× Expand Photo credit: Our American Revival Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) with former American Conservative Union and NRA President David Keene, Russian gun lobby agent Maria Butina and Deputy Russian Central Banker Alexander Torshin in 2015 at a Presidential campaign event for Walker’s PAC Our American Revival.

Here’s a question we never expected to be asking in 2018: Could Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker be a secret Russian agent?

We are truly living in bizarre political times when right-wing Republicans—including both Walker and President Donald Trump—are linked to a young, female Russian agent criminally charged with covertly infiltrating conservative American political organizations to advance the interests of the Russian government and its intelligence operations. But then we never expected to be disgraced before the entire world by Trump publicly sucking up to Russian President Vladimir Putin by accepting what he called Putin’s “incredibly strong and powerful denial” that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 U.S. election and then, on his own, attacking U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies for investigating and bringing charges against Russians and Americans accused of subverting democracy.

Right-wing Republicans going back to Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy and California Congressman Richard Nixon in the 1950s practically invented anti-communism. All of us who grew up during the Cold War with images of Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pounding his shoe at the U.N. and threatening to bury us and Republican President Ronald Reagan denouncing the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire are completely amazed at how many Republicans now support Trump kissing the backside of Russia’s latest murderous, totalitarian president.

GOP Soft on Russia

Trump’s collusion with Russia is now right out in the open, but Wisconsinites just learned the first Republican presidential candidate to be targeted by one undercover Russian intelligence operation was their own governor. Because Walker’s inept presidential campaign was so brief, many people forget he was actually the frontrunner in some early polls based on one speech he gave in Iowa. That tells you the value of early polls.

But it was enough to attract the attention of Maria Butina, a 29-year-old Russian accused of using her status as an American University political science student as cover to engage in conspiracy as an unregistered Russian foreign agent with direct ties to Putin’s government and intelligence services. Butina’s “handler” in Russia was Alexander Torshin, a Russian central banker and former senator close to Putin. For those of us who got our understanding of nefarious Russian espionage in America from episodes of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” in our youth, think of Butina as Natasha and Torshin as Boris Badenov.

Walker was considered such an important catch for the Russians that both Butina and Torshin had their pictures taken with him at the April 2015 convention of the National Rifle Association in Nashville, Tenn. In a Russian language blog post, Butina said she was impressed that Walker actually spoke a few words to her in Russian and displayed absolutely no hostility toward Russia in their encounter. Walker, one of the few presidential candidates in modern times without a college degree, acknowledged taking one semester of Russian at Marquette University. If this were a conspiracy theory being promoted on “Fox & Friends,” this would be when Fox News’ Steve Doocy would sarcastically wonder how a college dropout became fluent enough from a brief introductory course to communicate decades later with a Russian spy in her native language.

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The Mole in Madison?

The governor’s office dismissed Walker’s smiling photo with the accused Russians as the routine shot candidates pose for all the time, but Butina gave the encounter much greater significance; she traveled to Waukesha three months later to be present for Walker’s presidential campaign kickoff.

Walker’s friendliness toward Russians also resulted in a $1.5 million campaign contribution to his “Unintimidated-PAC” from a U.S. company owned by Len Blavatnik, a Ukrainian-born billionaire who made his fortune in Russian oil and gas through his direct ties with Putin. Blavatnik also contributed $250,000 to “Our American Revival”—another Walker political fundraising organization. Unintimidated-PAC returned $1.2 million to Blavatnik’s company after Walker’s presidential campaign fizzled. That’s when Butina moved on to support Trump.

What Butina described as Walker’s lack of public hostility toward Russia didn’t really begin until recently when the governor, like many other Republicans, has refused to criticize Trump’s fawning over Putin, the president of the world’s most powerful ideological opponent of American democracy. As a presidential candidate, Walker was a standard anti-communist, anti-Putin, right-wing Republican attacking Democrats as Putin’s dupes. Now that a Republican president has become a Putin dupe, Walker’s changed his tune.

When we can no longer trust Republicans—except for a handful dying from terminal illness or no longer running for office—to publicly stand up against direct threats to American democracy from communist Russia, the most important question is: Why? Does Putin, a former KGB agent, have compromising videotapes of every prominent Republican doing disgusting things with prostitutes in Moscow?

Or, were Comrade Walker and all those other so-called leading Republicans successfully recruited by real-life, covert, “The Americans” missions by Russian intelligence operatives to join sleeper cells in anticipation of the final communist takeover of the United States under Trump, Russia’s most “useful idiot”?