Sen. Rubio Responds to Russia Concern One Year Late, and With Campaign Spam

I’m not sure what I was expecting, except that well-positioned folks insisted Senator Marco Rubio was paying attention to these sorts of reports. Alas.

Back in May of 2023, I submitted a formal memo to Rubio’s office in Florida regarding ANSI’s role in handing over the ISO standards committee on arctic oil operations to an executive of Gazprom, the Russian state-run conglomerate. At that time — and, indeed, still as of now — Gazprom was under US sanctions for its role in the Russian invasions of Crimea and Ukraine.

ANSI refused to block the election of Sergei Baranov to ISO TC 67 Subcommittee 8, even though Baranov is the Head of the Directorate for Icebreaker Support and Navigation Safety for Gazprom Neft PJSC. That exact Gazprom entity is listed in international sanctions. Not only did ANSI abstain from voting, rather than vote against Baranov, it praised Baranov personally before abstaining, in an attempt to at least induce other nations to vote for him. Baranov won that vote, and now heads up the committee.

In the memo sent to Rubio, I laid out this chain of events and asked the Senator’s office to look into ANSI’s willingness not only to ignore US sanctions, but to help Gazprom further burnish its international credentials and potentially alter international standards to suit the Putin regime. That was sent on May 2, 2023. Later that day, I received an automatic reply, purported to be signed by Rubio, indicating I should “look for [his] response in the near future.”

Obviously, this was a boilerplate bot response, and I wasn’t fooled into thinking otherwise. But I had expected some type of direct reply related to my memo eventually.

Well, I finally got one on — (checks date) — April 27, 2024 eleven months later. Except while the email pretended to be responding to my “thoughts regarding United States policy towards Russia,” it wasn’t an actual response. Instead, Rubio sent out another boilerplate letter, this one being a fairly lame campaign ad. And, yes, I know he’s not up for re-election soon, but the letter is just a ridiculous re-statement of problems the US has with Russia and Vladimir Putin, and then Rubio bragging about what he’s doing about them.

Clearly, I didn’t need the lesson on Russia since I was the one informing him about the problems with ISO, ANSI and Russia. But he gave me a history lesson anyway, while ignoring the actual problem I reported to him.

But this is how US organizations like IAF, ANSI, ANAB and the rest get away with violating sanctions and helping to prop up enemies like Russia and China, even as these companies then win Federal defense contracts or get official DoD recognition. Elected officials like Rubio are in permanent, year-round campaign mode and can’t be bothered investigating actual problems as they unfold. Instead, they have to repackage things only for the purpose of getting re-elected, not to actually govern.

This worries me now, because I had made a similar report to Rubio related to the DoD’s CMMC program, which set the stage to hand over control to the official US cybersecurity maturity model certification program to foreign actors like Mexico and China. I had it on good authority that Rubio was monitoring that case, but now I doubt it. This could also be why the DoD has continued to push ahead on CMMC without any proper Congressional investigations, despite the program being built on outright fraud and handing oversight to non-US entities.

Again, not sure what I expected here, but this is probably about the best I was going to get. Ironically, Putin wins this round, no matter what Rubio says. Or, rather, specifically because of what Rubio says.