Swallowed up in Russiagate - Sam Patten

When Democracy Work Goes Wrong

Sam Patten spent decades promoting democracy overseas, from Kazakhstan to Iraq to Ukraine. He worked with senators in Maine, ran campaigns, and helped build political systems in some of the world’s most volatile regions. Then Washington came looking for anyone connected to Russia during the 2016 election, and his work in Ukraine made him a target.

“When Washington went looking for anyone who could have helped the Russians elect Donald Trump as U.S. President, Patton was a usual suspect,” as his book description puts it. He ended up charged under a rarely enforced 1938 statute, the Foreign Agent Registration Act, known as FARA.

From Maine Politics to the Former Soviet Union

Patten’s path to international political consulting started in his home state. His father published a weekly newspaper, and he got an internship with Senator Bill Cohen while at Georgetown. After working as a newspaper reporter and losing a gubernatorial campaign in 1994 with Susan Collins, he was looking for something different.

“I found an opportunity in Kazakhstan to go to the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and teach English and help manage graduates at a business school in Kazakhstan that had just been set up with foreign donor money,” Patten told me. “And it was fascinating. It was the wildies. It was what the wild west would have been for young Americans 120 years ago.”

That first overseas experience led to work with oil companies, including Chevron and a smaller Canadian operation where he dealt with everything from 5,000 unpaid workers to figuring out “what to do with camel meat so it doesn’t spoil because we had a camel farm.”

Living Through Putin’s Rise

Patten’s time in Moscow during the early Putin years gave him a front-row seat to Russia’s transformation. He worked for the International Republican Institute, training opposition political parties while living in a small apartment near where the famous novel “Master and Margarita” begins.

“I remember, you know, in the evenings watching Russian television and Putin would have his cabinet meetings televised and he would be sitting at the end as we all famously now know a long table and all his underlings would be around the table looking down and being quiet while he lectured them,” Patten recalled. “And my wife said to me who grew up under communist and she said to me, she said, you know, that’s really, that’s really creepy, don’t you think?”

He watched the gradual dismantling of democratic institutions. “It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a series of different things that happen,” he explained, describing how television stations were shut down and laws changed step by step.

The Missed Opportunity in Russia

Patten believes America missed a crucial chance to help Russia transition successfully after the Soviet collapse. Instead of a Marshall Plan-style reconstruction, “we sent them some half-baked advisors from Harvard who told them to do a mass privatization program. And the result of that mass privatization program was the birth of the class of oligarchs.”

The assistance that was provided often missed the mark. “Ben and Jerry’s had a multi-million dollar grant to teach the Russians how to make ice cream. The Russians know how to make ice cream. It’s just, you know, some politically connected person at USAID thought it would be cool and groovy to have Ben and Jerry in Moscow.”

From Iraq to Ukraine

After Russia, Patten moved to Iraq for the country’s first free election in 50 years, training political parties across the spectrum during a increasingly dangerous time. “Our compound was bombed towards the end. And I ended up, the last two or three weeks in Iraq, I spent living under my desk in the office because our house was blown up.”

His work eventually took him to Ukraine, first in 2007, then again in 2014 after the popular revolution. This time he worked for the political party that had just been thrown out of power, giving him perspective from both sides of Ukraine’s political divide.

“You had western Ukrainians standing up in Parliament and calling eastern Ukrainians sub-human. And those of us who studied genocide know that that’s a real bad warning sign,” he said, describing the tensions that followed the revolution.

When the Investigation Came

Patten’s Ukraine work eventually caught the attention of the Mueller investigation. His crime, as he sees it, was asking the United States to take a balanced approach to Ukraine’s internal conflicts. The FARA charge he faced is rarely prosecuted, but his name got swept up in the broader Russia investigation.

Now he writes a column for the Maine Wire and has a book coming out in October called “Dangerous Company: Misadventures of a Foreign Agent.” Seven hundred copies are sitting in his dining room, waiting for the official launch.

His story raises questions about what happens when promoting democracy overseas becomes politically suspect at home, and whether America’s approach to foreign democracy building sometimes creates more problems than it solves.