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“I suspect that, for our people, Sanders looks like the mad professor from ‘Back to the Future,’” says Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, who teaches future government workers at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, in Moscow. “Bernie’s socialist credentials is exactly the hot-button, divisive issue that Russia will seek to use to cause chaos,” says Polymeropoulos. I always said to Americans, ‘Your brilliant future is our horrible past.’ We collapsed into nothing because of Communism, and now this is the dream that Sanders is offering-and a big part of your country is following him into the abyss.” If Sanders secures the nomination, warns Polymeropoulos, the retired CIA officer, who worked to counter Russian interference after 2016, this is exactly the kind of attack you can expect to see from Russian bots. “The things Sanders says even Russian communists would be too scared to say. “It’s like a knife in the throat,” he went on. “I don’t think anyone really respects or values Sanders here,” Migranyan told me. Perhaps more notably, he’s also a close friend and former classmate of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Over the weekend, trying to make sense of what Russians might be thinking about Bernie Sanders, I also called Andranik Migranyan, who used to run a Russian government-funded think tank attached to the Russian mission to the U.N. The mainstream and the media support him and will do anything that helps Trump win, including supporting Sanders.” “He shares our ideology and has shown as much sympathy to Russia as was humanly possible. “Our favorite is Trump,” Yurgens says of how both the Russian elite and mainstream society view the American president. Yurgens, who once told me that the Kremlin sees Trump as “our wrecking ball,” believes that the Putin regime is hoping for a second Trump term, as does Pavlovsky.

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Sanders wasn’t the only Democrat in the Senate to vote against the measure, and though Sanders never explained his nay vote, fellow Dems suggest that it was because a free trade provision had been tucked into the legislative package. (Khanna later walked those comments back.) Others recall that Sanders voted against the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on Russians who had been suspected of violating the human rights of a Russian lawyer who died in a Moscow jail under mysterious circumstances. Some cite representative Ro Khanna’s remarks at the recent Munich Security Forum, where Khanna, one of Sanders’s top surrogates, said that a President Sanders would keep Ukraine and Georgia, two former Soviet republics, from joining NATO. After all, Russia, which loves intervening abroad, has a far easier time doing so when the U.S. Some observers point to Sanders’s foreign policy positions, like his commitment to non-interventionism, as being potentially beneficial to Moscow. “This Russian support for Bernie is multifaceted, multilayered, and in line with the traditional active measures playbook,” says Marc Polymeropoulos, a recently retired CIA agent who, after the 2016 election, was tasked with pushing back on Russian covert operations around the world. This time around, it appears that Moscow is still focused on Sanders. The disclosure sowed chaos at the party’s convention and helped to disenchant many of Sanders’s supporters. The correspondence, which we now know to have been pilfered by Russian intelligence agencies when they hacked the DNC’s servers, revealed that the Democratic Party was trying to thwart Sanders’s ascent in the 2016 primaries. In July of that year, WikiLeaks and the GRU hacker Guccifer dumped some 20,000 internal emails from the Democratic National Committee. In 2016, Russian state media, which often serves as a barometer of Kremlin sentiment, strongly backed both Sanders and Donald Trump-while trashing Hillary Clinton, whom it cast as committed to starting a war with Russia. The report didn’t specify what the Russians are doing to help, but if it’s true that they are, it would not be the first time they’ve sought to assist Sanders in his bid for the Democratic nomination. After the Post story, Sanders issued a strongly-worded statement, telling Vladimir Putin to “stay out of American elections, and as president I will make sure that you do.” government officials briefed Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign that the Kremlin was trying to aid his run for the White House.

On Friday, the Washington Post broke the news that, a month ago, U.S.