This is the wild story of Sarah Ashton-Cirillo, a transgender woman from Las Vegas who went from being an undercover Democratic Party operative and FBI informant in Nevada to a Nazi apologist in Ukraine cheering on the murder of independent journalists.
Sarah Ashton-Cirillo’s birth name was Michael John Cirillo. According to Wikipedia Cirillo was born in July 1977 in Florida and has lived in Las Vegas since 2004, establishing residency there in 2016 to be closer to his ex-wife and child. As a male Cirillo worked as a professional champion poker player and was well known in the gambling world. In August of 2019 Cirillo underwent gender transition and took the name Sarah Ashton-Cirillo. After transition Ashton-Cirillo worked for several non-profits, including a stint as Outreach Coordinator for Bridges, a Las Vegas non-profit providing emergency COVID relief.
At this time Ashton-Criollo regarded herself as a progressive Democrat, was in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and was something of a liberal activist. In 2019 she was offered a job at a firm called McShane LLC, a small Republican political consulting firm run by two people, Rory McShane, who served as president, and Woodrow Johnstone, who served as vice-president. McShane LLC managed campaigns for conservative Republican candidates and causes. Ashton-Cirillo said they knew her background as a progressive and knew that she was trans but hired her as a form of “tokenism”. An article in the liberal Daily Beast says that Ashton-Cirillo seemed to feel that her new employers weren’t that bright and she was in effect using them to pursue her own agenda. Shortly after the 2020 election Ashton-Cirillo wrote for the Daily Beast and she seems to have had a close relationship with that publication. A Daily Beast article about her openly states that Ashton-Cirillo was working as an undercover Democratic Party operative who claims to have recruited in the Proud Boys for the GOP.
While at McShane LLC Ashton-Cirillo worked closely with vice-president Woodrow Johnstone. Under his direction Ashron-Cirillo became well known in the Nevada Republican Party, frequently attending Trump rallies during the tumultuous 2019 campaign season as well as hosting fundraising parties at her house. It was assumed that Ashton-Cirillo was part of the pro-Trump conservative movement. She had friendly relations with the Proud Boys, a militant far right organization, who at one point asked her to host a fundraising party for them, which she turned down.
While in this milieu Ashton-Cirillo was often at events with two leading figures in the Southwest Trump movement, Paul Gosar, a Republican congressman from Arizona and Micheal McDonald, chair of the Nevada Republican Party. Ashton-Cirillo said that she noticed that they felt uncomfortable around because she was trans but that otherwise she seems to have been accepted in that milieu.
In the period approaching the 2020 elections there was fear among liberals that Trump would attempt to steal the election and possibly attempt a fascist coup. In Nevada there were rumors that Gosar and Johnstone would stage a “Brook Brothers riot” to disrupt the presidential election in that state. The original Brook Brothers riot was an event during the disputed 2000 election in which a demonstration by Republican Party staffers shut down a vote recount in Florida ensuring George Bush would win the 2000 presidential election. According to an article in the Daily Beast, deleted from their website but accessible via the Wayback Machine, at several private strategy meetings held at a hotel Woodrow Johnstone asked Ashton-Cirillo to approach the Proud Boys, whom she had connections with, and ask them to stage a protest. It was then decided not to use the Proud Boys. Johnstone then again changed his mind and asked Ashton-Cirillo to approach the Proud Boys, which she did through their Telegram chat, and convinced them to stage a protest. The resulting Proud Boys’ protest was contentious but was peaceful and non-violent.
During the 2020 election season Ashton-Cirillo had a close friend, a woman named Nadia Krall. Krall was a lawyer with a background in insurance law. She was a registered Democrat and in 2019 ran for a Nevada district judgeship. Ashton-Cirillo convinced Krall to change her party affiliation to Republican. The firm Ashton-Cirillo worked for, McShane LLC, then organized a robocall telemarketing campaign for her. Nadia Krall won the election and is currently serving on Nevada’s Eighth District Court.
After the election Ashton-Cirillo disclosed her involvement with Republican Party politics and her role in the election of Nadia Krall to the Daily Beast and claimed she had helped foil a Trump plot to carry out a coup by revealing local Republican Party ties to the Proud Boys. During this time it was likely that she was also secretly working for a Democratic Party organization and possibly for the FBI, although this is not known for sure.
A year after the election, in 2021 Ashton-Cirillo ran for the Las Vegas City Council, this time openly as a progressive Democrat, against sitting Councilwoman Michele Fiore. Fiore was a hardline conservative Trump Republican. She had a long history in Las Vegas politics and was highly controversial. Fiore had served as mayor pro tempore, or temporary mayor of Las Vegas but had been forced to resign after making what were regarded as incendiary thinly veiled racist remarks.
While running against Fiore Ashton-Cirillo informed on her to the FBI, providing screenshots of Telegram chats she made when she was undercover in the Republican Party indicating that Fiore had improperly misused campaign funds, hiring her daughter as a campaign worker and had spent campaign funds on parties, regarded as relatively minor offenses. In October of 2021 Ashton-Cirillo announced she was ending her campaign for City Council to focus on a news portal she had started, “Political.tips”, a site focusing on local politics. Most of the articles on Political.tips were written by Ashton-Cirillo herself. There are many articles on Michele Fiore on this site. The site seems to be inactive, with the most recent articles dated July 2022.
In an interview with the Daily Beast Ashton-Cirillo claimed to have received many death threats. After basically outing herself as an informant on people she pretended to be in political alignment with, it is likely that she made a lot of enemies.
Nazi Apologist and Cheering the Murder of Independent Journalists
Ashton-Cirillo said she had a long term dream of being a foreign war correspondent in the manner of Ernest Hemingway or George Orwell, both of whom were involved in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. In 2015, as a male, Cirillo visited a Syrian refugee camp in Turkey, intending to report on the refugee crisis. Cirillo said he was too scared to cross the border into Syria. Cirillo wrote a book on this experience, but never published it over quality concerns.
In March of 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion, Ashton-Cirillo abruptly left Las Vegas and went to Ukraine via Poland to fulfill her dream of becoming a war journalist. In an early entry in her Substack “Words from Ukraine” in 2022 Ashton-Cirillo describes taking a bus from Berlin through Poland to the Ukrainian city of Lviv. Since Ashton-Cirillo had a female driver’s license and a male passport she was nervous about entering the country. She describes three Westerners she was traveling with convincing her to continue on across the border. Ukrainian border authorities had her take off her wig while reviewing her travel documents.
In a later Substack entry which has been deleted, Ashton-Cirillo describes how, on a later bus in Ukraine she met, seemingly by chance, two young men who just happened to be in the SBU, Ukrainian state security, who helped her get journalist credentials and made things easier for her overall.
Ashton-Cirillo settled in Kharkov, a predominantly ethnic Russian city controlled by Ukraine. Since arriving in Ukraine she has been a prolific writer on Twitter and Substack, hosts two podcasts, “Trans at the Front” and “Russia Hates the Truth” and has written on Ukraine for LGBT magazines such as the Washington Blade and LGBTQ Nation. She has been interviewed by the BBC and has gotten favorable attention from many liberal media outlets.
Shortly after coming to Ukraine Ashton-Cirillo became an embedded journalist with the Azov Battalion, one of the largest militias in Ukraine. The Azov Battalion (now Azov Movement) is widely regarded as a Nazi organization. The original leader of Azov, Andrei Biletsky, said the founding of the organization in 2014 was “the first step in a National Socialist revolution”. There are numerous photos of Azov with Nazi flags and regalia and there have been many articles in mainstream media expressing concern that Azov are Nazis. Plans to bring Azov members to the US for military training were canceled after much controversy. While some of the extremist members of Azov left in 2015 in an apparent effort by the organization to clean up its image it appears that Biletsky and others still have close ties to the group. Independent American video journalist John Mark Dougan showed large amounts of Nazi regalia and literature in Azov’s former headquarters in Mariupol and there are reports that Azov had a temple to the ancient Slavic fire god Perun outside that city.
In her Substack entries and elsewhere Ashton-Criollo insists that Azov are not Nazis but are Ukrainian patriots. While embedded with them she claimed that Azov are LGBT friendly. She admitted that while with Azov she had been sexually harassed but said she thought this would have happened to any woman and that they weren’t singling her out because she was transgender. Ashton-Cirillo has frequently promoted Azov. In a Twitter post dated April 21, 2022 Ashton-Cirillo wrote , “If you don’t support the #Azov do you really support Ukraine? “ Alex Rubinstein of the Greyzone called Ashton-Cirillo a “Nazi apologist producing propaganda” and she has been criticized by independent journalists including Rubinstein, Eva Bartlett, the ConvoCouch and others.
Ashton-Cirillo admits that in a trip to the Baltic countries in 2017 she came to”hate Russia” .She echoes and promotes narratives pervasive in the mainstream corporate media about the Russian invasion being unprovoked, Russia being fascist and Ukraine being a “free democratic country” fighting against “fascist tyranny”. Ukraine is a country which has banned all opposition parties and media and has canceled the scheduled upcoming presidential election. Ashton-Cirillo has never mentioned decades of NATO expansion, the US orchestrated Maidan coup of 2014, nor has she mentioned the situation of the Russian speakers of the Donbas, subjected to a brutal war and horrific shelling for nearly a decade.
In a widely mocked video Ashron-Cirillo posted on Twitter she is seen shouting in anguish, “Putin, there will be no monuments to your fascism”. Ironically she was standing next to a Soviet era memorial to the troops who died fighting fascism in the Second World War. Russia is a country which lost over 20 million people fighting Nazi Germany. It is unclear whether Ashton-Cirillo was aware of this history or knew the purpose of the memorial she was standing next to.
Ashton-Cirillo appears to think the monument is to fascism. In fact it’s a monument to Soviet troops who died fighting fascism in World War II.
On February 22, Ashton-Cirillo was hit by shrapnel and received face and hand injuries, for which she was hospitalized and suffered some permanent disfigurement.
On April 18, 2022 Ashton-Cirillo issued what looked like veiled death threats against two independent journalists on Twitter, both who have a wide following. Gonzalo Lira is a Chilean- American businessman, writer, film maker and Youtube personality who has lived in Ukraine for many years. In March of 2022 he was stranded in Ukraine after the Russian invasion. After the war began Lira built up a wide following across the political spectrum discussing geopolitics and the endemic corruption and fascism in Ukraine. Patrick Lancaster is an American independent video journalist who reports from the Donbas region, an area very few Western journalists visit. While both Lira and Lancaster are very critical of the Western role in Ukraine, both are anti-war and take a neutral stance towards the conflict.
Gonzalo Lira often denounced the Ukrainian government and at one point said that a group of Banderites, followers of fascist WWII Ukrainian politician Stefan Bandera, went into his apartment building looking for him, presumably to kill him in response to a clip from one of his videos (which are banned in Ukraine) which was rebroadcast on Russian social media. For a time after this Lira lived underground at an undisclosed location in Kharkov. He claimed he was in fear for his life. The Daily Beast, the Democratic Party mouthpiece of which Ashton-Cirillo wrote for, ran a smear campaign against Lira in which they claimed he was a Russian agent. They disclosed where he was living, essentially doxxing him, and demanded that the Ukrainian government investigate him. In response Lira posted a video, “The Daily Beast is Trying to Get Me Killed” which seems to be an accurate summation.
Lira mentioned that many opponents of the Kiev regime have gone missing, and provided links to information on disappeared dissidents on his Youtube channel. He added that “if you don’t hear from me within 12 days, you know something has happened to me”. Followers of independent media became concerned after no one heard from Lira for two weeks and he missed a scheduled interview with British journalist George Galloway on April 12, 2022. In response to this Ashron-Cirillo posted a Tweet celebrating the disappearance and possible murder of Lira.
A Twitter follower wrote that Lira was a “well paid Kremlin spy” and said that “Patrick (Patrick Lancaster), “you’re next” Sarah answered this with “Patrick must go”.
After this and a Twitter exchange which discussed the “liquidation” of independent journalists which Ashton-Cirillo participated in she was banned from Twitter for several days. Both Tweets have been deleted but there are screenshots of these circulating online.
War Crimes and Propaganda
In August of 2022 Ashton-Cirillo resigned as a reporter for LGBTQ Nation, which she had been primarily working for, to become a civilian employee of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, where she worked as an analyst and wrote policy papers. In October 2022 Ashton-Cirillo reported on missile strikes on Kiev. She posted a horrific and controversial video of a dead civilian. In an interview with the Voice of America Ashton-Cirillo said that she was honestly surprised by the controversy her gory video elicited. In October of 2022 Ashton-Cirillo announced that she had enlisted in the Ukrainian military as a combat medic. According to reports she was first assigned to a Crimean Tatar unit and then a Kharkov based defense brigade and was awarded the rank of junior sergeant. Ashton-Cirillo briefly returned to the US twice after enlisting in the Ukrainian military, both times primarily to lobby Congress for more aid to Ukraine. According to the Washington Post as of August 2023 the US has spent over $60 billion on Ukraine, with $40 billion of this direct military aid and the Biden administration has announced plans to send another $200 million, at a time when US infrastructure is crumbling and there’s seemingly a rail disaster every other week.
On March 7 Ashton-Cirillo posted a Tweet, in which, while the wording is ambiguous, seems to be confessing to having committed a war crime. The Tweet reads,
“Yesterday I showed us escorting a Russian POW. Now meet his friend. I took this photo after he went to sleep on us. Remember. This is war. Before it was 15 to 30 of them for one of us. Now we will make it 100 to 1.”
Below this are two photos of a dead Russian soldier.
This has been deleted from Twitter but was reposted on the Russian social media site en.mirya.news.
The Tweet appears to be saying that Ashton-Cirillo killed a Russian prisoner, which would constitute a war crime. The Russian Ministry of Defense announced that they are investigating this.
In August 2023 Sarah Ashton-Cirillo was appointed an official English language spokesperson for the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine. The Deputy Defense Minister cited Ashton-Cirillo’s estimated Twitter reach of 28.3 million and her work “debunking Russian propaganda”. On August 5th Ashton-Cirillo released a bizarre video in which she asked, “Do you know the difference between us and them”, pointing to cardboard cut out of a Russian soldier, “besides fighting under this (Ukrainian) flag and for freedom on behalf of the people of Ukraine while the Russians are fighting for tyranny and dictatorship? It’s pretty simple , we’re human, and those guys most definitely aren’t. Slava Ukraine!” This dehumanization of an enemy has long been a traditional technique of war propaganda. This video is not widely available on US internet portals, but has been widely seen on Russian internet venues.
More recently Ashton-Cirillo released a video celebrating the second arrest of Gonzalo Lira , who facing torture and likely execution, tried to escape to Hungary.
Ashton-Cirillo is portrayed favorably and is widely promoted in mainstream US media, which overwhelmingly supports Ukraine and NATO. Her Wikipedia entry downplays her comments on Gonzalo Lira, does not mention Patrick Lancaster and completely omits her controversial Tweet where she seems to brag about killing a Russian POW. Commenters on Twitter have mentioned how the View History tab of the article shows contributors discussing how they could best portray Ashton-Cirillo in a favorable light. Many people regard Wikipedia as essentially a tool of the US security state, as shown by their frequent smearing of independent journalists and anyone going against corporate/state narratives. This would seem to be yet another example of this.
In her prolific writing and videos Sarah Ashton-Cirillo shows an empty headed uncritical fanaticism not worthy of an actual journalist. Her involvement with and frequent promotion of the Azov Movement , as Alex Rubinstein implied, shows either an extreme lack of intellectual curiosity and/or willful unethical opportunism. Her strange story shows the limitations of woke imperialism. Story to be continued…
Kate Frey
Kate Frey spent most of her life in Vermont. She has a background as an international educator and has taught at two universities in China and spent three years teaching in Moscow, Russia. Kate currently lives outside Portland, Maine with her two dogs, Mollie and Micah. She works as a special education teacher at a local school district. Kate has written articles on history and politics for a variety of publications. She shares her thoughts on the current world situation on Rumble at <a href="https://rumble.com/user/KateFrey" title="Rumble KateFrey">KateFrey</a>.
