A Trump administration official’s plan to host a sanctioned Russian nationalist in the U.S. in the coming months is raising alarms across Washington.
NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine, a former three-term Republican congressman from Oklahoma, extended an October invitation for his counterpart, Dmitry Rogozin, to visit NASA headquarters in Houston in early 2019.
Rogozin is an ultranationalist politician with a record of stark racism and homophobia who is under American sanctions, which typically bar him from entering the U.S. over his 2014 role, as deputy prime minister, in Moscow’s annexation of Crimea.
Bridenstine told the Russian state news agency TASS in mid-October that he had succeeded in temporarily waiving sanctions on Rogozin so that he could visit Houston and speak at Rice University, Bridenstine’s alma mater, sometime after the new year.
Lawmakers from both parties and former national security officials are crying foul, saying the invitation undermines U.S. sanctions and would give a government-approved platform to an anti-American bigot.
“It absolutely sends the wrong message to lift sanctions, even temporarily, for the purpose of inviting him to speak to students at one of our nation’s premier universities,” said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leader of the committee’s investigation into 2016 Russian election interference.
“This is appalling,” said Evelyn Farkas, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia in the Obama administration. “It’s utterly inappropriate given who he is and the fact that he is on our sanctions list.”
A Dec. 7 TASS report said that Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, is planning for Rogozin to visit in “early 2019,” but neither the U.S. nor Russia has announced a specific date.
Several factors make Rogozin’s invitation, which has received little attention in the U.S., potentially more controversial.
For one, there is no apparent pressing national security reason for the Russian space chief to visit the United States.
A senior Obama administration official said that during that administration, if U.S. officials needed to meet with their sanctioned Moscow counterparts, they would do so in third countries, rather than waive sanctions to let the sanctioned Russians into the U.S.
And an invitation to speak at a prestigious American university is an honor that the government has not bestowed on other officials it has sanctioned.
The invitation to speak at Rice is even more striking in light of Rogozin’s history as a provocative anti-American ultranationalist.
After co-founding the Rodina coalition in 2003, Rogozin got the party banned from regional elections in Moscow two years later over ads that compared migrants from the north Caucasus region to “garbage.”
Earlier that year, several Rodina members of parliament signed a petition calling for Jewish organizations to be banned from Russia, an initiative that Rogozin disavowed.
“Wow,” said Heather Conley, a Russia expert and director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, in response to the invitation. “Rogozin is well known for his very destructive public comments about the U.S. What is difficult for me to understand is what is to be gained for giving a sanctioned individual a public platform.”
A spokesman for Rice, Doug Miller, referred questions to NASA. “Rice has not invited Rogozin to the campus,” Miller said. “I don’t know what NASA is working on. … As far as we know, there’s no plan for Rogozin to visit Rice if he visits Houston.”
Bridenstine, whom Trump tapped to run NASA last September, has sought to highlight his rapport with Rogozin.
He met with the Roscosmos chief in Moscow in mid-October, and tweeted a video in which he called U.S.-Russia space collaboration “a charge we have to keep.”
Russia experts say that Rogozin’s party, Rodina, was part of a Kremlin strategy of so-called controlled opposition, which encourages extremist opposition parties to create foils for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ruling party and to float controversial ideas to see how they play with the Russian public.
In 2008, Rogozin made his alliance with Putin official, accepting a post as Russia’s ambassador to NATO, where he hung a portrait of Joseph Stalin in his office and made a point of thumbing the eye of the Western alliance.
“The Americans and their allies again want to surround the den of the Russian bear?” he tweeted in 2010, in response to U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile system to Romania. “The bear will emerge, and kick them in the ass.”
In 2011, Rogozin became deputy prime minister in charge of overseeing the Russian defense ministry, including its cyber warfare operations, which in recent years have frequently targeted the U.S. and its allies.
In March 2014, he was one of seven senior Russian officials sanctioned by the Obama administration for their roles in the annexation of Crimea.
A year later, Rogozin tweeted that the West would “fall under the weight of Islamic State and gays” rather than from Russian aggression, according to Agence France-Presse.
Rogozin also has at least one connection to the Kremlin’s efforts to subvert American politics.
In December 2015, he met with a delegation of National Rifle Association officials invited to Russia by Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty in December to conspiring with a different Kremlin official to infiltrate the U.S. political system.
Meanwhile, Rogozin continues to needle the United States, making headlines last month for joking that Russia would verify NASA’s moon landings actually occurred.