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Sunday, December 18, 2016

In the Chappaqua woods, a search for Hillary Clinton

 

In the Chappaqua woods, a search for Hillary Clinton


In Chappaqua, N.Y., especially along its hiking terrain, sightings of Hillary Clinton are hardly unlikely. (Tyler Sizemore/Hearst Connecticut Media/Greenwich Time via Associated Press)
  
CHAPPAQUA, N.Y. — The other day, Carol Meyer and her friend Ellen went walking in the woods of Chappaqua. For all they knew, they might see a coyote or some rare mushrooms or Hillary Clinton.
“I just have a sense — ” said Ellen, putting on her gloves.
“You think so?” said Carol, adjusting her scarf.
A Clinton sighting was hardly unlikely. She and her husband were Chappaqua neighbors who enjoyed an invigorating, mind-clearing tromp in the local nature preserve as much as anyone else. And now, of course, she was back in town. Ellen had already seen her in the woods twice since she lost the presidency, and she wasn’t the only one. Two days after the election, a young woman had spotted Clinton and taken a photo with her that went viral, leading to fake news stories alleging that the whole thing was staged, which was said to prove once again that Hillary Clinton couldn’t do anything that did not strike a false note. But Chappaquaians knew better.
“Of Course Hillary Clinton Was Hiking The Day After She Lost the Election You F-----g Dumba--es,” wrote one Chappaqua native blogging in defense of the young woman in the photo, who had received hate mail afterward, which was why Ellen and others did not want their full names made public. “It’s not uncommon to run into the Clintons in the nature preserves, or even on the road.”
In fact, photos had been popping up all over in recent weeks showing a makeup-free Clinton smiling with strangers in the pines, so many that “Saturday Night Live” did a skit called “The Hunt for Hil,” in which two investigators head off into the woods to “find her, trap her, and thank her” with the help of a forest shaman. Others scrutinizing the photos noted that in one, Clinton appeared to be wearing the same blue-patterned Patagonia fleece she had been photographed wearing in outings for 20 years, spawning jokes that her fleece had more experience than Donald Trump, and comments about how regular she seemed, how human.
It was like Al Gore growing a beard after his 2000 election loss. Or George W. Bush painting self-portraits after leaving office. It was Hillary Clinton in the woods: not a candidate running, but a person walking, and probably also talking, as Ellen and Carol were doing now, two lawyers heading along a grassy path into the 44-acre preserve.
“I read this article by Michael Kinsley — he was saying Donald Trump is a fascist, but not in the usual sense,” Ellen began, and as they walked along, the words “corporate statism” and “Tillerson” and “democracy” drifted up into the maples and pines.
They huffed up a rocky hill and walked along a ridge. They eased down into a clearing by a half-frozen stream, which was where, two days after the election, Ellen had been walking her yellow lab Phoebe, distraught over the results and saying to herself, “If I see her, I see her” when she actually saw her, in the woods: Hillary Clinton coming around a bend.
“Bill was in front,” Ellen said. “And then here came Hillary with her poodle and then the agents. And I’m here, and then we were together, and I just said, ‘What happened?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know. I have no idea.’ And I said, ‘I really admire you. You look great. You’re wonderful.’ I stood there with my arms wide open and I’m not even a hugger and I gave her this big hug. She had on a beautiful sweater. She asked my dog’s name.”
A couple weeks later, Ellen, who calls herself “the Sacagawea of the Arboretum,” let Phoebe off her leash. The dog was bounding ahead full speed when she started barking, and then Hillary and Bill Clinton appeared again, this time with their daughter, Chelsea, Chelsea’s husband and their children. It was the day after Thanksgiving and soon, other hikers were popping out of the woods.
“I had already hugged her so I just said hello and patted her on the arm,” Ellen said. “Don’t ask me why.”
It was cold and quiet now except for the wind blowing through the bare branches of trees, and the sound of something rustling in the leaves. The women carried on deeper into the woods, bending back twigs, heading up a slope they called “Secret Service Hill” after a time years ago when the path was frozen and they had helped the Clintons’ agents, who were wearing loafers, navigate the incline. The Clintons were well shod.
“It was a snowy February day,” Carol recalled. “They were holding hands.”
Ellen remembered Bill talking during his convention speech this summer about how he and Hillary had taken a walk on their first date and had been “walking and talking” ever since. Sometimes, though, it was just Bill walking alone in the woods as Hillary traipsed around the world or campaigned across the country.
Once, a Chappaquaian named Judy Fuhrer was driving along the road by the preserve, listening to an audio recording of Bill Clinton’s 1,008-page memoir. She said she was on the 13th CD when she realized that the tall white-haired man walking his dog up ahead was the former president of the United States.
“I stopped and got out of my car and said, ‘I’m listening to your autobiography right now!’ And he said, ‘You listened to the whole thing?! Whoa!’ And I said, ‘I listened to Hillary’s too.’ And he said, ‘Well, that’s more interesting.’ He asked me if I wanted him to sign [the CD] but I told him it was a library copy.”
Once, a Chappaquaian named Lew was coming out of the woods with his dog Maggie when he saw Bill Clinton and the dog heading in.
“He said, ‘What’s it like in there today?’ ” Lew recalled. “I said, ‘It’s actually pretty muddy.’ He was complaining he didn’t have on the right boots.”
It seemed like almost every Chappaquaian had some story about the time they ran into the former most powerful man in the world. They had chatted with him in the woods about Nelson Mandela’s birthday party, or at Le Jardin Du Roi bistro about the lost chance for a Middle East peace deal. When Judy Fuhrer’s son broke his arm, Clinton signed the boy’s cast. Ellen ran into him in the bookstore once and handed him her cellphone to wish her sister-in-law a happy birthday, and he had seemed glad to oblige.
Hillary Clinton sightings were less frequent. “Sometimes she was here on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, in casual clothes, just like the rest of us,” said Carol, stepping over some rocks. “She’d always comment on it being a nice day, I think so you’d feel comfortable because sometimes it can be intimidating, you know, meeting a former president and, at that time, a secretary of state.”
Now it was different. Now it seemed like Hillary Clinton might appear at any moment, like she was just up ahead, just beyond those trees. Recently, a Chappaquaian named Andy and his two dogs, Lucas and Earl, were out walking and noticed that the leaves normally covering the path appeared to have been cleared by a leaf blower, the first time he had ever seen such a thing. In the distance, he saw two men sitting too stiffly on a bench.
“I said, ‘This is odd.’ It’s more like ‘Deliverance,’ ” he said, referring to the movie. “I tried to hustle up with the boys, and that night, my wife showed me the picture.”
A picture of Hillary Clinton in the woods. He had just missed her.
“I’d be interested to see her and chat,” he said, figuring it would happen sooner or later, which was what Carol and Ellen figured too.
They ducked under the limbs of two skinny trees that arched over the path, and after a while, there was a rustling noise, and the sound of people talking in the distance. It was a Saturday afternoon; Ellen had almost always seen her in the afternoon. She had seen Bill at the Starbucks earlier. Maybe she was back. They pressed on, but soon the sounds vanished, and there was just the woods.
“The Cathedral of Firs,” Ellen said, reaching her favorite part of the hike, a swath of evergreens. They stopped and looked around. You could hear a bird or two. You could hear the creak of branches in the wind. They tried to imagine what Hillary would be doing next.
“I think of her as someone who wants to be out doing things, having a goal,” Carol said.
“My niece wants me to invite her to join my book club,” Ellen said, and as they headed into a clearing, the two friends talked about how they had solved all the world’s problems in the woods, even if they had yet to solve their own grief over the election. Seeing Hillary Clinton out here in nature helped, even if it was also unsettling.
“It kind of brings it all home — like, oh. Wait. That’s who lost,” Carol said, and soon, they reached the last part of their hike, a path winding through a marshy area of low shrubs with long yellowy leaves. The leaves looked like uncombed yellowy hair. That was what they saw now, not Hillary.

In last-shot bid, thousands urge electoral college to block Trump at Monday vote

 

In last-shot bid, thousands urge electoral college to block Trump at Monday vote


Washington state elector Levi Guerra, center, at a Nov. 30 news conference calls for members of the electoral college to vote for a Republican “consensus candidate” rather than Donald Trump. (Steve Bloom/AP)
  
Pressure on members of the electoral college to select someone other than Donald Trump has grown dramatically — and noisily — in recent weeks, causing some to waver but yielding little evidence that Trump will fall short when electors convene in most state capitals Monday to cast their votes.
Carole Joyce of Arizona expected her role as a GOP elector to be pretty simple: She would meet the others in Phoenix and carry out a vote for Trump, who won the most votes in her state and whom she personally supported.
But then came the mail and the emails and the phone calls — first hundreds, then thousands of voters worrying that Trump’s impulsive nature would lead the country into another war.
“Honestly, it had an impact,” said Joyce, a 72-year-old Republican state committee member. “I’ve seen enough funerals. I’m tired of hearing bagpipes. . . . But I signed a loyalty pledge. And that matters.”
Such is the life these days for many of the 538 men and women who are scheduled to meet Monday across the country to carry out what has traditionally been a perfunctory vote after most every presidential election.
The role of elector has intensified this year, in the wake of a bitter election in which Trump lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton by a margin of nearly 3  million votes and the revelation of a secret CIA assessment that Russia interfered to help Trump get elected.
Amid the uncertainty caused by Russian influence, 10 electors — nine Democrats and one Republican — asked for an intelligence briefing to get more information about Moscow’s role. Their request was endorsed by John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager.
“The administration should brief members of the electoral college on the extent and manner of Russia’s interference in our election before they vote on Dec. 19,” Podesta wrote Thursday in a Washington Post op-ed.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence said Friday evening that it would not brief the electors, because it is engaged in a presidentially ordered review of the Russian interference. “Once the review is complete in the coming weeks, the intelligence community stands ready to brief Congress” and may release findings, the ODNI said in a statement posted to its website.
Meanwhile, Joyce and the other 305 Republican electors who are supposed to cast their votes for Trump have been subject to intense campaigns orchestrated by anti-Trump forces to convince them that they alone can block the reality-television star from the White House.
Others have targeted Democratic electors, who are supposed to cast votes for Clinton, to persuade them to switch to a more conventional Republican who could also draw enough support from GOP electors to swoop into office.
While there is little sign the efforts will prove successful, the push has unleashed intense pressure on individual electors, who have now been thrust into a sometimes uncomfortable spotlight.
Joyce has received emails from “Benjamin Franklin” and “John Jay” — and a Christmas card that read: “Please, in the name of God, don’t vote for Trump.”
The rancor about the role of electors started early in the campaign. In August, Baoky Vu, a GOP activist in Atlanta, said he planned to resign from the job because he was so morally opposed to Trump. He planned to defer his voting responsibility to someone more willing — an alternate who would be put in place Monday.
After the election, Vu started getting phone calls and emails asking him not to resign. He was asked instead to consider joining a coalition of electors hoping to vote against Trump. He declined.
“I don’t think we should drag this election out any longer,” Vu said. “And can you imagine if the electors overturned the results? If we attempt to change them in any way, you’ve got these far-right elements that are just going to go haywire.”
Mark Hersch, a 60-year-old Chicago-based marketing strategist, joined a group known as the Hamilton Electors, who have been organizing efforts to contact electors and change their minds. Before the election, Hersch said, the most political activism he had ever undertaken was planting a yard sign.
He said he believes the goal to deny Trump seems reachable if not probable. Rather than persuade an entire country, he and his allies must find 37 Republicans willing to vote for someone else, a tipping point at which the responsibility of picking the president would shift to the U.S. House of Representatives. No one knows for sure how many are considering alternate votes; estimates vary from one to 25.
The GOP-controlled House could vote for Trump anyway, but those trying to flip voters say there is still value in taking a stand. Hersch said he was inspired to continue to flip electors by the movie “300,” which depicts an ancient Spartan army’s stand against a Persian force that outnumbered it 1,000 to 1.
“I would like to think we would be successful, but if not, we need to do all we could to prevent this man from being president,” he said. Then he modified a line from the movie: “Prepare your breakfast, and eat hearty, for tonight, we will go to battle. This isn’t 300, but 538.”
That “battle” has intensified as electors draw closer to their convening Monday. Joyce was getting 15 letters a day and 300 emails in the days after Nov. 8, but those numbers quickly increased to 50 and 3,000. Some of them have been form letters, others handwritten.
The letters came from Washington state and from China, stuffed with copies of the U.S. Constitution or Alexander Hamilton’s writing in Federalist Paper No. 68, which states that the meeting of the electoral college “affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.”
On Thursday, Joyce received so many letters that the letter carrier just gave her a U.S. Postal Service bucket filled to the brim.
“I’m sorry this is happening to you,” Joyce recalled the letter carrier saying. While some electors have complained of harassment, Joyce shrugged off the mail and placed it all on a sofa decorated with American flag pillows.
“This is America,” she said in a phone interview. “People have a right to say what they want.” She said most of the messages were thoughtful.
On Friday, she said, her emails became more positive. The messages were from Republicans, thanking her for taking Trump to the finish line of an arduous process.
“How refreshing!” she said.
Although some Democrats (who have in the past five presidential elections lost two in which they won the popular vote) and even Trump himself have questioned the necessity of the electoral college, many opposing Trump have said this election proves just how important it is.
Norman Eisen, a former ambassador to the Czech Republic who served as legal counsel to both the Bush and Obama administrations, began calling electors to explain that their job is not necessarily to certify the results but to have a reasonable discussion over whether the public made the right decision.
For instance, Eisen, who focused on government ethics in Obama’s White House, noted that Trump could be violating a clause in the Constitution that prevents presidents from receiving gifts and funds from foreign governments; it is unclear whether his businesses do because he has not publicly disclosed his tax returns.
In Massachusetts, Republican operative and attorney R.J. Lyman said he didn’t want to harass anyone, so he used his connections to find electors who were willing to chat about the lessons he learned in American history class and at the dinner table. He became one of the few people in the country more willing to talk about Hamilton the man than about “Hamilton: An American Musical.”
The electoral college, he said he tells them, was “not intended to be a rubber stamp.” Otherwise, he said, the Founding Fathers would have tasked the responsibility to a clerk or simply used the popular vote as a way of choosing a president.
“I’m reminding them of their duty to think about their choice in a way that’s consistent with their conscience and the Constitution,” Lyman said.
So far, Lyman said, he has identified 20 electors who might be willing to vote “other than their party pledge.” He couldn’t name more than one publicly but insisted that more were out there.
Earlier this month, Chris ­Suprun of Texas became the first Republican elector in a red state that voted for Trump to declare, in a Dec. 5 New York Times column, that he would not cast his electoral vote for Trump. Suprun voted for Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the primary and said he left behind his wallet on Election Day and thus did not vote in the general.
Nonetheless, Suprun said, he was willing to vote for Trump in the electoral college until the candidate claimed with no evidence that millions of Clinton supporters voted illegally.
Suprun’s public stance has elicited death threats and hate mail, he said.
“As of yesterday, people are calling to say, ‘Get your ass together, or we’re coming for you,’ ” said Suprun, who was the sole Republican elector to ask for an intelligence briefing on Russia. “They are doing it with their own phone number, not even blocking the number. That’s not been surprising — look at what Trump says himself.”
Vinz Koller, a Democratic elector from Monterey County, Calif., said he read Suprun’s column and started thinking about his own role in the college. It inspired him to support a new theory: If he could persuade other Democrats to abandon their Clinton votes, perhaps he and Republicans could agree on a more conventional choice — a la Ohio governor and failed GOP candidate John Kasich — to vote for instead of Trump.
The plan seemed unlikely, he said, but Trump’s candidacy unsettled him so much that he felt he needed to try anything. California is one of 29 states that mandate electors vote for the candidate who won the state, so Koller sued to continue his plan.
“Frankly, this is hard and not something I do lightly,” he said. “I’ve been working in partisan politics a long time, and I don’t like voting against my candidate, but I never thought that the country might be unstable until now.”
On Thursday evening, he found himself in the Library of Congress. Strolling through its stacks, Koller sought a librarian with one request: Can I see the original Federalist Papers?
He looked to see Federalist No. 68, written by Hamilton to describe the need for the electoral college.
“We have been getting a civic lesson we weren’t prepared to get,” Koller said. “They gave us the fail-safe emergency brake, in case the people got it wrong. And here we are, 200 years later. It’s the last shot we have.”

China said it would return a seized U.S. naval drone. Trump told them to ‘keep it.’

 

China said it would return a seized U.S. naval drone. Trump told them to ‘keep it.’


An unmanned U.S. Navy drone. (U.S. Navy/U.S. Navy)
 
The Chinese government said Saturday it will return a U.S. naval drone seized last week in the South China Sea, a step toward defusing maritime tensions between the two Pacific powers. 
President-elect Donald Trump reacted to the news by telling them he doesn’t want it back. “We should tell China that we don’t want the drone they stole back.- let them keep it!” he tweeted Saturday evening.
The comment could prolong one of the most serious incidents between the U.S. and Chinese militaries in recent memory, potentially complicating ties ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
The latest spike in U.S.-Chinese maritime tensions occurred Thursday, when a Chinese submarine rescue ship close to the USNS Bowditch, an oceanographic survey vessel operating about 50 nautical miles northwest of Subic Bay in the Philippines, took possession of the U.S. drone.
The incident occurred within sight of the Bowditch, which tracks the drone as it collects unclassified data on water temperature, salinity and other factors that may affect U.S. naval operations. According to U.S. officials, the Chinese ship refused initial requests from the Bowditch to return the drone.

Why China is militarizing the South China Sea

 
Play Video2:37
China has laid claim to a number of islands in the South China Sea, building airbases on tiny spits of land while installing powerful radar and missile launchers. Here's why. (Jason Aldag, Julie Vitkovskaya/The Washington Post / Satellite photos courtesy of CSIS)
“We have registered our objection to China’s unlawful seizure of a U.S. unmanned underwater vehicle operating in international waters in the South China Sea,” Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook said in a statement.
“Through direct engagement with Chinese authorities, we have secured an understanding that the Chinese will return the [drone] to the United States,” he said.
[Pentagon: Chinese naval ship seized a U.S. underwater drone in South China Sea]
China’s Ministry of Defense on Saturday said they had decided to return the drone in an “appropriate” manner, but did not specify what that meant. 
Yang Yujun, a spokesman for the Ministry of Defense, said in a statement that the Chinese said took the U.S. drone “in order to prevent the device from harming the navigation safety and personnel safety of the ship in the past.”
“The U.S. military has frequently dispatched naval vessels to carry out reconnaissance and military measurements in China’s water. China resolutely opposes this and urges the U.S. side to stop such activities,” he said.The statement, which was published before Trump’s “keep it” tweet, called the U.S. response to the drone’s seizure “hype” that is “inappropriate” and “unhelpful for settling the problem.” Beijing has yet to respond to the president-elect’s latest comment.
Song Zhongping, a Chinese expert on military affairs who works as a commenter for Hong Kong’s Phoenix TV, said the statement was an effort to warn the United States to not deploy this type of vessel in the South China Sea, “Otherwise, we will keep on picking them up whenever we see them,” he said. 
Despite sharp words on both sides, official statements from Washington and Beijing suggest that the two governments are eager to avoid further intensifying tensions at a moment of deep uncertainty in U.S.-Chinese relations after Trump’s election.
Even as China asserts a right to areas of the South and East China seas also claimed by some of its neighbors, it has embarked on an ambitious program of constructing artificial islands, some of which appear to be intended as military outposts.
The U.S. military has conducted repeated shows of force, sailing ships or conducting surveillance flights near disputed areas, while seeking to avoid any serious military escalation with a key commercial partner.
Speaking after the Pentagon announced that the drone would be returned, a U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to comment freely, said that the Obama administration was “glad to get it back and put this behind us.”
“It’s somewhat reassuring that senior leadership in Beijing agreed that this was something that should be returned, regardless of the individual actions of their people at sea,” the official said. It is not clear who authorized the seizure of the drone.
[Photos: China’s rapid island-building continues]
The flap over the drone comes as Trump’s election generates concern among Chinese authorities, with the president-elect questioning long-standing U.S. policy on China and continuing his sharp criticism of Beijing’s trade and monetary policies.
Trump angered Chinese officials when he spoke by phone with the president of Taiwan, a thriving democracy that Beijing considers a breakaway province.
While it is not clear how the Trump administration will handle efforts by China to assert itself in the South China Sea, his stance toward Beijing suggests a hard line.
On Saturday morning, Trump issued a tweet that said: “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters — rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act.”
In Beijing on Sunday, the Global Times, a Communist Party-controlled newspaper known for its nationalist town, poked fun at the mixed messages coming from the United States.
“Before Trump’s generous announcement that he didn’t want the drone back, the Pentagon had already announced publicly that they have asked China to return the ‘illegally seized’ [unmanned underwater vehicle] through appropriate governmental channels,” the paper wrote. “We don’t know, after seeing Trump’s new tweets, if the Pentagon should feel boggled.”
Emily Rauhala reported from Taipei and Luna Lin reported from Beijing.

mainstream Russia views taking hold under Trump

 

Rohrabacher sees his out-of-mainstream Russia views taking hold under Trump


From left, Congressmen Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.), William R. Keating (D-Mass.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) lay a wreath at the site of a terrorist attack in 2000 in Moscow’s Pushkin Square. (Ivan Sekretarev/AP)
  
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) is finding himself newly relevant, after nearly three decades in Washington, as Donald Trump’s presidential win provides his out-of-the-mainstream views on Russia a new foothold.
Last week, Rohrabacher praised the president-elect’s choice of ExxonMobil chief Rex Tillerson to be secretary of state, describing it as a victory in his lonely and oft-criticized struggle to relax Washington’s posture toward Russia.
Tillerson is facing criticism from Democrats and some Republicans over what they view as his too-close relationship with Russia and President Vladimir Putin.
Rohrabacher sees the issue quite differently.
“[Tillerson is] a man who knows the players in Russia, obviously, and knows the nuances you need to make in order to have a successful relationship,” he said in an interview. “I’m happy [Trump] chose Tillerson.”
The representative from Orange County predicted that a softer attitude toward Russia and Putin will sweep into Washington under Trump’s administration — a prospect that is proving exhilarating for Rohrabacher, who was once described in a news account as “Vladimir Putin’s favorite congressman,” after years of having his views on Russia relegated to the fringe.
“This is what a number of [Trump’s] people are all about,” Rohrabacher said. “Now that we have a president who is going to try his best to bring a better, more cooperative relationship with Russia, I think you’ll find more people stepping up to the plate and trying to put out an open hand.”
Rohrabacher, a dark-horse candidate for secretary of state before Tillerson was picked, aggressively defends Trump’s most controversial statements about Russia.
Like Trump, he rejects the FBI’s and CIA’s assessments that Russia interfered in the election to help the Republican win, saying the conclusion reveals only the intelligence community’s inability to abandon Cold War attitudes.
“Most of the people who are so aggressively attacking Russia for everything it does basically have this image that Putin is the same as Stalin, and that is not the case,” Rohrabacher said.
He also has criticized NATO, a onetime Trump target that is considered one of the most successful military alliances in history, as “vilifying” Russia and “trying to get Americans frightened” to increase its own power.
“NATO is trying to justify itself by incredibly exaggerating a Russian threat to Europe,” he said. “The Soviet Union was a priority in the past; now we’ve got to look at radical Islam. The Soviet Union is not the enemy that it was.”
Rohrabacher, 69, declined to comment specifically on speculation that he might be appointed Trump’s ambassador to Russia, saying only that the transition has discussed several possibilities with him. He told Politico on Thursday that he has let Trump’s transition officials know that he would prefer to stay in Congress over serving in the new administration.
Already a frequent presence in the Russian media, Rohrabacher is increasingly a go-to source for U.S. journalists trying to sketch how Trump’s foreign policy might operate — or simply looking for a contrarian voice.
This can have explosive results, as two recent television interviews revealed.
Rohrabacher on Tuesday joined MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” to discuss atrocities in Aleppo, Syria. The interview quickly devolved into a shouting match after host Joe Scarborough, a former House colleague of Rohrabacher’s, accused him of glossing over the Russian bombing campaign’s killing of Syrian women and children.
Rohrabacher argued that the United States needs to keep Russia on its side to fight the Islamic State. Other experts on the show argued that Russia is involved in Syria to prop up President Bashar al-Assad, not to fight terrorism.
“We allied with Stalin in order to defeat Hitler,” Rohrabacher said, undeterred. “Stalin was a horrible man, he murdered millions of people, but we knew Hitler was a bigger threat. Today, the biggest threat is radical Islam to our safety. If we keep trying to focus on all of the faults of Russia so that we can’t work with them to defeat this common enemy, you’re not doing any service to the people of the United States.”
Last Wednesday, Rohrabacher made further headlines after a Yahoo News anchor asked him about Russia’s history of violating citizens’ rights. “Oh, baloney,” he shot back at the anchor, Bianna Golodryga. “Where do you come from?”
Golodryga said she came from the former Soviet Union as a political refugee. “Oh, that’s good — then the audience know you’re biased,” he responded.
Most foreign-policy experts reject the notion that a blanket strategy of greater warmth toward Putin is in the interest of the United States.
“We should be very sober and pragmatic about him,” Fiona Hill, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, said of Putin. “We won’t get any rewards just for being warm and fuzzy. He will see that as purely a sign of weakness.”
Rohrabacher has labored in obscurity for most of his career, but a closer look at the details reveals a colorful and unpredictable character.
A former White House aide to President Ronald Reagan, Rohrabacher was elected to the House in 1988 with help from his old friend Oliver North, a fellow former Reagan aide who was forced to resign after he was implicated in the Iran-contra scandal.
He is famous for having arm-wrestled Putin, then-deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, in the 1990s at a bar during a Russian delegation visit to Washington. Rohrabacher lost to Putin in an instant, the story goes.
Rohrabacher has been criticized for freelancing his own foreign policy. Around the time of his election, he briefly joined a mujahideen unit fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. After he won his race, he illegally entered Burma to meet with pro-democracy students. Against advice from the State Department, he became the first congressman to visit Croatia, in August 1991, after fighting broke out between Croatian secessionists and Serbian militants that summer. Ten years later, the State Department reportedly rebuked him for meeting with Taliban officials at a Sheraton Hotel in Qatar.
Rohrabacher considers these kinds of actions an essential part of his persona, which in his mind lies somewhere between Indiana Jones and a California surf bum. In earlier years, he wrote a handful of adventure-driven movie scripts, including a World War II drama titled “The French Doctoresse.” “I’m going to stay here [in Congress] 10 or 12 years at the max,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “To me, the ultimate nirvana is to be a creative writer and live at the beach.”
Many of Rohrabacher’s relationships in Russia were originally shaped by his involvement in U.S. space policy. By 1992, Rohrabacher — a longtime member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology — was advocating that the U.S. space program save money by purchasing rockets made by the former Soviet Union. He hosted several Russian delegations in Southern California, home to a number of aerospace companies.
Rohrabacher has a history of supporting Russian interests in Congress. Last month, Politico reported that he and his staff used information received from the Russian government to promote removing the name of Sergei Magnitsky, a whistleblowing Russian lawyer who died in jail, from a law barring the Russian officials blamed for his death from entering the United States, along other punishments. During a markup of the bill, Rohrabacher reportedly proposed an amendment to remove Magnitsky’s name from the bill’s title. The amendment did not pass, but critics still accused Rohrabacher of helping the Russians by muddying the waters.
Rohrabacher still chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and emerging threats. He said he remains in contact with Trump’s transition team but is focused on shepherding what he described as a growing group of lawmakers sympathetic to Russia in the House. This may eventually involve ramping up the activities of the Russia Caucus, of which he is one of just a few members.
“You can expect there to be a number of members of Congress who are willing to step up and say that we should quit being hypercritical and attributing hostility and evil to every step the Russians make,” he said.

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