There’s talk going around Resistance circles that when seven U.S. lawmakers, all Republicans, met with top Russian officials in Moscow over the Fourth of July recess, they didn’t even bring up Russia’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. They also, according to the story, steered clear of other touchy issues like Russia’s annexation of Crimea and intervention in Ukraine.
“They had no interest in confronting Russian officials over their election interference, preferring instead to let bygones be bygones,” wrote MSNBC’s Steve Benen on the network’s MaddowBlog. “There was no reason for these Republicans to give the Kremlin a pass on its misdeeds, but they did. There was no reason for the GOP lawmakers to exclude election meddling and the fate of Crimea from their discussions, but they did that, too.”
“In another time, Republicans would have labeled somebody who did this ‘Hanoi Jane’ or ‘Baghdad Jim,'” tweeted Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank.
“Have we forgotten what the Russians did in the 2016 election?” asked former CIA Director John Brennan on MSNBC. “Have we forgotten what the Russians did in Crimea?”
The answer is no. In the last few days, Sens. John Thune and Ron Johnson, two of the GOP lawmakers who went to Russia, talked to me about what was discussed there. Their accounts — of conversations dominated by talk of the 2016 election, plus substantial discussion of Crimea and Ukraine — differ radically from the Resistance narrative.
[Also read: GOP senator open to revising Russia sanctions after Moscow trip]
First, there was a lot of discussion, some of it heated, about election interference. Both lawmakers said the Americans did not hesitate to bring up the 2016 election, and the subject took up much of their time in sessions with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, Federation Council Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Konstantin Kosachev, former Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak, and other officials.
“We delivered, I thought, a very tough message from the Article 1 branch of our government that we’re very serious about the issue of election meddling, and they’ve got to stop it,” Thune, the third-ranking GOP leader in the Senate, said. “We really hammered, especially, on the election meddling. We got into Syria, we got into Ukraine, we got a little bit into nuclear weapons issues, but by and large, I would say without question the issue we hit the hardest was the issue of election meddling.”
“I would say all of us at some point in time alluded to it to a certain extent,” said Johnson, who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation. “I don’t know what percent was spent on the back-and-forth on elections, but it was a large percentage — it might have been more than 50 percent of the time we were talking was about election interference. It was covered.”
The Russians were ready to argue. Russia interfering in a U.S. election? they asked. What about the U.S. interfering in Russian elections? Congress allocates lots of money to promote democracy in Russia, the Russians noted more than once.
“They spent all kinds of time pushing back,” Johnson said, “saying you want evidence of interfering in politics? What about the money you actually appropriate to do just that? They had plenty of pushback.”
Of course, the Russians admitted nothing, claiming there was no evidence to prove the election-meddling accusations against them. But everyone knew the U.S. intelligence community has determined that Russia tried to influence the American election, and that the Russian effort could not have happened without the knowledge of top Russian leaders. Still, the Russian leaders talking to the U.S. delegation did not concede anything.
“I wasn’t expecting anybody to confess anything, and of course they didn’t,” Johnson said. “They just pushed back. They said you guys do way worse than we have done.”
As is always the case with Russia, there was a lot of complaining about U.S. sanctions. The senators reminded the Russian officials that the minimum condition for even the possibility of loosened sanctions is no interference in the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.
“You want a better relationship? Obviously we can’t see any evidence of interference in the 2018 elections,” Johnson said. “That case was made time and time and time again. There could be no misunderstanding that the basic table stakes of ongoing discussions, improving the relationship, is to stop interfering in our elections. We could not have made that more plain.”
“Hearing it delivered loudly and clearly from a bunch of Republican senators that election meddling is a very, very serious issue that matters to us, and if there’s any hope that any of these sanctions get lifted, that they’ve got to demonstrate some change,” added Thune. “We were there to find out if there’s a path forward to a more responsible relationship between our two countries, starting with their quitting interfering in our democratic process.”
The lawmakers — in addition to Thune and Johnson, there were Sens. Richard Shelby, Steve Daines, John Hoeven, John Kennedy, and Jerry Moran, in addition to Rep. Kay Granger — also talked about Russian military aggression. Though the largest single topic was election meddling, there was also time spent on Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, and INF treaty and nuclear weapons issues.
At one of the stops, some of the senators also met with representatives of a Russian human rights group.
Just getting to Moscow was difficult for the lawmakers; Russian authorities made it difficult to get visas. Johnson, in his role as subcommittee chair, had tried to organize a trip to Russia in January. The trip was to have included Johnson, Republican Sen. John Barrasso, and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. The Russians reportedly denied a visa to Shaheen.
“I met with Ambassador [Anatoly] Antonov in December,” Johnson said. “He said the whole purpose was to start improving our relationship. But then he brought up the fact that there just might be a problem with one of the members of the delegation not being granted a visa. But he said we can take care of that if you let members of the Duma into America. In other words, they were playing games. So unfortunately I had to cancel that trip, because we were not going to let them play that type of game.”
This time, the trip was organized by Shelby, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Johnson was not granted a visa until a few days before his scheduled arrival in Moscow.
Some critics have suggested it was improper — MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow called it “inexplicable” — for the delegation to include only Republicans. First, lots of congressional delegations are made up of just one party or the other. And second, while it is probably always better for an international delegation to be bipartisan, it’s also clear that if the trip had been bipartisan, the Russians, well-versed in American political conflicts, would say that the Democrats on the delegation were angry about Russian election interference only because they believe it led to Hillary Clinton’s loss. For a group of Republicans to stress to them that election interference is a big deal to all members of Congress was probably a valuable experience.
That the trip happened at all was due to the efforts of U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman. The former governor of Utah, ambassador to China, and Republican presidential candidate has urged U.S. lawmakers to come to Russia. “He thinks it’s important that we have direct dialogue with these guys,” Thune said. “He wants us to have a clear-eyed assessment of what the differences are here, but also try to figure out a path forward on how we can have a responsible relationship, how we can get the Russians in a different place.”
Last Wednesday, Huntsman invited the lawmakers to the Fourth of July event at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. It was a big, crowded, star-spangled event. Some critics in Resistance world suggested there was something unpatriotic, or at least suspicious and strange, about American lawmakers being in Moscow on U.S.’ Independence Day. The Washington Post’s Milbank called it the “worst possible place to celebrate July 4.”
The lawmakers were unfazed. “I know we were criticized — how can you be there on the 4th of July?” said Johnson. “I kind of like promoting freedom and the birth of our Declaration of Independence. I kind of liked doing that in Russia, in front of Russians.”
