Was Dana Rohrabacher Outed As A Russian Spy? Well, Not Exactly But...

Dana Rohrabacher's Orange County district is the reddest in what is now purple Orange County. It stretches along the coast from Seal Beach, Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach through Costa Mesa and Newport Beach to Laguna Beach, Aliso Viejo and Laguna Niguel. Romney had beaten Obama handily there-- 54.7% to 43.0%-- but last year Hillary edged Trump-- 47.9% to 46.2%. That's a pretty narrow margin to hang too many hopes on for a seat flip. It's it's not the only hope Democrats are counting. The other is Rohrabacher himself. He's a crackpot and it'd finally catching up with him.

The hash in Afghanistan is heavily opiated

After he was first elected in 1988 he skipped congressional freshman orientation so he could go play dress-up with the muhjadeen in Afghanistan. That's him playing Taliban (on the right in the photo above). Recently he claimed Trump wanted him to be Secretary of State. And everyone knows he's Putin's favorite member of Congress. But neither Trump nor Putin offered him a job. Oh, wait... it turns out Putin did want to hire him. Remember when the tape cam out this week of Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy telling GOP House leaders that Putin was paying Rohrabacher? At first McCarthy and Ryan denied it-- fake news, they said. But it wasn't. It was on tape. At which point McCarthy and Ryan suddenly changed their story-- it did happen they had no choice but to admit... but it was a joke. Oh, ha ha ha.

But the joke was on the GOP yesterday when the NY Times reported that in 2012 the FBI had warned the clueless Rohrabacher that he was being recruited as a Russian spy. "[K]nown for years as one of Moscow’s biggest defenders in Washington and as a vocal opponent of American economic sanctions against Russia," the FBI has been watching Rohrabacher for years because of his close connections with Russia.

In a secure room at the Capitol, an F.B.I. agent told Mr. Rohrabacher in 2012 that Russian spies were trying to recruit him as an “agent of influence”-- someone the Russian government might be able to use to steer Washington policy-making, former officials said.

Mr. Rohrabacher said in a telephone interview on Thursday that the meeting had focused on his contact with one member of the Russian Foreign Ministry, whom he recalled meeting on a trip to Moscow. “They were telling me he had something to do with some kind of Russian intelligence,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. He recalled the F.B.I. agent saying that Moscow “looked at me as someone who could be influenced.”

Law enforcement officials did not think that Mr. Rohrabacher was actively working with Russian intelligence, officials said, rather that he was being targeted as an unwitting player in a Russian effort to gain access in Washington, according to one former American official. The official said there was no evidence that Mr. Rohrabacher was ever paid by the Russians.

Other senior members of the House Intelligence Committee were forced to remind Rohrabacher that Russia is an adversary of the United States, something he's still never accepted. Rohrabacher has denied that Russians had worked to help Trump win the presidency and when's not denying it, he's making excuses for it, as though there's nothing wrong with what the Kremlin did. "Did they try to influence our election? We have tried to influence their elections, and everybody’s elections," the OC crackpot told the L.A. Times 2 months ago. "The American people are being fed information that would lead them to believe that we need to be in a warlike stance when it comes to Russia."

Rohrabacher was already facing what is shaping up to be the most difficult campaign of his 28-year career in Congress-- a race some of his own colleagues would rather not see him run, given how much money the party may have to spend on his behalf. After largely avoiding difficult re-elections in his Republican-leaning district along a stretch of the Pacific Ocean in Orange County, he finds himself in the Democrats’ cross hairs.

There are 4 mediocre candidates running against Rohrabacher so far-- ex-Republican Harley Rouda, Laura Oatman, Boyd Roberts and some guy with pictures of him with guns all over his website, Anthony Zarkades. Rumors are very strong that a heavy hitter, stem cell scientist and entrepreneur Hans Keirstead, is being brought in to give Rohrabacher a serious run for his money.