Nor is Mr. Rohrabacher, a self-proclaimed veteran of international intrigue, all that perturbed by the interest of federal and congressional investigators. He said he would talk to them when scheduling allows.
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The story of Mr. Rohrabacher’s transformation from Cold Warrior to pro-Putinist is well worn. A vocal Young Republican in the 1960s, he latched onto Ronald Reagan, California’s Republican governor, and followed him to Washington and a speechwriting job in the White House. Then came the fall of the Soviet Union and a détente in relations with the former superpower. For Mr. Rohrabacher, who claims to have lost a drunken arm-wrestling match to Mr. Putin in the 1990s, the era of good feelings never really ended.
Mr. Rohrabacher has laughed off suggestions that he is a Russian asset, and said in an interview that he did not remember being briefed that the Russians viewed him as a source. The F.B.I. and the senior members of the House Intelligence Committee sat Mr. Rohrabacher down in the Capitol in 2012 to warn him that Russian spies were trying to recruit him, according to two former intelligence officials.
“I remember them telling me, ‘You have been targeted to be recruited as an agent,’” he said. “How stupid is that?”
And yet, as investigators in Washington scrutinize the Russian interference campaign, Mr. Rohrabacher, like an extra in a spy thriller, just keeps showing up — if not quite at the scene of the action, then just off camera.
In April 2016, he was in Moscow, accepting a copy of a “confidential” memo containing accusations against prominent Democratic donors that would, months later, reappear in Trump Tower when a Russian lawyer who had reported those allegations to the Russian government, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, sat down with Donald Trump Jr. to deliver a similar document.
Last August he was in London on a quick diversion from an anniversary trip to the Iberian Peninsula to meet Mr. Assange at the fugitive’s sanctuary in the Ecuadorean Embassy. American intelligence agencies believe Mr. Assange acted as a conduit for Russian operatives seeking to release a trove of hacked Democratic emails. Mr. Assange denies the accusation, and Mr. Rohrabacher hoped to broker a meeting with Mr. Trump to allow him to make his case.
Then earlier this year, this time on Capitol Hill, Mr. Rohrabacher dined with Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Russian central bank who has been linked both to Russia’s security services and organized crime. During Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign, Mr. Torshin tried to set up a “backdoor” meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin, according to an email that has been turned over to Senate investigators.
Mr. Rohrabacher asserted that none of the meetings were untoward or inappropriate, given his chairmanship. Ms. Veselnitskaya and her allies are fighting the Magnitsky Act, which imposed sanctions on Russian officials for human rights abuses, and they deserved a hearing, he said. Russia, he argued, could be a key ally to defeat Islamic terrorists in the Middle East, and under Mr. Putin, the Kremlin has undertaken key reforms back home.
“I want to treat Russia as if it is a nation state that deserves to be judged as all other nation states are judged,” he said.
Mr. Rohrabacher said his efforts to connect Mr. Assange with the president have been stonewalled by John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff.
NBC News reported this month that Mr. Mueller’s investigators are looking at a 2016 meeting between Mr. Rohrabacher and Mr. Flynn, whose lobbying for foreign powers has come under scrutiny by the special counsel.
Mr. Rohrabacher acknowledged meeting Mr. Flynn twice, once to discuss computer chip technology and once to discuss a plan advanced by Mr. Flynn late last year to build a series of nuclear power plants across the Middle East. He said he did not remember discussing Russia.
“All I remember about that meeting is that they were promoting some kind of an idea about having Gulf State countries invest in building nuclear power plants of some kind, I think,” Mr. Rohrabacher said.
Mr. Rohrabacher may shrug off such scrutiny, but on the Foreign Affairs Committee, fellow Republicans have had enough. The committee’s chairman, Representative Ed Royce of California, pushed out Mr. Rohrabacher’s top committee aide, Paul Behrends, in July amid stories about his ties to pro-Russian lobbyists.
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Since then, the chairman has taken a more hands-on approach to managing Mr. Rohrabacher’s subcommittee, a Republican House aide said. The chairman has not imposed a blanket ban on Mr. Rohrabacher’s travel or power to convene hearings, nor has he stripped Mr. Rohrabacher of his subcommittee chairmanship.
But Mr. Royce’s aides are closely scrutinizing his requests.
Mr. Rohrabacher has given conflicting assessments of his own status on the committee, most recently saying that he faced few limitations. But in an interview with The New York Times in late October, he acknowledged actions to curtail his activities and said they represented Republican regrets about leaving the gavel to someone who would not “just go along and get along with whatever the State Department wants.”
“What happens with our committee is, if there is anything positive to say about Russia, it is trash-canned,” he said.
Back home, Mr. Rohrabacher’s challengers from both parties have seized on the restrictions and the unwanted attention he is getting from investigators to make the case that he is out of step with the issues voters in the district care about.
Independent analysts and political operatives from both parties said that the Russia issue, the district’s steady leftward drift and a frustration with Republicans in control in Washington has put Mr. Rohrabacher on unstable ground.
Hans Keirstead, a prominent stem-cell researcher competing with five other Democrats to challenge Mr. Rohrabacher, compared the Republican’s Russia record to “a prologue to a very bad book.”
“We’ve got a Russian-tainted congressman,” Mr. Keirstead said in an interview, adding “Why should the constituents of the 48th District vote for an individual whose interests are elsewhere?”
Mr. Rohrabacher may be getting the message. In an invitation to a $1,000-a-head fund-raising lunch he will host at the Monocle Restaurant on Capitol Hill next month, he told supporters he was “under attack” like never before: “The attacks on my conservative positions on issues are unrelenting, nefarious and underhanded.”
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