Christina Pushaw

Christina Maria Cody Pushaw (born September 3, 1990) is an American political aide, serving as rapid response director for the 2024 presidential campaign of Ron DeSantis. She is a member of the Republican Party.

Early life and education

Pushaw was born in Washington state and raised in Malibu, California. She attended La Reina High School, a Catholic preparatory school in Thousand Oaks, California.

Her father is Robert J. Pushaw, the James Wilson Endowed Professor of Law at the Pepperdine University School of Law. Her mother, Patricia Pushaw (née McCormack), is a native of Wexford, Ireland. She has two younger sisters, Carolyn and Stephanie. Carolyn attended Harvard University and is a pilot for the U.S. Marine Corps.

In 2012, she graduated ''magna cum laude'' with a B.A. in history from the University of Southern California (USC). While an undergrad, she volunteered for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign. In 2011, Pushaw studied abroad in Moscow, Russia.

In 2017, she obtained a M.A. in international relations and economics from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies Studies (SAIS). In her first year of graduate school, she studied abroad at the SAIS campus in Bologna, Italy. In Bologna, she worked as a research assistant at the Center for Constitutional Studies and Democratic Development, researching Ukrainian constitutional reform and democratic development in Central Asia. In spring 2017, she spent time in Kyiv, Ukraine to research for her graduate thesis, titled "The status of Crimean Tatars under Russian occupation".

Career

Early career

In 2008, Pushaw developed an interest in Georgia, in the Transcaucasus, after hearing presidential candidate John McCain speak about it. She researched Georgia, and was impressed by the accomplishments of then-president, Mikheil Saakashvili.

From October 2013 to June 2015, she lived in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. She worked at the American-Georgian Education Center as a college admissions counselor, specializing in applications for American schools. Pushaw also worked at an exchange program that organized for Georgian students to study abroad in America, called My World Foundation. She managed the program with Giorgi Arveladze, a former Minister of Economy of Georgia that served under Saakashvili. Arveladze also worked for Yulia Tymoshenko for Stand Together, a philanthropic organization founded by Charles Koch. At Stand Together, she claims to have worked on the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the passing of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Work for Mikheil Saakashvili

From August 2019 to December 2020, Pushaw worked in Georgia as a full-time aide, for former Georgia president Mikheil Saakashvili. She started working for Saakashvili in January 2018, but was limited to part-time consulting on a "voluntary basis". Pushaw first encountered Saakashvili while he was lecturing at the Reagan Library in California, where she was a volunteer. Later, while doing graduate field research in Ukraine, she and her class had a meeting with Saakashvili.

Pushaw assisted Saakashvili with improving his international profile and prepared him for a re-introduction into Georgian and Ukrainian politics. This included outreach to American and European Union media and politicians. She ghostwrote op-ed articles for Saakashvili that appeared in prominent English-language publications. All of Pushaw's work for Saakashvili had been terminated by December 2020.

When Pushaw started working for Saakashvili, he had recently been stripped of his Ukrainian citizenship and was living stateless in the Netherlands. He revoked his Georgian citizenship in 2015 and had outstanding criminal charges in Georgia. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a close ally of Saakashvili, restored his Ukrainian citizenship in May 2019. Saakashvili led the 2003 Rose Revolution, is pro-NATO, and strengthened ties with the United States while he was president.

In August 2019, Pushaw established the New Leaders Initiative, a non-governmental organization (NGO) that hosted events for Georgians interested in "democracy and international affairs".

Work for Ron DeSantis

In February 2021, Pushaw published an article in ''Human Events'' criticizing Rebekah Jones, a Florida Department of Health employee who was fired in May 2020 for insubordination. Jones had been a vocal critic of the DeSantis administration's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her article was retweeted by DeSantis' lieutenant governor, Jeanette Nunez. In March 2021, Pushaw wrote a letter to the governor's office asking for job on DeSantis' communication team. She was then hired as press secretary for Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in May 2021. She worked in the position until August 2022, before leaving to join his 2022 gubernatorial reelection and later 2024 presidential campaign teams as rapid response director.

Pushaw's tenure as press secretary was noted for her aggressive and hyper-partisan style. She used her presence on social media websites, like Twitter, to criticize the media's coverage of DeSantis. She has been credited for popularizing the word " groomer" in conservative politics and for strengthening DeSantis' reputation among conservative and anti-LGBT internet personalities.

In September 2022, Pushaw gave a speech at the National Conservatism Conference in Miami, Florida, titled "Defeating the Legacy Media’s Regime Narrative Enforcement". In her speech, Pushaw suggested conservatives should treat journalists and legacy media outlets like "liberal activists". Her boss, Ron DeSantis, was one of the keynote speakers at the event.

Controversies

Suspension from Twitter

Pushaw was suspended by Twitter following her "tweeting" in 2021 concerning an Associated Press report.
In that tweet
she which suggested that a group of about 20 protesters who were seen wearing Nazi symbols and shouting anti-Semitic slurs Saturday afternoon could be political opponents of DeSantis trying to frame the governor in a bad light. Her tweet was a reference to several people organized by the anti-Donald Trump Republican group the Lincoln Project who posed with tiki torches during last year’s Virginia governor’s race in an attempt to smear Glenn Youngkin, who at the time was running for governor. Pushaw recommended that followers "drag them" and as DeSantis' press secretary, said she would put the A.P. reporter "on blast." The A.P. said Pushaw had made "a direct effort to activate an online mob to attack a journalist." Pushaw said she believed she had not incited the violent threats made to the A.P. which followed her tweet.

Registration as a foreign agent

In June 2022, Pushaw retroactively registered as a foreign agent per the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), after the United States Department of Justice contacted her. She hired former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Michael R. Sherwin, to represent her for the FARA registration. She was paid $25,000 over the course of two years for her work and lived rent-free, for six weeks, in a Tbilisi apartment owned by a Saakashvili associate. In a November 2018 interview for ''Georgia Today'', Pushaw claimed she was "not paid by anyone" for her support of Saakashvili. According to her FARA filing, she received her first cash payment from Saakashvili in late October 2018. Her filing described her arrangement with Saakashvili as "unwritten and informal".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pushaw, Christina
1990 births
Living people
American political women
American press secretaries
Anti-LGBT sentiment
University of Southern California alumni
Johns Hopkins University alumni
People from Malibu, California
Florida Republicans