Republicam congressman Dana Rohrabacher's Russian connections are coming under increasing scrutiny as US authorities investigate Russian inteference in the 2016 presidential election. Credit:AP At the same time, fellow Republicans - questioning his judgment and intentions - have moved to curtail his power as chairman of the Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats. And back home in Southern California, where Democrats and Republicans alike smell blood, the 15-term congressman is facing his toughest re-election contest in decades, with well-funded candidates from both parties lining up to unseat him. "I feel like I'm in good shape politically," he said breezily during an interview last week, a day before he voted against his party's tax bill. "My constituents couldn't care less about this. They are not concerned about Russia. They are concerned about the taxes on their home. They are concerned about illegal immigrants coming into their neighbourhood and raping people." Nor is Rohrabacher, a self-proclaimed veteran of international intrigue, all that perturbed by the interest of federal and congressional investigators. He said he would talk to them when scheduling allows. The story of Rohrabacher's transformation from Cold Warrior to pro-Putinist is well worn. A vocal Young Republican in the 1960s, he latched onto Ronald Reagan, California's Republican governor, and followed him to Washington and a speech-writing job in the White House. Then came the fall of the Soviet Union and a détente in relations with the former superpower.

Dana Rohrabacher met Assange in the Ecuadorean Embassy and hoped to broker a meeting with Trump and Assange. Credit:AP For Rohrabacher, who claims to have lost a drunken arm-wrestling match to Putin in the 1990s, the era of good feelings never really ended. Rohrabacher has laughed off suggestions that he is a Russian asset, and said in an interview that he did not remember being briefed that the Russians viewed him as a source. The FBI and the senior members of the House Intelligence Committee sat Rohrabacher down in the Capitol in 2012 to warn him that Russian spies were trying to recruit him, according to two former intelligence officials. Rohrabacher claims he once lost to Vladimir Putin in a drunken arm wrestle. Credit:AP "I remember them telling me, 'You have been targeted to be recruited as an agent,'" he said. "How stupid is that?"

And yet, as investigators in Washington scrutinise the Russian interference campaign, Rohrabacher, like an extra in an spy thriller, just keeps showing up - if not quite at the scene of the action, then just off camera. In April 2016, he was in Moscow, accepting a copy of a "confidential" memo containing accusations against prominent Democratic donors that would, months later, reappear in Trump Tower when a Russian lawyer who had reported those allegations to the Russian government, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, sat down with Donald Trump Jr. to deliver a similar document. Last August, he was in London on a quick diversion from an anniversary trip to the Iberian Peninsula to meet Assange at the fugitive's sanctuary in the Ecuadorean Embassy. US intelligence agencies believe Assange acted as a conduit for Russian operatives seeking to release a trove of hacked Democratic emails. Assange denies the accusation, and Rohrabacher hoped to broker a meeting with Trump to allow him to make his case. Then earlier this year, this time on Capitol Hill, Rohrabacher dined with Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Russian central bank who has been linked both to Russia's security services and organised crime. During Trump's presidential campaign, Torshin tried to set up a "backdoor" meeting between Trump and Putin, according to an email that has been turned over to Senate investigators. Rohrabacher asserted that none of the meetings were untoward or inappropriate, given his chairmanship. Veselnitskaya and her allies are fighting the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on Russian officials for human rights abuses, and they deserved a hearing, he said. Russia, he argued, could be a key ally to defeat Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, and under Putin, the Kremlin has undertaken key reforms back home.

"I want to treat Russia as if it is a nation state that deserves to be judged as all other nation states are judged," he said. Rohrabacher said his efforts to connect Assange with the president have been stonewalled by John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff. NBC News reported this month that Mueller's investigators are looking at a 2016 meeting between Rohrabacher and Flynn, whose lobbying for foreign powers has come under scrutiny by the special counsel. Rohrabacher acknowledged meeting Flynn twice, once to discuss computer chip technology and once to discuss a plan advanced by Flynn late last year to build a series of nuclear power plants across the Middle East. He said he did not remember discussing Russia. "All I remember about that meeting is that they were promoting some kind of an idea about having Gulf State countries invest in building nuclear power plants of some kind, I think," Rohrabacher said.

Rohrabacher may shrug off such scrutiny, but on the Foreign Affairs Committee, fellow Republicans have had enough. The committee's chairman, Rep. Ed Royce of California, pushed out Rohrabacher's top committee aide, Paul Behrends, in July amid stories about his ties to pro-Russian lobbyists. Since then, the chairman has taken a more hands-on approach to managing Rohrabacher's subcommittee, a Republican House aide said. Rohrabacher has given conflicting assessments of his own status, most recently saying that he faced few limitations. But in an interview with The New York Times in late October, he acknowledged actions to curtail his activities and said they represented Republican regrets about leaving the gavel to someone who would not "just go along and get along with whatever the State Department wants." Loading "What happens with our committee is, if there is anything positive to say about Russia, it is trash-canned," he said.

New York Times