Rohrabacher said the Russian president beat him quickly in an arm-wrestling match. | AP Photos Rohrabacher-Putin in an arms race

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is shedding new light on Vladimir Putin as a “strongman.”

The California Republican recalled in an interview the time he drunkenly arm-wrestled the Russian president in the early 1990s at a Washington pub - and lost.


“We got down to these arm wrestling matches and I ended up being paired off with Putin. And he’s a little guy, but boy I tell you he put me down in a millisecond, he is tough. He was just, bing! His muscles were just unbelievable,” Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) said to Southern California radio station KPCC in an interview on Thursday.

Rohrabacher said Putin at the time was serving as deputy mayor in St. Petersburg. Putin had been visiting D.C. with a delegation and stopped by Rohrabacher’s office and the congressman invited them for a game of football.

“Well, I talked to them and I asked them, ‘by the way I’m spending the weekend here any of you want to play some American football with me and my buddies?’ And three of them said ‘yeah, sure,’” Rohrabacher said.

Among the players was Scooter Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and “a bunch of my right-wing friends,” Rohrabacher said.

“We all ended up going to the Irish Times pub afterwards and we were having a little bit too much to drink I guess, but anyway we started arguing about who won the Cold War, et cetera and so we decided to settle it like men do when they’ve had too much to drink at the pub,” the congressman said.

Rohrabacher also acknowledged Putin’s “tough guy” image and while he has said he doesn’t see intervention in Syria as part of the U.S.’s national security interests, he supported of working with Putin for a diplomatic solution.

“You know he’s a tough guy and he’s supposed to be a tough guy, that’s what the Russian people want, but that’s no reason that we shouldn’t try to work with him,” Rohrabacher said.

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