Mike Gauger tried to tell us.
When ex-Palm Beach County Sheriff’s deputy turned Russian tool John Mark Dougan was still whetting his teeth on local cyber lies, Mike Gauger was his favorite target.
And Gauger’s wife.
And Gauger’s child.
It takes a cast iron stomach to read the vitriol leveled at the former PBSO deputy chief and his family on smear sites linked to Dougan.
Turns out, though, the chaos Dougan sowed in Palm Beach County was just a warm-up for the Kremlin.
Working from a report by NewsGuard, The New York Times last week dived into Dougan’s unlikely rise from vicious local cyberstalker to Vladimir Putin’s right-hand disinformation man.
NewsGuard found 167 fake “independent news” websites believed linked to Dougan, who fled to Moscow in 2016 one step ahead of the feds.
His web of fake websites have drawn 37 million views.
Echoes of their published lies are everywhere. The lie that Russia invaded Ukraine to destroy secret U.S. biolabs? Repeated by Tucker Carlson. The lie that Ukraine’s president bought yachts? Heard from U.S. Sen. J. D. Vance.
Dougan’s response? Not me. Not my sites.
He is too modest by half. In addition to NewsGuard, Clemson University researchers meticulously backtracked IP addresses; so did sleuths at Recorded Future, a threat intelligence company.
The broad conclusion was not just that Dougan was at the nexus of the sites; it was that the sites were a nexus of Kremlin disinformation.
Putin isn’t paying me, Dougan protested.
That doesn’t mean he isn’t providing value.
Dougan has parroted the anti-American line on Russian TV. He published prepackaged Russian anti-Ukraine propaganda on YouTube and is a repeat panelist on an anti-Ukraine Russian tribunal.
If the FBI paid attention, they might have noted Dougan’s 2013 trips from Palm Beach County to Russia, where he said he scored an unlikely sit-down with high-level Russian apparatchik Pavel Borodin.
They might have wondered how an ex-sheriff’s deputy with a small tech business came to be chatting up projects with the man known as Putin’s mentor.
The FBI, though, had shrugged off Dougan.
No one knew that better than Gauger, the former PBSO deputy chief.
Cyber assaults targeting Gauger and his family continued years after Dougan quit the force in 2009. Lewd photoshopped pictures of his wife were spread online. His child was targeted.
Federal cyberstalking can carry a prison sentence. But Gauger had made the law enforcement rounds, including the FBI, and no one seemed interested. He sued for libel. It went nowhere.
Then, in 2016, the home addresses of thousands of Florida prosecutors, law enforcement agencies and judges were published on a Dougan website.
The FBI raided his Palm Beach Gardens home.
Dougan hopped on a commercial jet, fled to Russia, and was promptly granted asylum.
Even in Moscow, though, he continued his harassment campaigns. In 2017, he scored a hit.
Gauger was on a cruise with his wife that year when his cell phone started blowing up. A faked PBSO deputy’s report had metastasized into a viral media storm. It claimed PBSO had found Gauger was a white supremacist, posting on a neo-Nazi website that he wanted to rape and kill a black man or a Jew.
Bloggers ran with the phony story. Comedian D.L. Hughley posted it on social media. So did Raw Story, with its legions of social media followers.
Everywhere, people believed it, said Gauger. “A girl I went to high school with sends me a message, ‘Mike, is any of this true?’”
The original “story” was published on the website DC Weekly. Dougan denied involvement.
According to Clemson researchers, DC Weekly went dormant after 2017 only to reemerge in 2021. It was tied to Dougan, researchers wrote, and with “likely links to the Russian government.”
Just as Dougan denied having anything to do with lies aimed at Gauger, he has denied being Moscow’s most prolific propaganda troll.
He is now a Russian citizen. He says he voted for Putin.
It’s doubtful that he’ll be back soon. He’s facing an arrest warrant on 21 felony charges of extortion and wiretapping.
But Palm Beach County is still on his mind. Three weeks ago, Gauger says, he got a call.
It was his old tormentor, Dougan.
Dougan apologized, he said, and told him his true target had always been Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw.
And then, said Gauger, Dougan made him an offer.
He had heard Gauger was running for sheriff. If he happened to have any dirt on Bradshaw, he should feel free to pass it along.
Dougan said he might be able to help.
Pat Beall’s column appears every Saturday in the Sun Sentinel. Write to Pat at pbeall1@gmail.com.
