Russian Anti-Sanctions Campaign Turned To California Congressman
U.S. diplomats were concerned about Russian outreach to House Republican Dana Rohrabacher while on a trip to Moscow last year.
ROSIE GRAY 7:50 PM ET
The trip was two months before the now- infamous Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer and lobbyist. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, perhaps the most Russia-friendly member of the GOP caucus, led a congressional delegation to Moscow in which he was handed materials critical of the Magnitsky Act, the 2012 bill imposing sanctions on Russian officials. Rohrabacher has said that the documents were given to him by Russian prosecutors.
But even at the time, Rohrabacher’s 2016 Moscow trip raised eyebrows among U.S. officials, particularly at the State Department. According to two sources with close knowledge of the events, officials at the Embassy in Moscow expressed doubts about the people they were meeting with and had warned the delegation that FSB presence was constant while the members were in Moscow. During the trip, the group was briefed by the U.S. Ambassador, John Tefft.State was “really concerned” about who Rohrabacher was meeting with, another source with knowledge of the trip said. “They were under the impression they were FSB agents.”
Past Rohrabacher visits to Moscow have also been objects of controversy. A 2013 trip that enlisted Steven Seagal as a fixer also included a meeting with top FSB officials and a dinner with deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin. The trip ended with an aborted plan to fly to Chechnya and meet the authoritarian Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. On that same trip that he received the anti-Magnitsky Act documents, Rohrabacher met with Russian Railways chief Vladimir Yakunin, who had been added to the Treasury Department’s sanctions list in 2014.
Rohrabacher has long been an outlier in the Republican caucus for his pro-Russian stance, but in the Trump era his views are no longer so unusual. He said in November that he had been told he was under consideration for Secretary of State. Rohrabacher has reportedly been warned by the FBI in the past that Russian intelligence was attempting to recruit him.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/russian-anti-sanctions-campaign-turned-to-california-congressman/534102/
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