A Washington Bulwark Against Putin Is Being Rocked by Internal Strife. Is It Simple Dysfunction — or Something Worse?

The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, better known as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, is one of those Cold War-era Washington relics that acquired a new relevance after Russia invaded Ukraine. But this year, the staff has been convulsed by internal strife that has nothing to do with the mission of promoting human rights.

It’s an odd turn of events that leaves Kremlin critics worried that office dysfunction has distracted an anti-authoritarian bulwark at a crucial moment — and has others wondering whether something more sinister is behind the troubles at a storied Beltway institution whose advocacy for democracy in eastern Europe has been loathed by Moscow since Communist days.

Those foes may have enjoyed the news cycle week when a leaked memo from the Commission’s current, GOP-appointed staff director accused his Democratic-appointed predecessor of improperly helping Ukraine, leading to embarrassing headlines. Compounding the sense of chaos, the former staff director, who remains at the Commission because power rotates between House and Senate members every two years, says it’s retaliation for his own complaints about the successor’s management.

Now, even as their job of defending democracy in Europe is suddenly an all-consuming issue again, staffers have been asked to sit for lengthy interviews with an outside law firm that’s supposed to get to the bottom of it all.

It makes for a dangerous moment. Long a bipartisan pillar, the Commission has lately acquired enemies closer to home: Legislation introduced last year by Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs and cosponsored by MAGA figures including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz would zero out funding for the organization.

At least some people in the anti-Putin orbit smell a rat. Anything that damages the Commission “would be exactly what the foreign agents of Vladimir Putin and other human rights violators would like to see happen,” Thor Halvorssen, the CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, told me. “It’s the old cui bono — who benefits?”

On paper, the proximate issue feels a long way from that kind of geopolitical intrigue: It involves dueling professional misconduct complaints against Kyle Parker, who led the staff when the Commission was chaired by Democratic Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, and Steven Schrage, who took over after the chairmanship rotated to Republican South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson last year.

But the more explosive context involves politics — on both sides of the Atlantic.

Parker, the Democratic-appointed former staff director, is viewed as a hero by human-rights campaigners as someone who was “essential” to passing the Magnitsky Act targeting Russian human-rights abusers, according to Bill Browder, the financier who led the push for the law. Browder told me Parker was “probably the most effective anti-Putin person in Congress.” Moscow apparently agrees: Parker’s name is on a list of Americans banned from the Russian Federation; in 2018, when Vladimir Putin told then-President Donald Trump at a summit that the Russian government wanted to interrogate several Americans, Parker was one of them.

Schrage, the director since GOP Rep. Wilson took the chair last year, is a Cambridge Ph.D. and former State Department official with a very different recent history when it comes to Russia-related headlines. In 2020, before coming to the Commission, he published a lengthy piece on Racket.news, the Substack run by Matt Taibbi, the journalist known for inveighing against the Washington-blob foreign policy consensus prevalent at organizations like Helsinki. Schrage’s piece blasted the alleged FBI “Russiagate” conspiracies against Trump and his first National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn. He accused a group of shadowy intelligence figures he dubbed the “Cambridge Four” of being at the center of the scheme.

In a historically bipartisan redoubt of Capitol Hill, it’s an unusual credential, to say the least.

Not that any names were mentioned when the issue first surfaced. On Nov. 17, staffers received a letter from the Commission’s four leaders — Wilson, the chairman; Cardin, the co-chairman; and Democratic Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen and Republican Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker, the ranking members — alerting them that “we are in receipt of various allegations against senior staff of inappropriate actions and statements that may have adversely affected the Commission workplace and other potential improprieties” and announcing the outside investigation.

When staff sat for hours-long interviews with investigators, they were asked about complaints running in at least two different directions: Some against Schrage, others against Parker. Many of the questions involved comparatively familiar personnel allegations: High-handedness, insubordination, hostile workplace environments, bullying. Though it consumed time internally, it didn’t get much notice elsewhere.

Then, last week, The New York Times reported a much more colorful set of accusations against Parker: He was under investigation for transferring $30,000 of tactical equipment to Ukraine, possibly in violation of foreign-agent registry laws; donning Ukrainian military insignia on trips to the war zone; and representing a possible “counterintelligence issue” that should be referred to the FBI. (For good measure, the Times also reported on a video of Parker urinating on a Russian hat.)

The allegations against Parker were part of a long Nov. 1 memo from Schrage, which I also reviewed. It has the feel of a kitchen-sink dossier. It includes odd details (like Parker allegedly picking a Turkish election-monitoring destination because of its breakfast options) as well as serious ones. It generally paints Parker as a dangerous loose cannon who represents a whole host of liabilities for his bosses. “A full investigation of security issues will require referral to federal agencies,” it said. An accompanying letter atop Wilson’s signature recommends firing him.

The dossier cites a 2019 arrest after Parker tried to bring a knife into his Congressional office building, something that was first reported last week by my colleagues Erin Banco and Nicholas Wu. And it also cites, without many specifics, alleged racism and sexism during Parker’s tenure as staff director. One of the attachments is a memo from Parker’s Democratic predecessor, who served when then-Rep. Alcee Hastings led the Commission, urging Cardin not to retain him because “he does not share the values of inclusion and respect.”

The headlines about Parker’s Ukraine coziness landed with a thud at the Commission’s headquarters in the Ford House Office Building and among the broader universe of pro-Ukraine partisans, who found the framing awfully strange given that the United States is on Kyiv’s side. “I think it’s a bunch of bullshit, quite frankly,” said Orest Deychakiwsky, who worked at the Commission from 1981 until his retirement in 2017 and knows Parker well. “These guys targeted Kyle, from my point of view.”

Parker, a 48-year-old father of eight whose wife hails from Kharkiv, angrily disputed the portrait of himself as a security risk or problematic manager last week. Most of his travel to Ukraine was on his own nickel, and some of it involved trying to get his in-laws out safely. The equipment he transferred — like range-finders for snipers — was legal to export and included items purchased on Amazon. He never passed himself off as a soldier. As for the 2019 arrest, charges were never filed; Wicker, who led the committee at the time since Republicans then controlled the Senate, met with Capitol Police, reviewed video, and determined that it had been a mistake, something confirmed to me by a Capitol Hill source familiar with the incident but not authorized to speak for attribution.

“I was impressed with the power of what it means to be smeared in the most influential newspaper in the world,” Parker told me this week. “Within a few hours, the story had been repeated in newspapers throughout the world ... What hurt the most was when my 13-year-old son found the story online and came to me worried, saying, ‘Dad, they’re saying you’re a Ukrainian spy.’”

As for the hat, Parker told me it was an emotional response to what he saw in Ukraine: “From the safety of the Washington suburbs, it’s impossible to understand the fear of the early months of full-scale war. Russian forces were executing Ukrainian civilians in suburban Kyiv and dumping their bodies in mass graves. Russian artillery was turning whole cities to dust. You had to see it with your own eyes and, if you did, it broke something inside you.”

But Parker’s most incendiary response, in a statement last week to POLITICO, was that the complaints weren’t really about him at all. In Parker’s telling, the dossier was a response to his own complaints against Schrage, a litany of claims from colleagues that he began documenting earlier in the 2023 and put into writing via a Sept. 11 memo to Commission leadership. Entitled “Helsinki Commission in Crisis,” that document accused the staff director of a generally more mundane variety of “misconduct against the majority of the commission’s staff, including me” — high-handedness, bullying, control-freakery and other types of alleged bad-boss behavior that you don’t have to travel to Ukraine to witness.

Schrage did not respond to requests for comment. The offices of the Commission’s four Congressional leaders also did not comment. With the outside law firm’s findings due soon, leadership appears determined to tamp down controversy.

Many people in and around the Commission, though, find the idea of Schrage being out to get Parker quite credible. At a staff meeting after the Times report, he was accused of being the leak, according to several people familiar with the event, something he denied.

Parker is not without his detractors — they say he can be an infuriating subordinate and weirdly territorial on behalf of the bipartisan Senate half of the Commission leadership — but is broadly popular with colleagues and collaborators across the aisle. (He’s an independent). “Kyle Parker is the gold standard of congressional staffers,” one senior GOP defense staffer told me. “Every foreign affairs staffer should strive to be like Kyle. He is a patriot, and it’s a travesty he is being distracted from his duties because of this phony complaint.”

Schrage, meanwhile, is a more inscrutable character, someone who has not won a lot of staff affection yet also hasn’t publicly lived up to the most hysterical predictions from folks who only knew his Russiagate views. The Commission continues to hold hearings, send delegations to events like last month’s Munich Security Conference, and put out statements like last month’s sharply worded release declaring that “whatever the claims of Russian authorities or the exact cause of his death, Alexei Navalny was murdered.”

But multiple sources in and around the Commission also tell me they’ve sensed a fall-off in energy, possibly due to the tensions. “When Ukraine advocates are thinking about ways to get more information to Congress, the Helsinki Commission has been crippled by this ridiculous infighting,” said Steven Moore, a former Republican staffer who in 2022 relocated to Kyiv to launch the Ukraine Freedom Project to support the country’s efforts to defend itself.

Given the history of the Commission, that’s a particular tragedy. Founded following the east-west Helsinki Accords of 1975, the organization was intended to investigate compliance with the pact’s groundbreaking human rights provisions. The work of the Commission became a sore issue for the Soviet Union, as staff used their perch to organize hearings, conduct investigations, and expose mistreatment of dissidents.

“It’s a commission that I think has really stood out for maintaining a consistent, values-based approach for dealing with the region,” said David Kramer, the executive director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas and a former member. “It has, admirably, gotten under the skin of a lot of authoritarian leaders in the region and been an advocate for citizens who have been victims of authoritarian regimes. It has been a shining light on the Hill for years.”

Even as American politics have divided over Ukraine, the Commission’s four congressional principals pride themselves on bipartisan camaraderie. There’s been very little daylight between them on the question of wanting Ukraine to win.

Yet the Commission’s bonkers org chart may not work in the America of 2024, no matter how well the four chieftains get along. While the chairmanship switches between House and Senate every two years, leaders from one chamber aren’t fully empowered to remove top staffers hired by the other, leading to conflicts where the divide can be more between houses than parties. It’s a recipe for dysfunction even when there’s no malign intent.

And, of course, in 2024, fewer and fewer people are willing to believe there’s no malign intent.

Sure, stories of alleged corner-office martinets or staff-level cowboys are legion in Washington. But when it’s a Michael Flynn defender battling an anti-Putin stalwart, the more prosaic explanations seem insufficient.

“It’s either weird and sinister or dramatically weird and dramatically sinister. There’s something that smells really rotten here,” said Browder, who had a chapter called “Kyle Parker’s War” in Red Notice, his bestselling book about fighting Putin’s regime. “Of anybody to be accused of being a disloyal foreign agent, this makes no sense. Kyle Parker is the most high-integrity, honest and loyal person in Washington. It’s not just his name being rubbished, but the Helsinki Commission being rubbished.”

In Ukraine, meanwhile, people who interacted with Parker during his trips to the country were baffled when the allegations about Parker’s foreign ties came out, yet another example of Washington wackiness.

“People were more surprised than anything,” said Jason Jay Smart, a Kyiv-based American political consultant and outspoken pro-Ukraine media figure. “People were like, WTF. The guy didn’t say anything other than the generic talking points the White House uses. He said we’re going to support Ukraine. How is that controversial?”