Republican delegation to Russia blows up in Vladimir Putin’s face

| 6:04 pm EDT July 5, 2018
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I’ll admit, it took me a minute to put my finger on what was wrong with the Republican congressional delegation that traveled to Moscow to meet with the Russian government on the Fourth of July. Don’t get me wrong, everything is wrong with this. It’s brazen. It’s ridiculous. It’s unpatriotic. It almost certainly has criminal underpinnings. In fact, under the circumstances, it’s treasonous. But it finally hit me what felt so “off” about the whole thing – and that’s when I realized that this stunt ended up being a big failure for Vladimir Putin.

We all know why this summit happened. Putin wanted to humiliate America by convincing some of its top politicians to spend their own nation’s Independence Day colluding with the Russians in broad daylight. The key word here is “top.” This kind of stunt was only going to be effective if Putin could lure in some big names and influential people.

So let’s take a look at the list of Republicans who took Putin’s bait and joined him in Moscow: Richard Shelby. Steve Daines. John Hoeven. Ron Johnson. Kay Granger. John Kennedy. Jerry Moran. John Thune. This is not a “who’s who” of the GOP. It’s more like “who are these people?” Granger is low-key influential in the House. Shelby has been around forever in the Senate, but he’s a has-been. The rest are anonymous faces. In terms of visibility, these Republicans might as well have fallen off the back of a truck.

Vladimir Putin tried to humiliate America in the most blatant way possible, yet the only American politicians he could land were a bunch of D-list nobodies. Where are the big names, or even recognizable names, from the Republican Congress? They must have all been too scared to marry themselves to Putin, at a time when Robert Mueller is closing in on Trump and his fellow Russian puppets. Unless Putin’s plan was to bring a minor league GOP scout team to Moscow, this has blown up in his face and left him looking, frankly, weak.