What Is the Full Extent of DeSantis Aide Christina Pushaw’s Foreign Ties?
A full catalogue of Christina Pushaw's foreign ties, and the unanswered questions about her involvement in Georgia and Ukraine
In June 2022, former Ron DeSantis (FL-Governor) press secretary Christina Pushaw was placed under the media spotlight amid her controversial retroactive registration as a foreign agent, for her work with ousted Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. Governor DeSantis made a statement at the time of the Washington Post hit piece, the first article to report on her registration as a foreign agent, that it was “A totally ridiculous smear”, and that he was “Not deterred by any smear piece from these legacy media outlets…the only reason they are attacking her is because she does a great job”.
So, is this where the story ends? Was it simply a malicious hit piece, written to discredit a highly-qualified firebrand political aide? What is the full extent of Christina Pushaw’s involvement with Saakashvili and Georgian NGOs? Why did the DOJ choose not to prosecute her, and to simply inform her that she was in violation of the law? With much speculation surrounding a possible 2024 presidential run by Governor DeSantis, a full investigation of the facts of Pushaw’s foreign ties is absolutely warranted, given her closeness with DeSantis and her continued work on his campaigns.
This article is not meant to paint Pushaw as a treacherous foreign-paid actor subverting the Republican Party, but merely to present the information currently available to us about the full extent of her work with Georgian NGOs and with Saakashvili, and to address the remaining unanswered questions that come as a result.
One of the most elucidating sources on Pushaw’s motivations and involvement in Georgian politics is the 2017 interview she gave to the Georgian Journal. In 2008, pursuing her bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Southern California, Pushaw says that she volunteered for John McCain’s presidential campaign, and that his statement “today we are all Georgians” prompted her to “look into the country and its leader”. Admiring Saakashvili’s accomplishments as president, she had the opportunity to meet him a number of times after volunteering at the Reagan Library in California, where Saakashvili had on occasion been a speaker.
The Ventura County Star reported on a 2012 speech by Saakashvili at the Reagan Library due to a protest outside the library by Georgian-American activists.
The VS Star reported that the protesters were chanting “Democracy in Georgia”.
"President Saakashvili unfortunately took over the power and single-handedly rules the country with tyranny and abuse of human rights," said demonstration organizer Lasha Shanidze. "President Reagan would have been ashamed of him for what he has done to his country."
The organizer of the protest Lasha Shanidze claimed to have been granted temporary asylum in the United States after being imprisoned and tortured for 50 days by Saakashvili’s regime on trumped-up charges.
Pushaw states that she applied to move to Georgia after she graduated in 2012, and proceeded to stay in Georgia for an unspecified amount of time working a number of different jobs, mostly in education, due to a Saakashvili-ran program for native English speakers to teach English in villages.
Apparently the controversial nature of Saakashvili’s regime and his rise to power after the “Rose Revolution” in late 2003 did not deter Pushaw from admiring the president’s track record.
The Rose Revolution followed the same playbook as all color revolutions: coup by NGO. In the case of Georgia, it was even more overt than in many other countries. Directly upon achieving his CIA-backed victory in toppling Slobodan Milošević’s regime in Belgrade in 2000, US ambassador to Georgia Richard Miles arrived in Tbilisi to orchestrate the same stunt in efforts to overthrow the regime of former Soviet Foreign Minister Edouard Shevardnadze.
Kmara, a civic youth resistance movement formed in Georgia in 2003 was funded by the Georgian NGO Liberty Institute, and by the George Soros-owned Open Society Institute. Allied with Saakashvili, Kmara received training by the parallel Serbian organization “Otpor!”, on Soros’ dime. As Otpor! had done in Belgrade in 2000, so too Kmara did to Shevardnadze in 2003. These were not organic, grassroots demonstrations, this was direct action by the US government in partnership with George Soros to install Western puppet regimes.
One sincerely has to wonder what exactly Pushaw saw in the Soros puppet Saakashvili that made her want to work for him from 2018 to 2020. Although Saakashvili certainly oversaw a drastic decrease in corruption in Georgia, this came at the cost of political persecution, and systemic torture and sexual violence in the overcrowded prison system (as evinced by the 2012 Gldani prison scandal). In 2014 Saakashvili was criminally charged with high corruption, embezzlement, and abuse of power for the 2007 Georgian demonstrations, and for the seizure of the first independently owned Georgian broadcasting station Imedi TV, which had been subject to a state police raid and expropriated from its owners in 2007 for criticizing the Saakashvili regime.
Saakashvili fled from the charges to Ukraine, and became governor of the Odessa region, appointed by then Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko, largely because of Saakashvili’s support of the Revolution of Dignity and the ousting of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. Poroshenko would later strip Saakashvili of his Ukrainian citizenship in 2017 as a concession to Georgian authorities, and because Saakashvili was organizing a new opposing political party in Ukraine. His citizenship would later be restored by fellow globalist puppet president Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019.
It should come as no surprise that Pushaw herself was in Odessa, presumably at the behest of Saakashvili, when Zelensky won the primary:
Pushaw has continuously allied herself with the Soros-backed puppet regimes of Saakashvili and Zelensky—why? The sentiment among America first Republicans is firmly anti-Zelensky, anti-Soros, anti-regime change. If DeSantis’ most public spokesperson is allied with Soros-backed corrupt foreign regimes, does that bode well for DeSantis being any sort of substantial threat to the political establishment and deep state?
The extent of Pushaw’s work in Georgia is shrouded in mystery. In a 2018 interview with Georgia Today, Pushaw states she had previously lived in Georgia for two years, and was then visiting the country to celebrate the establishment of the “western platform initiative”, a group of 16 NGOs that “support Georgia’s western development and its democratic path”.
Additionally, in this 2018 interview she states that her work with Saakashvili was “informal”, and that she was “not paid by anybody”.
Ironically, she also states that she is very open about her support, and she criticizes those other lobbyists who do not register with FARA and try to conceal their payments:
This is ironic because when the DOJ informed her that she was in violation of the law by being an unregistered foreign agent, the paperwork revealed that she was indeed being paid. She reportedly received $25,000 total from Saakashvili, and was staying rent-free in a Tbilisi apartment “owned by an associate of Saakashvili”. Pushaw’s attorney stated:
Ms. Pushaw was notified recently by the DOJ that her work on behalf of Mr. Saakashvili likely required FARA registration. Ms. Pushaw filed for the registration as soon as she was made aware.
Pushaw characterized her work for Saakashvili in the following way:
“I advised Mikheil Saakashvili on international communications and media, including assistance with television appearances, op/eds, and outreach to policymakers,” Pushaw wrote. “I worked under the supervision of Saakashvili during this period. As stated previously, my work for Saakashvili consisted of monitoring the Georgian political environment for him and assisting in his international profile.”
Why was she not prosecuted? In 2018 as part of the Mueller investigation, Samuel Patten was forced into a guilty plea for also failing to register as a foreign agent for his lobbying work in Ukraine between 2014 and 2018. The DOJ decided to go after Patten because he was a long-time associate of Paul Manafort, former campaign chairman for Donald Trump. The DOJ chose to prosecute Patten, and not Pushaw—why did Pushaw get a free pass?
Another highly questionable aspect of Pushaw’s story is that her work with Saakashvili reportedly ended in December of 2020, and within months was hired by Ron DeSantis—that is quite the rapid turnaround!
In 2019, Pushaw founded an NGO of her own in Georgia, the “New Leaders Initiative”, which apparently has been inactive since 2021.
The archived website for Pushaw’s NLI remained under construction, only having a landing page and a link to a registration form.
From the NLI’s Facebook page, where it seems they were most active, it appears the NGO did good charitable work, and I do not want to cast needless aspersions on this project. It is worth noting, however, that according to Pushaw’s biography on the “Free Russia Forum”, the NLI is described as a mentor program for the anti-Putin PR-Free Russia Forum, a conference led by Putin’s political opposition. Who provided the funding for this NGO? Tying together that this NGO was partnered with Putin’s opposition and her admiration of Zelensky, we can certainly make some inferences.
Some additional light is shed on Pushaw’s past by a statement given by the Warsaw Security Forum, who invited her to speak at their event in 2019. They wrote that Pushaw “worked as an academic consultant, freelance edited foreign policy articles and proposals for international NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and developed a keen interest in Georgian politics.” Is it possible she was doing more in Georgia than simply celebrating the advent of the “western platform initiative”? What were those 16 NGOs, and who funded them? Why did she say that she was not being paid for her work in Georgia, when she quite evidently was?
All of this information seems to generate more questions than answers, questions that I wish Pushaw would address and clear up. As I said, her work with the NLI on the surface appears to be entirely benevolent, such as providing masks for people during the COVID pandemic, and promoting educational opportunities in Georgia. But what about some of her work with other NGOs in Georgia, her work for Saakashvili, her support for Zelensky, and her previous work in 2017 for “Standing Together”, funded by the Koch brothers?
At the very least, what we should takeaway from this information is that DeSantis does not represent an anti-establishment movement. DeSantis is not “Trumpism” without Trump if he is hiring foreign agents who are very publicly allied with corrupt globalist-puppet foreign regimes. What this really shows is that the “National Conservatism” movement is really just controlled opposition, and is in bed with the same globalists as the Democrats and Neo-Conservatives.
This is excellent work.
Electricity production and consumption has doubled in the past 20 years in Georgia. How can you say that there was no electricity in 2003?
Who did Pushaw "apply" to in order to move to Georgia in 2012? It does not require hardly anything to move there today. And did she "stay in Georgia for an unspecified amount of time working a number of different jobs, mostly in education, due to a Saakashvili-ran program for native English speakers to teach English in villages"?
Or did she, as she said, advise “Mikheil Saakashvili on international communications and media, including assistance with television appearances, op/eds, and outreach to policymakers,” while working "under the supervision of Saakashvili during this period. As stated previously, my work for Saakashvili consisted of monitoring the Georgian political environment for him and assisting in his international profile.”
Working in villages isn't exactly the same thing as advising an international leader.
It doesn't add up.