So does Stein, with the benefit of hindsight, have any regrets? “I don’t think so,” she tells me by phone from her home in Lexington, Massachusetts. Decrying “fake news,” citing the “sabotage of Bernie Sanders” and talking up the “tremendous” campaign she could have run with more money, Stein is projecting a Trump-worthy level of defiance. “I consider it a great honor that the party and our prior campaign for president is suddenly being attacked outside of an election season,” she says.
Those attacks aren’t merely sour grapes from a party still reeling from its stunning defeat in November. Some Democrats would like to see Stein hauled in front of Congress to explain mysteries like what, exactly, she was doing at a 2015 Moscow gala thrown by a Russian state-owned broadcaster—the same RT event that got Trump’s former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, in such trouble.
“We're certainly interested in any efforts the Russians made to influence our election,” says California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russia’s alleged meddling in the election. “There have been public reports, I think, that Jill Stein was also in Russia attending the RT function, so we’re going to need to look at any efforts the Russians made through whatever means to influence our elections."
Stein didn’t just attend the gala—dressed in a shimmering silver shawl, she sat at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has barely disguised his glee at the political chaos that what he calls “patriotic” Russian hackers have unleashed in the United States. And she recorded a video from Moscow’s famous Red Square, in which she talked about “the need to rein in American exceptionalism” and replace “a U.S. policy based on domination”—words that sounded like they were ripped from Putin’s talking points.
Stein isn’t sorry about any of it. She says she’d welcome the opportunity to testify before Congress and dismisses the idea that she was a spoiler or that her campaign was co-opted as a tool of Russian influence as Democrats’ “pathetic excuses” for losing the election.
Well she seems nice.
And don;t think that Stein is some outlier among Green Party folks either, get a load of what the Green Party's Michigan Chairwoman had to say:
“In some ways, Trump is one of the best things to happen to this country because look at how many people are getting off their posteriors,” says Sherry Wells, the Green Party’s Michigan chairwoman. “So part of me is giggling.”
Americans, she reasons, would be hypocritical for crying foul over foreign meddling in their political system. “I am so comforted to hear that the United States never interfered in the election of other countries,” cracks Wells, who volunteers that she is fluent in Esperanto.
I personally have never been a fan of third party candidates, and I was quick to dismiss Jill Stein during the 2016 election.
But now I'm beginning to wonder if there is not something a little more subversive going on here.
