Jill Stein Isn’t Sorry The Green Party candidate has no regrets, even as Democrats accuse her of helping elect Donald Trump and cozying up to Vladimir Putin. By Ben Schreckinger
| June 20, 2017 Had a few thousand votes in key Midwestern states gone to Hillary Clinton instead of Jill Stein, many on the left believe, America might be having a very different conversation today.
Instead, Democrats are still fuming about the role the Green Party nominee may have played in electing Donald Trump—who as president has celebrated the coal industry, promised to pull the United States out of the world’s most important climate agreement and refused to even say whether he believes global warming is real. All of that should be anathema to a party whose founding principles include a commitment to “ecological wisdom.”
So does Stein, with the benefit of hindsight, have any regrets? “I don’t think so,” she tells me by phone from her home in Lexington, Massachusetts. Decrying “fake news,” citing the “sabotage of Bernie Sanders” and talking up the “tremendous” campaign she could have run with more money, Stein is projecting a Trump-worthy level of defiance. “I consider it a great honor that the party and our prior campaign for president is suddenly being attacked outside of an election season,” she says.
Those attacks aren’t merely sour grapes from a party still reeling from its stunning defeat in November. Some Democrats would like to see Stein hauled in front of Congress to explain mysteries like what, exactly, she was doing at a 2015 Moscow gala thrown by a Russian state-owned broadcaster—the same RT event that got Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in such trouble.
“We're certainly interested in any efforts the Russians made to influence our election,” says California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russia’s alleged meddling in the election. “There have been public reports, I think, that Jill Stein was also in Russia attending the RT function, so we’re going to need to look at any efforts the Russians made through whatever means to influence our elections."
Stein didn’t just attend the gala—dressed in a shimmering silver shawl, she sat at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has barely disguised his glee at the political chaos that what he calls “patriotic” Russian hackers have unleashed in the United States. And she recorded a video from Moscow’s famous Red Square, in which she talked about “the need to rein in American exceptionalism” and replace “a U.S. policy based on domination”—words that sounded like they were ripped from Putin’s talking points.
Stein isn’t sorry about any of it. She says she’d welcome the opportunity to testify before Congress and dismisses the idea that she was a spoiler or that her campaign was co-opted as a tool of Russian influence as Democrats’ “pathetic excuses” for losing the election.
Unlike Flynn—whose initially undisclosed $45,000 RT payout landed him in hot water with congressional investigators—Stein has said she was not offered any speaking fee and that she declined the Russian network’s offer to cover her travel. She tells POLITICO that she was accompanied by a single aide and that her presidential campaign paid for the travel, which included a stop in Paris. The campaign’s Federal Election Commission reports from that period show modest disbursements to multiple airlines, including Air France, and a travel agency.
Stein says that to her knowledge, neither she, her campaign nor the Green Party have taken money from Russian entities: “I am certainly not aware of any ties whatsoever, financial or otherwise, to the Russian government.”
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/06/20/jill-stein-green-party-no-regrets-2016-215281
