State Capture on the Potomac
Russian influence over the Trump administration is ghastly and unprecedented
(Representative Luna [in white] with [to her right] Russia State Duma deputy Vyacheslav Nikonov, Molotov’s grandson, plus four other sanctioned Russian parliamentarians. The Duma voted for Russia’s genocidal ‘annexation of several Ukrainian oblasts and Crimea, which no UN member state has recognized.)
In a sign of the times, the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov, architect of Stalin’s infamous pact with Hitler, is leading a Russian parliamentary delegation visiting Washington, DC this week.
Their host is representative Anna Paulina Luna, an arch-MAGA US air force veteran who was elected for Florida’s 13th congressional district in 2023.
Luna’s grandfather was Heinrich Mayerhofer, born in 1926 in Fürstenfeldbruck, Bavaria. An electrician by profession, he emigrated by ship from Bremerhaven to Montreal in 1954, entered the US in 1959 and filed naturalization documents in California the next year. As a young man, Mayerhofer served in the Nazi army, or Wehrmacht: you can see him in uniform here.
So the granddaughter of a Nazi, who appears to have falsely claimed Jewish heritage, is hosting the grandson of history’s most notorious Nazi ally in the Capitol.
The Trump administration is also meeting today with an undisclosed list of Russian officials at the US Institute for Peace, a non-profit founded under Reagan in 1984 which Trump is currently seeking to rename after himself.
Needless to say, this is not a good look for the United States. It is also a symptom of a far deeper problem: this US administration is showing signs of state capture.
What does this mean? It means Moscow doesn’t just have allies in this White House, as they did in the first Trump administration. Senior figures are actually pursuing Russia’s agenda from official positions in the US government.
Let me give you three recent examples. Just this week the US Department of Justice reached a $1.2 million settlement with Michael Flynn, the former national security advisor to Trump who, as part of the Mueller report on Kremlin interference in the 2016 US election that Trump won, pleaded guilty in 2017 to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador.
In other words, one of the key orchestrators of Russia’s mischief has not only been pardoned but received a US government settlement for wrongful prosecution. This move serves to whitewash Russia’s malign activity, which has already changed the course of US history and done enormous damage to American democracy.
The Trump administration has also eased some sanctions on Russia, including via a one-month waiver for oil sales to India. They have included many pro-Kremlin ‘new media’ outlets in White House briefing pools, including one funded by Russia Today employees who were charged by the Department of Justice in 2024.
Threats from Russia, whose war of conquest against Ukraine has now lasted twelve years, were downplayed in the latest US National Security Strategy, released in December 2025. As part of fraudulent ‘peace talks’ with Moscow, Trump’s envoys are reportedly pursuing business opportunities in Russia.
Beyond these headlines, many senior figures in the Trump administration are known to have close ties to Russia or extremely Russia-friendly views. In the wake of Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Vice President J.D. Vance was the US senator with the most consistently and unapologetically pro-Moscow stance, which has carried over into his current role. He is set to visit Hungary a few days before forthcoming elections next month which Viktor Orban — a longstanding Kremlin ‘Trojan horse’ in the EU and NATO that Vance has strongly supported — seems on course to lose to reformer Peter Magyar.
Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles has wide-ranging ties to Russian oligarchs and Russia-connected businesses and lobbyists. FBI director Kash Patel was Trump’s point person in reframing Russian interference as a ‘hoax’. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who started her political career as a Democrat, has been a notorious apologist for Russia and its proxies, including Syria’s Assad.
This group does not control the whole administration: explicitly pro-Russian orientations or connections are found among perhaps one-third of those in senior positions, especially among acolytes of chief ideologue Steve Bannon, who served a four-month prison term in 2024 for contempt of Congress. But this group exercises enormous influence: we have no idea how they may be serving Moscow’s interests when the klieg lights are off — on issues that have so far escaped scrutiny.
