DINING WITH THE ENEMY: Stein attended the now in famous dinner with Putin, center right, and Flynn, center left, in Moscow in 2015 but says she was there to challenge both U.S. and Russian military action.
MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/SPUTNIK/AP
TO SOME, Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein was a spoiler last November, pulling liberal voters away from Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. To others, she was a principled truth-teller who offered a necessary critique of a moribund two-party political system.
The debate over Stein’s role in Donald Trump’s victory was revived when her name appeared over the summer in a document request by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is investigating potential collusion between Russia and Trump’s campaign. With that returned long-standing, but unfounded, suspicions that Stein was somehow associated with elements within the Kremlin. Those suspicions stem, in good part, from a photograph of Stein taken in Moscow in 2015, where she was attending a conference. The now-infamous image shows her sitting at a dinner table with Russian President Vladimir Putin and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who is at the center of the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia.