Long, long ago— not that long go; 2017 just seems like another era entirely— Republican crackpot Dana Rohrabacher represented part of then-red-now-purple Orange County in Congress. He was the first of the Trump-era Kremlin allies in Congress. Chair of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe, Rohrabacher actively spread official Russian propaganda materials to other Republicans in the House. During a Foreign Relations Committee hearing, he approvingly compared Señor T to Putin, even though he had been quietly warned— 4 years earlier— by the FBI that the Russians were cultivating him as an asset. The day after the hearing, House Majority Leader McCarthy was caught on tape famously telling some of his GOP cronies that “There are two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. When some of them laughed, he said “Swear to God.”
That year, it didn’t seem possible to flip that district, but both top Democrats running campaigned against Rohrabacher Kremlin ties. I spoke with each of them during the primary. Harley Rouda told me that "At the very least, Dana Rohrabacher was woefully derelict in doing due diligence on who he was talking to. At most, it’s something far more serious. After Dana Rohrabacher was warned by the FBI that Russian intelligence was recruiting him, he should have been on high alert for well-connected Putin allies bearing gifts. Regardless of Dana’s motives, my question is this: How does any of Dana’s pro-Putin funny business help the hardworking people of the 48th district?” The DCCC-favored Hans Keirstead told me that he was “profoundly concerned with Congressman Rohrabacher's continued relationship with suspected Russian intelligence officials. He has made it a priority to entertain the Kremlin's whims and shown that he can be influenced by the Russian government. Now, it's clear that he has attempted to act on that influence. The people of Orange County deserve a representative who is standing up for them-- not one who is focused on defending Russia's interests.” Then House Speaker Paul Ryan was so embarrassed by Rohrabacher’s blatant disloyalty that during the election, he cut him off from GOP Super-PAC funds.
The very last time I spoke with Rohrabacher was at a political event in Pasadena when we talked about a marijuana legalization bill he was working on with Ted Lieu. But when he complained that his back was hurting because he had been surfing earlier, my friend David, a young political operative at the time, looked him straight in the eyes and asked, without cracking a smile, “Where, in the Moscow River?” David and I had recently returned from Moscow and had stayed at at the Baltschug Hotel, right across the Moskva River from the Kremlin, overlooking the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge where Putin opponent Boris Nemtsov had been murdered, upsetting David.
In any case, Rouda, a former Republican-turned-conservative-Democrat won the primary by a hair and then shocked the political world by routing the incumbent of 3 decades, by over 7 points! In truth, many Republicans were palpably relieved to see him go down. Oh, how things have changed since then! This week conservative Texas Republican Michael McCaul, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, warned that Russian propaganda is now rife among the Republican base. He likened it to an infection.
Yesterday, Aaron Blake reminded his readers that during Trump’s first impeachment (2019), one of his national security aides, Fiona Hill, “made an extraordinary plea. Seated in front of congressional Republicans, she implored them not to spread Russian propaganda. ‘In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,’ she told them. She was referring to comments they had made during her earlier deposition breathing life into a baseless, Trump-backed suggestion that Ukraine, rather than Russia, interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. ‘These fictions are harmful even if they’re deployed for purely domestic political purposes,’ she added. Republicans on the committee blanched at the suggestion that they had served as conduits for Russian misinformation, but Hill refused to back down. Five years later, Republicans are starting to grapple more publicly with the idea that this kind of thing is happening in their ranks.”
The most striking example came this week. In an interview with Puck News’s Julia Ioffe, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX)— none other than the GOP chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee— flat-out said that Russian propaganda had “infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”
McCaul suggested conservative media was to blame.
“There are some more nighttime entertainment shows that seem to spin, like, I see the Russian propaganda in some of it— and it’s almost identical [to what they’re saying on Russian state television]— on our airwaves,” McCaul said.
He also cited “these people that read various conspiracy-theory outlets that are just not accurate, and they actually model Russian propaganda.”
Asked which Republicans specifically he was talking about, McCaul said it was “obvious,” before staff intervened and asked that the conversation go off the record.
[When McCaul said “obvious,” he was referring to Putin-loving MAGAt degenerates like Marjorie Traitor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Scott Perry, Ronny Jackson, Matt Rosendale, Chip Roy, Elise Stefanik, Troy Nehls...]
These comments are the most significant to date, but they’re not the only ones.
A GOP impasse over additional funding for Ukraine’s defense against Russia— combined recently with Tucker Carlson’s deeply weird promotion of Russia and Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies from Moscow— has apparently occasioned some self-reflection among Republicans about their colleagues and allies:
Former vice president Mike Pence, Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and a top aide to Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) have warned their party against serving as apologists for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Recent presidential candidate Nikki Haley said Trump’s comments about not defending NATO allies, among others, “empower Putin.”
And Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) shot back at criticism from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) about Cornyn’s support for Ukraine, urging Paxton to “spend less time pushing Russian propaganda.”
Around the same time, former congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) said there is now “a Putin wing of the Republican Party.”
In 2022, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) called the pro-Putin sentiments in some corners of his party “almost treasonous,” while allowing that perhaps his fellow Republicans were just attention-seekers.
“It’s unthinkable to me, it’s almost treasonous and it just makes me ill to see some of these people do that,” Romney said. “But, of course, they do it because if they get shock value and it’s good to get more eyeballs and maybe make a little more money for them or their network. It’s disgusting.”
And today, as RFK Jr makes a play to become Trump’s running mate, he’s pivoted in two areas: the failed J-6 coup and Russia. He’s coming around to Trump’s talking point that the violent rioters in prison are hostages and political prisoners. And he now routinely parrots the Russian propaganda that’s floated in conspiracy theory social media posts. Ally Sammarco noted that on Friday, RFK was using Russian propaganda “word for word when discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying that Putin just wanted to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine.”
"Putin said 'Look I don't want to go into Crimea. Let's negotiate a peace,’” Kennedy said. “Alright, and the three things he wanted— he wanted to keep NATO out of Ukraine. That was number one. He wanted to de-Nazify the Ukrainian government."
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.
Putin said in televised remarks in February 2022 that his goal was to "seek to demilitarize and de-Nazify Ukraine, as well as bring to trial those who perpetrated numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including against citizens of the Russian Federation."
Many Holocaust experts have said his characterizations were grossly misrepresentative and part of an ongoing attempt to delegitimize Ukraine.
In 2022, NPR reported that a number of historians signed a letter condemning the Russian government's "cynical abuse of the term genocide, the memory of World War II and the Holocaust, and the equation of the Ukrainian state with the Nazi regime to justify its unprovoked aggression."
The historians stated that although Ukraine has right-wing extremists, it does not justify Russia's aggression and mischaracterization.
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