The Russia watchA not-so-fond farewell to Dana Rohrabacher; running out of time to kill the Russia probe; Bill Browder’s war against Putin, and more

A not-so-fond farewell to Dana Rohrabacher, Putin’s best friend in Congress (Anne Applebaum, Washington Post)
It took a while for Orange County, Calif., to count all the mail-in votes, but officials there did it. The result: Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) will be leaving Congress after 15 terms in the House. So as he leaves the stage, let’s spend a little bit of time saying goodbye to Rohrabacher, the soon-to-be ex-congressman from California’s 48th District. For Rohrabacher is, in his way, quite an important symbolic figure: He is the living, breathing embodiment of the moral corruption that has seeped into a part of the Republican Party foreign policy establishment — the part that long ago stopped caring about U.S. leadership of the democratic world.
He started his career as a Reaganite. But Rohrabacher long ago up gave pretending that he has any interest in freedom, or democracy, or even the Western alliance. For much of the past decade, he has served as the voice of foreign autocrats in Congress. Egged on by Natalia Veselnitsksaya — the Russian lawyer who met with Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, and offered them “dirt” on Hillary Clinton – Rohrabacher fought, for example, against the Magnitsky Act and its successor, the Global Magnitsky Act, the legislation that targets human rights violators and kleptocrats from Russia and elsewhere with individual sanctions. At one point, he arranged to show an infamous Russian propaganda film, smearing the Magnitsky Act and its main promoter, Bill Browder, in Congress. When Rep. Edward R. Royce, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, blocked him from doing so, Rohrabacher’s office instead promoted the film’s showing at the Newseum.