A former high-level employee for the Green Party’s 2016 presidential nominee, Jill Stein, says Senate Intelligence Committee officials have requested the campaign provide it a series of documents, BuzzFeed reported late Monday afternoon. The Senate Intelligence Committee is the top legislative body responsible for investigating Russia’s influence in the 2016 presidential election.
Dennis Trainor Jr., one of Stein’s former communications directors and managers, told BuzzFeed that campaign employees used his personal cell phone to facilitate multiple appearances for Stein on RT News, an international, English-language media company funded by the Russian government.
In October, Twitter banned the media company from advertising on its website after American political officials, scholars, and journalists insisted that RT intentionally tried to influence the results of the 2016 presidential election by reporting misleading or blatantly false information. RT has long been considered an effort to disseminate pro-Russia propaganda in the West, and was forced to register last month as a “foreign agent,” allowing the Department of Justice to closely monitor its finances and external communications.
Trainor told BuzzFeed that he believes Stein will comply with the document requests, but that he will likely first seek legal counsel. He added that Stein will likely post the documents submitted to the Senate committee on her own website “to show complete transparency and kind of wage her own war against … what I imagine she thinks is an overblown investigation into collusion.”
