Just How Compromised Is The GOP By The Russians?

There's increasing evidence that the Russians are pulling the GOP’s puppet strings.

LEFT: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Photo by Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images. RIGHT: Russian President Vladimir Putin. Photo by Contributor/Getty Images.

For years, critics of Vladimir Putin have been warning that the Russians have taken over parts of the Republican Party. They raised the alarm as Republicans defended the Russian leader, parroted clear Kremlin talking points, and became mules for disinformation campaigns.

In recent weeks, that criticism has shifted to include not just Republicans who have left the party, including former representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but current GOP members. Recently, two powerful Republican chairs of the House Intelligence Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee warned openly about how Russian propaganda has seeped into their party and even made its way into speeches on the House floor.

Other members are now even openly questioning whether some of their fellow officials have been compromised and are being extorted. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) suggested in a recent interview that the Russian spies may possess compromising tapes of some of his colleagues. It’s unclear where he’s getting his information or how accurate it is.

And then there’s this: According to a report by Politico, a number of European politicians were recently paid by Moscow to interfere in the upcoming EU elections by Russians pretending to be a “media” outlet called “Voice of Europe.” The Kremlin-backed operation used money to influence officials to take pro-Russian stances. Authorities have conducted some money seizures and launched an investigation into which members of the European Parliament may have accepted cash bribes. This in turn raises an important question for our own politics: Are the Russians doing the same with U.S. politicians, directly or indirectly?

This piece walks through the three types of compromise—disinformation, extortion, and bribery—to give a sense of what we know and what we don’t really know, and, importantly, where we should be on our guard. As this summary will show, from the 2016 election till now, there’s enough Russian smoke now to assume there is a fire, one that compromises not only the integrity of our own system of elections, but the safety and security of the free world.

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Duped.

Over the past year, we have witnessed two distinct kinds of Russian propaganda in action. Both use our own elected officials and intelligence processes to amplify and even weaponize disinformation.

The first kind originates online through Russian-backed internet channels. Information operatives begin spreading false rumors, for example about Ukraine, that then get repeated within right-wing silos before reaching willing purveyors of it within the halls of Congress.

A chief culprit in Congress is Georgia’s Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Among the Russian-originated false narratives she has uplifted is the patently false claim that Ukraine is waging a war against Christianity while Russia is protecting it. On Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Greene even claimed, without evidence, that Ukraine is “executing priests.”

Where would Greene have gotten this wild, concocted notion? We don’t have to look far. Russian talking points have included this gaslighting narrative for some time. The twist, of course, is that, according to the International Religious Freedom or Belief Alliance, it is the Russian army that has been torturing and executing priests and other religious figures, including 30 Ukrainian clergy killed and 26 held captive by Russian forces. The Russians have also targeted Baptists, whom they see as U.S. propagandists, according to an in-depth Time magazine piece on the violence and death directed toward evangelicals.

The Congressional propaganda mouthpieces for Russia aren’t limited to the U.S. House. Over in the Senate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance was also recently accused of spreading Kremlin-backed disinformation about Ukraine, this time over spurious allegations that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy siphoned U.S. aid to purchase himself two luxury yachts.

That false claim, which is easily disproven based on boat registries, began on a YouTube channel with just a handful of followers, according to a report by Slate. From there, a site called “DC Weekly” picked up the story. With an innocuous and official-sounding name, the “DC Weekly” story got picked up by other outlets and run as if true. 

But DC Weekly is not at all what it appears to be. As Slate noted,

DC Weekly is not some kind of alternative newspaper or community blog; Clemson University researchers Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren argued in a report in December that the website was likely created to share fake news created by Russian state actors. The site is populated with A.I. content, has clearly fake authors, and has been partially hosted on a server in Moscow.

From there, the false but damaging rumor circulated among right-wing circles until it got absorbed into the mind of Sen. Vance. Once again, on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room, Vance repeated Russian-originated disinformation. Speaking about his fellow Congressmembers, Vance said that “there are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty, why? So that one of Zelenskyy’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”

A second vector for disinformation comes even more directly from Russia. This one is particularly insidious because it leverages our own intelligence services to create veneers of credibility for their lies. 

A prime example of this was the use of an informant named Alexander Smirnov to spread false claims about the Bidens taking bribes from Burisma.

Smirnov made the claims to his FBI handler, who per protocol created a written recording of that claim. But opponents of the Bidens used the mere existence of the written report as grounds to allege that the bribes had actually occurred. 

To understand how unorthodox and dangerous this is, imagine the FBI interviewing and recording someone who is obviously a bit unstable and non-credible. That person swears he was abducted by aliens, but the FBI puts the recording into storage. Years later, someone in Congress goes on Fox and claims the FBI has evidence of the existence of aliens and the Biden administration is covering it up.

That sounds insane, but it’s essentially what happened with the Bidens and the Burisma bribe story. It demonstrates how merely hearing something from an informant doesn’t make it true, and writing it down in a report doesn’t change anything. U.S. intelligence is highly reluctant to allow opportunistic politicians to see such reports precisely because they might intentionally conflate the existence of the report with the facts underlying it.

In the case of Smirnov and the alleged Burisma bribe, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), who chairs the Oversight Committee, along with GOP propagandists like Sean Hannity at the Fox Network, blew the fact of the report up and made it seem like it was credible and real, rather than fabricated by a Russian disinformation mule. Smirnov was later arrested and indicted for making false statements to the FBI, and he has admitted that his information about Hunter Biden was passed to him by Russian sources.

Russia is now keenly aware of how easy it is to sow confusion, mistrust, and outright lies by managing to plant false stories, whether through the internet or through an intelligence source, with those willing to exploit them for their own political gain. While this is a rampant problem within the GOP, finally some Republican leaders are calling it out.

Heading into a crucial vote on Ukraine aid, Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH), who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, laid the problem out in a startlingly frank way. “We see directly coming from Russia ... communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor," Turner said on CNN’s “State of Union” Sunday talk show in early April. “There are members of Congress today who still incorrectly say that this conflict between Russia and Ukraine is over NATO, which of course it is not," he added as an example.

Rep. Turner was not alone. Just a week before, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the GOP chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee, blasted some in his own party for their support of  Vladimir Putin. “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base,” McCaul told Puck News.

As the Washington Post reported,

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.”

McCaul was then asked which Republicans he was talking about specifically, and he responded that it was “obvious”—before staff insisted that the details of names be off the record.

Kompromized?

The accusation that Russians are presently extorting and blackmailing U.S. politicians into supporting Russia’s agenda has some broad appeal. It would help explain some mysteries, including why people like Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) suddenly is no longer as supportive of Ukraine as before and constantly kisses the ring of Donald Trump these days—after presciently saying in 2016 that the GOP would destroy itself if it nominated him. 

The problem has been that these accusations aren’t supported by much evidence. That means that political extortion by the Russians is either not a very prevalent practice, or it’s so effective that no one dares expose it. Either way, we’re left without much to go on.

The Russian word kompromat came into common parlance around the time that Buzzfeed published a salacious story about another intelligence report back in early 2017. In that instance, the author, a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele, was concerned Russia had compromising data on the soon-to-be president, Donald Trump.

That report never wound up being substantiated, and its sources and funding came into question as well. But intelligence agencies are in general agreement that obtaining kompromat is standard practice by Russia, and someone like Trump could have been an easy mark considering the company that he kept (e.g. Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell) and the projects he was involved with (e.g. the Miss Universe contest).

Lately, the notion of kompromat emerged once again, this time not from Democratic-paid outfits but from within the GOP itself. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) is one of the more “colorful” characters within the GOP, primarily known lately for being one of the eight members who voted to oust former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and even for getting into public jostling and shouting matches with McCarthy.

Rep. Burchett made a startling claim recently on a podcast interview with radical political commentator Benny Johnson. Burchett asserted, without providing any specifics, that “good conservatives” were voting for some “crazy stuff” because foreign spies had compromised them. He described a situation where a member of Congress might be at a bar and be approached by a "very attractive" person:

“Next thing you know, you're in the motel room with 'em naked, and next thing you know, you're about to make a key vote. And what happens? Some well-dressed person comes up and whispers in your ear, 'Hey man, there's tapes out on you.'”

This sounds a bit far-fetched and Hollywood movie-like, but Burchett was serious. He elaborated, “The old honeypot. The Russians do that, and I’m sure members of Congress have been caught up.” He continued, “What do they do? It’s human nature. And they know what to get at, you know, if it’s women, drugs, booze, it’ll find you in D.C., and in most elected offices.”

It isn’t clear if this is all in Rep. Burchett’s imagination, which is a distinct possibility and may account for a lack of serious reporting on this claim. HuffPost followed up on Burchett’s accusations with an interview, and Burchett wouldn’t back down from his claims. But when asked for specifics and names, he retreated into general principles of privacy. Said Burchett, “You as a member of the media understand confidentiality, and I appreciate that, and I am going to keep that confidential unless those people tell me otherwise.”

That again isn’t much to go on, admittedly, and until he says who “those people” are, we may never know who he is referring to or how to track this any further. But his claim does dovetail with another rather strange podcast outburst by a former GOP member of the House, Madison Cawthorn.

The young former Congressman said something he clearly shouldn’t have. In March of 2022, Cawthorn alleged that he had witnessed other members of Congress, who were supposedly leading anti-drug campaigns, doing key bumps of cocaine right in front of him. He claimed also that he had personally been invited to attend private orgies by other House members.

It’s important to note that the Congressmembers who were in the same circle as Cawthorn were the far-right, pro-Putin Freedom Caucus, of which Cawthorn was a member. When news of Cawthorn’s statement began to circulate, the Freedom Caucus went into defensive mode, demanding that Cawthorn elaborate on who exactly he was talking about. The chair of the caucus, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), asked Cawthorn to speak to him about the allegations, while then-minority leader Kevin McCarthy quickly blasted the comments as “unacceptable.” Cawthorn ultimately walked the allegations back privately in meetings, according to McCarthy and other GOP leaders.

Not long after he made these remarks, however, and as if on cue, photos and stories of Cawthorn acting inappropriately toward women and a video of him feigning gay sex with a friend emerged. That video reportedly had been passed to an anti-Cawthorn group called American Muckrakers PAC by a “former supporter” of Cawthorn’s, and it did significant political damage. Cawthorn believed he was being intentionally targeted, and he lost his primary narrowly that same month.

To be sure, none of this adds up to a very strong case that there is actual Russian kompromat at work in the halls of Congress, despite Burchett’s insistence and the story of Cawthorn’s fall from favor within the Pro-Putin Freedom Caucus. Unless and until someone comes forward with actual names and evidence, this remains just rumor and unsupported accusations.

Bought?

There has always been some focus on, and criticism of, the Trump family’s financial ties to Russia. Within the GOP, it was a point of common knowledge and discussion, so much so that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy even joked, on the day after news broke that the Russians had hacked the emails of the DNC, “There’s two people, I think, Putin pays. [Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” 

This joke is not without some truth. Russian elites bought many properties from Trump, with wealthy buyers, including 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses, investing nearly $100 million in Trump Properties as of 2017, according to an investigation by Reuters. And that’s a conservative count.

Then there’s Trump’s one-time mansion in Palm Beach Florida, which a Russian billionaire named Dmitry Rybolovlev paid $95 million cash for in 2004—then razed to the ground only a few years later and divided the property into three lots. Trump earned a $50 million premium for that sale, having paid $41.35 million for it in 2004. That’s a hefty cash profit and a lot of money to exchange hands for no apparent reason, other than perhaps Rybolovlev wanted to hide money from his wife in their divorce. (Interestingly, FAA records show Rybolovlev’s plane landing in many of the places where Trump was campaigning in 2016, sometimes just hours after campaign events had started. To date, no one has explained the coincidences, but the men claim to have never met each other and deny there was anything unusual going on.)

The Trump Campaign itself had scores of interactions with the Russians after Vladimir Putin attempted to influence the 2016 campaign by undermining our elections and denigrating Hillary Clinton as a candidate. And while the Justice Department did not find evidence of explicit coordination with the Russians by the Trump Campaign, Trump had welcomed foreign Russian assistance far beyond the norms of any candidate.

After Trump won the election, Russian-connected individuals attempted to purchase influence with his presidency, according to a report by Open Secrets. For example, Andrew Intrater, who is a cousin of sanctioned Russian oligarch and Putin pal Viktor Vekselberg, donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration, gaining him individual access to many of Trump’s events. Intrater owns Sparrow Capital, a firm closely associated with Renova Group owned by Vekselberg. 

By no small coincidence, Intrater was also a high five figures donor to disgraced ex-House member George Santos’s campaign, and Intrater remains a big donor to Republican causes and committees, especially in the state of New York.

Intrater’s company also transferred one million dollars to “Essential Consultants”—the same company controlled by Michael Cohen that made payments to Stormy Daniels, if you can believe it. 

It isn’t clear what if any influence Russia-connected people like Intrater exert in exchange for the money they provide. But as the investigations and seizures of funds in Europe from Russian-backed operations show, the Russians are not averse to using money to buy favor and pro-Russian policies among European Parliament members. There is absolutely no reason they shouldn’t attempt to do the same in the U.S., where it is actually so much easier to accomplish. 

After all, direct cash donations from Russian elites associated with Putin’s oligarchs, especially in the amounts we are seeing with people like Trump and Santos, would produce a major scandal in almost any other Western democracy. That our system of politicking and electioneering permits so much dark money would no doubt be irresistible to Putin.

So is anything being done to investigate possible Russian influence buying? We can’t know for sure. But there are some interesting clues out there.

For example, back in 2022, federal agents raided U.S. properties of Vekselberg and left with boxes of materials. The U.S. then seized his properties in 2023, valued at $75 million. It isn’t clear what information the FBI has gathered from those actions, but Vekselberg remains under U.S. sanctions and stands accused of fraud and money laundering, including influence purchasing.

When the Justice Department does have evidence of foreign corruption against a sitting member of Congress, it hasn’t hesitated to bring charges. In recent months, it brought indictments against two Democrats, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Rep. Henry Cuellar, for various financial crimes associated with foreign governments. Whether the government is building a case against those within the Vekselberg sphere of influence and intends to bring charges remains unclear.

One thing is certain, however. Russia is actively working through various means to undermine our elections, sow division, and destroy our democratic processes. Thankfully, we are now seeing a sea change within the GOP as the blatant parroting of Russian propaganda by certain Republicans has grown too obvious to ignore any longer. 

This could pave the way toward more bipartisan rejection of Russia’s goal as we saw in the Ukraine aid bill recently. And it could also help limit cries of “witchhunts” and “partisan prosecutions” should any politicians on the take from the Russians ever be held to account for it.