Costa Mesa Congressman Dana Rohrabacher continues to make headlines far beyond the boundaries of his district, getting coverage this month in the San Francisco Chronicle after claiming the Charlottesville violence was part of a left-wing scheme and in the Wall Street Journal for being rebuffed in his effort to talk to President Donald Trump about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The 15-term Republican has long worn his iconoclastic reputation with pride. A surfer and former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, Rohrabacher has distinguished himself by leading efforts to liberalize federal marijuana laws and by calling for friendly relations with Russia.

But the congressman has been getting more media attention than usual this year. Headlines since July have included meetings with Russian officials, asking a NASA official if there was ever civilization on Mars and for becoming the first congressman to meet with Assange since the controversial figure took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012.

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Dana Rohrabacher asks NASA scientists about ancient life on Mars and social media eats it up Rohrabacher’s heightened profile comes at a time when he could receive the first significant challenge to his reelection. His seat has been targeted by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and he’s already drawn nine challengers who have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Following his Aug. 16 meeting with Assange, Rohrabacher said the WikiLeaks chief continued to vehemently deny that Russia was involved with leaking controversial emails from the Democratic National Committee during last year’s presidential campaign. He said Assange had shared information with him, but declined to detail what it was.

“I have some information to give the president before I give information to anyone else,” he told the Register that night. U.S. intelligence agencies have expressed “high confidence” that Russia originally hacked the emails and relayed them to WikiLeaks. Those leaks are part of ongoing federal investigations.

Rohrabacher reached out to White House Chief of Staff John Kelly last week in a phone call “apparently aimed at resolving the probe of WikiLeaks … through a pardon or other act of clemency from President Donald Trump,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

However, according to the report, Kelly told Rohrabacher the proposal “was best directed to the intelligence community” and did not relay Rohrabacher’s message to Trump.

Asked about the congressman not getting through to the president, Rohrabacher spokesman Ken Grubbs said, “The congressman is patient, knowing the president has had a few other major matters on his mind.”

Did Rohrabacher, one of Trump’s staunchest defenders in Congress, consider the Wall Street Journal story accurate?

“His only objection to the Journal’s story is being called ‘pro-Russian,'” Grubbs said via email “He sees his work as being in the interests of the United States of America.”

However, Grubbs did not respond to requests for comments in the same email exchange about the Chronicle story, in which the reporter interviewed a bare-footed, guitar-strumming Rohrabacher at his Costa Mesa home.

Rohrabacher said “left wingers” were behind the racially-tinged violence in Charlottesville last month, according to the article. An anti-racism counterprotester was stuck and killed by a car allegedly driven by a white nationalist at the melee.

“It was a setup for these dumb Civil War re-enactors,” Rohrabacher says in the story. “It was left wingers who were manipulating them in order to have this confrontation.”

Politifact.com researched the allegation and declared it “Pants on Fire” — wholly false — but not before reaching out to Grubbs for evidence supporting the claim.

“Grubbs told us the congressman saw a FoxNews.com article in which Jason Kessler, the organizer of the ‘Unite the Right’ white nationalist rally, says ‘he voted for Obama and was involved in Occupy Wall Street,’ ” according to Politifact.com. However, the FoxNews article offers no evidence Democrats were behind the gathering, Politifact.com notes.

Several of Rohrabacher’s Democratic challengers — as well as the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — quickly jumped on Rohrabacher’s Charlottesville claim.

“It is deeply disturbing that Congressman Dana Rohrabacher struggles to identify white nationalists, particularly after their actions in Charlottesville resulted in the death of an American citizen,” said DCCC spokesman Drew Godinich. “These views are repugnant. They are un-American. It is 2017, not 1861 … Any member of Congress that hesitates to condemn white supremacists has no business serving in the House of Representatives.”

This story has been updated to clarify that Rohrabacher used the phrase “left wingers” — rather than Democrats — to describe those he thought were behind the Charlottesville violence.