Jill Stein's Ties to Vladimir Putin Explained

After Jill Stein announced she would seek the Green Party's nomination for president for a second time, an image of her seated at the same table as Russian President Vladimir Putin has resurfaced.

Stein announced on Thursday that she would run as a candidate, after Cornel West, a philosopher and civil rights activist who had captivated the party faithful, dropped out of the race to run as an independent.

Stein's first presidential run was in 2012, against Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. She also ran in 2016, garnering one percent of the popular vote.

Some have claimed that Stein's relatively strong performance that year, like other third party runs, helped split the left vote, giving Donald Trump the win over Hillary Clinton—though Green Party members contest this, noting Clinton won the popular vote but lost out in the electoral college.

The 2016 election was subject to influence from the Russian state, which weaponized fake social media accounts on social media to foment conspiracy theories. According to NBC, some of those accounts called on people to vote for Stein over Clinton, though there is no suggestion Stein was aware of the interference operation.

Following her latest campaign announcement, many social media users noted the images of Stein seen sitting at a table with Putin and Michael Flynn, Trump's short-lived national security adviser, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, among others.

"Jill Stein is running for president again as a Green Party candidate," Tristan Snell, an attorney, wrote above one of the images, before joking: "And here is Jill Stein meeting with her campaign fundraising team."

"A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump and Putin," another user claimed. "Did you forget 2016 so soon?"

"Every moron in the Green Party needs to remember the company that Jill Stein keeps," Christopher David said.

A campaign spokesperson told Newsweek that Stein "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."

They added: "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 at home."

The event featuring Stein and Putin was a December 2015 gala in Moscow in celebration of the Russian state television channel RT's tenth anniversary. The channel has been banned in several countries for spreading Russian propaganda since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The channel regularly featured Stein during her 2016 campaign. When asked about the dinner by NBC that year, Stein said it was a "shameful commentary" on U.S. media that she had received more air time on Russian news as a third party candidate.

Speaking to The Intercept in 2017, she said the notion that it was an "intimate roundtable" was "mythology," and that Putin and his associates "weren't at the table for very long." Stein said that "nobody introduced anybody to anybody" and that she "didn't hear any words exchanged between English speakers and Russians" due to the lack of a translator.

Stein said that Putin had appeared to make a speech and left immediately after. "Nobody cared to make introductions. This wasn't intended to be a discussion of any sort," she told the outlet.

As well as running in 2016, Stein was West's interim campaign manager until his abrupt departure from the Green Party at the start of October, leaving it without an obvious candidate to nominate next year.

In her announcement, she touted her anti-war credentials and referenced the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas.

Stein pledged to put the "climate emergency agenda front and center in this election"—something that had taken a back seat in West's campaign—and said, "it's time to offer voters a viable alternative to the bought-off politicians who have thrown them under the bus."

Update 11/11/23, 10:14 a.m. ET: This article was updated to include comment from a Stein campaign spokesperson.