Tulsi Gabbard’s Campaign Is Being Boosted by Putin Apologists
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is being underwritten by some of the nation’s leading Russophiles.
Donors to her campaign in the first quarter of the year included: Stephen F. Cohen, a Russian studies professor at New York University and prominent Kremlin sympathizer; Sharon Tennison, a vocal Putin supporter who nonetheless found herself detained by Russian authorities in 2016; and an employee of the Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT, who appears to have donated under the alias “Goofy Grapes.”
Gabbard is one of her party’s more Russia-friendly voices in an era of deep Democratic suspicion of the country over its efforts to tip the 2016 election in favor of President Donald Trump. Her financial support from prominent pro-Russian voices in the U.S. is a small portion of the total she’s raised. But it still illustrates the degree to which she deviates from her party’s mainstream on such a contentious and high-profile issue.
Data on Gabbard’s financial supporters only covers the first three months of the year. In that time, her campaign received just over $1,000 from Cohen, arguably the nation’s leading intellectual apologist for Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Tennison donated to Gabbard no fewer than five times, eventually reaching the per-cycle individual contribution limit in mid-March. Tennison and her group, the Center for Citizen Initiatives, have long worked to improve U.S.-Russia relations, in part by organizing junkets to the nation both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. She’s also been an outspoken Putin supporter, dubbing him a “straightforward, reliable and exceptionally inventive man” in a column last year. Tennison wrote that column in spite of her detention in Russia two years earlier, when she was accused of attempting to covertly advance U.S. foreign policy interests in the country.
Gabbard also got a $1,000 contribution from “Goofy Grapes,” who listed his or her occupation as “comedian” and employer as Redacted Tonight, a current events comedy show on Russian state-backed broadcaster RT. That show’s host, comedian Lee Camp, told The Daily Beast that the person who made the donation “is no longer an active member of Redacted Tonight. And separately, it is company policy to not donate to political campaigns.”
Camp, for his part, routinely promotes the Russian government line on major world affairs, most notably the invasion of Ukraine, political unrest in Venezuela, and the Syrian civil war.
To the extent that those donors toe the Kremlin line on issues such as Syria, they’re more squarely in line with Gabbard’s own views than those of any other Democratic presidential candidate. As a member of Congress, she has personally met with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and cast doubt on widely accepted reports that he deployed nerve gas weapons against his own people.
Gabbard has also been one of the few prominent Democrats in the country to downplay the findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. The report found no evidence of a conspiracy by the Trump campaign to support that meddling. But it did provide extensive details of that malicious influence campaign, and of the Trump administration's efforts to impede the special counsel’s investigation.
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