Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein says she and her campaign have finished turning over hundreds of documents to the top congressional committee investigating Russian election interference in 2016 — but she is refusing to hand over some documents that she argues are protected by the Constitution.



In a telephone interview with BuzzFeed News, Stein said many of the documents she and her campaign recently sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee were emails with RT, a Russian state-funded media network that US intelligence agencies have dubbed a Kremlin propaganda outlet. Stein, who made several appearances on RT during the 2016 presidential race, said the emails were largely about setting up interviews.

“I doubt it reached a thousand documents, but it was certainly hundreds of basically emails, mostly communicating with RT producers about when we were going to show up and what time we needed to be where,” Stein said.

Stein, however, has refused to hand over some documents from two of the six categories about which the committee inquired. One of those categories, according to a March letter from Stein’s lawyer to the committee’s bipartisan leadership, was for communications with “Russian persons,” while the other asked for “all communications related to the campaign’s policy discussions regarding Russia.” Both categories asked for documents dated from Feb. 6, 2015, when Stein announced her interest in making her second presidential bid, to present.

Stein — who announced last week that she had finished turning over documents to the committee — says she did turn over materials related to her 2015 trip to Moscow to attend a conference, where she was photographed sitting at the same dinner table as Russian President Vladimir Putin and future White House national security adviser Michael Flynn. “The materials include records of the campaign’s payment for my trip to Russia as well as longstanding Green Party policy objectives of promoting dialogue and diplomacy as essential alternatives to war, nuclear confrontation, and climate catastrophe,” Stein said in the statement on Thursday.

“The dinner was a real nonentity,” Stein told BuzzFeed News Friday. “Although the Russians, I’m told, are capable of speaking English, they did not, and we were not acknowledged, we were not introduced; there was absolutely nothing that went on at that table,” Stein said, adding that “there were about four words translated between” Flynn and Putin. Stein said that conversation was along the lines of "How are you?" "Okay."

Both North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr and Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the committee’s respective chair and vice chair, have referenced Stein’s trip to Russia while speaking about their interest in her campaign. Flynn, who was ousted from the White House just 24 days into the presidency, has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about communications with the Russian ambassador and agreed to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading a criminal investigation into potential collusion between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.

BuzzFeed News reported first in December that the committee had taken an interest in Stein. Earlier in April, BuzzFeed News reported that she had turned over documents in response to the committee’s request late last year.

“Can I point out that when I was in Russia, they actually refused to identify me as a candidate?” Stein said. “So even though my campaign had requested that I be introduced and listed in the program and so on as a candidate, although I was not the nominee at the time, Russia refused to do that.”