

The version of the letter corrected and then tweeted by the U.S. Embassy makes no mention of any "main target."

It does, however, congratulate Alekseyev for organizing a protest against Russian aggression in the Ukraine and insinuates the U.S. government would be rewarding him financially.

"It is worth noting that consistent actions of LGBT activists during the demonstration triggered widespread media coverage of the event as well as negative responses from Russian officials,’ the letter said. "Following the results of the rally United States Department of State made a decision to redistribute funds allocated for promoting democracy in Russia. LGBT organizations will get increased financing at the expense of other opposition democratic organizations."

After incredulously noting that the email address included on the letter directs to a Gmail account, the U.S. Embassy added a note at the bottom of the "corrected" version of the forged letter: "Dear Izvestia, next time you are going to use fake letters — send them to us. We’ll be happy to correct the mistakes. Sincerely yours, Dept. of State.’"