I’m going to be upfront here and tell you I don’t know much about Jill Stein. She’s somewhat of an enigma to me. I was curious about her in 2016 just as I was about Bernie Sanders, who was also running. I already knew Donald Trump was bad news. But I also worried that Stein and Sanders might take crucial votes away from Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent and a presidential candidate who was (and still is) superior to Trump in every way.

But if there’s one thing you can say about Stein, it’s that she’s definitely tenacious. She’s run for president in 2012, 2016, and now, in 2024. Along the way, she attracted plenty of attention from the Russians. According to a December 2018 report from NBC News, Russia launched a social media blitz for Stein to help get Trump elected. The Russians did things like post fake tweets, like the one from @woke_blacks, which said “The excuse that a lost Black vote for Hillary is a Trump win is bs. It could be late, but y’all might want to support Jill Stein instead.”

This led the Senate to commission a report, which found the account was a fake, part of the Russian campaign to sway the 2016 presidential election to favor Donald Trump. Stein is not a stupid woman, she’s a Harvard-educated physician, so this makes me think she likely understood this would sway things in Trump’s direction. However, there is no credible evidence to suggest this.

I don’t know. I could be wrong. But she’s trending on social media again. The group Republicans against Trump posted a video of Stein being arrested on the campus of Washington University this weekend as she and others protested the Israel-Hamas war. Republicans Against Trump then asked: The purpose of her campaign is clearly to elect Donald Trump. Who’s funding it?”

That’s a good question, isn’t it? So I did a little digging to try and see if there’s a financial connection between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Jill Stein. In the posts below, the two look rather cozy, as does former NSA director/retired general and nutball Trump crony Mike Flynn. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitri Peskov is also seen seated at the table.

This Newsweek report from November 2023 gave me a good overview of Stein’s possible connections to the Russian president.

“jill stein is running for president again as a green party candidate,” wisecracked attorney Tristan snell above one of the images and then joked: “and here is jill stein meeting with her campaign fundraising team.”

So did I find out if Stein has real connections to Putin? No, I didn’t. But I did find out she likes to sit on both sides of the fence.

A Stein campaign spokesperson told Newsweek that the candidate “attended at her own expense to spread a message of peace and diplomacy” and gave a speech in Moscow “in which she criticized the excessive militarism of both Vladimir Putin and U.S. leaders.”

The spokesperson also noted: “The Senate Intelligence Committee later investigated the trip and found no wrongdoing whatsoever. Dr. Stein’s commitment to diplomacy is more needed than ever and stands in stark contrast to the two warmongering ruling parties, which are driving us toward WWIII [World War III] and draining resources urgently needed here and at home.”

The now-infamous photo depicting Stein and Putin was taken at an event in December 2015 at a gala in Moscow. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the Russian state television channel RT. The channel has subsequently been banned in numerous countries amid claims that it spread Russian propaganda in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

But another thing RT did quite regularly was to feature Stein during her 2016 campaign. Stein, having been asked about the dinner by NBC, noted it was a “shameful commentary” on U.S. media that she was given more air time on Russian news as a third-party candidate. She has also since noted that Putin and his associates didn’t stay long at the dinner and that none of the attendees were introduced to each other. Putin made a short speech and then left, she told The Intercept in 2017.

So I can’t tell you precisely how well she is or isn’t connected to the Russian leader. What I can tell you is the 2024 presidential election could be a rerun of the 2016 one, where the Russians definitely had their sticky fingers involved. And even though I happen to like Bernie Sanders, I do believe he took crucial votes away from Hillary Clinton and we wound up with Trump. Stein could very well wind up doing the same thing to Biden, meaning we could wind up with Trump all over again.

This seems to be what third-party candidates do, even though they have no chance of winning: drive a wedge between the two major parties that ultimately favors one candidate over another.

I don’t have to tell you why that’s a bad idea, do I?

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