Journalists give McCain the benefit of a doubt cause he was a POW 40 yrs ago. Well, he is mixed up with Manafort and Russians too. His ‘But Her Emails’ at today’s Comey hearings and his total lack of follow through standing up to Trump may reflect his unfortunate activity w/Manafort and Russians. Manafort’s partner Rick Davis orchestrated McCain’s presidential campaign. Manafort & Davis drew McCain into their eastern European activities such as Montenegro’s exit from Serbia. And McCain had a series of meetings with Deripaska, a Russian involved in organized crime and barred from entering the USA:
The call came after Manafort and Davis had already drawn McCain into their eastern escapades. It wasn’t just Ukraine. That year, the pair had consulted on behalf of pro-independence forces in the tiny principality of Montenegro, which wanted to exit Serbia and become its own sovereign republic. On the surface, this sounded noble enough, so noble that McCain called Montenegro’s independence the “greatest European democracy project since the end of the Cold War.”
A report in the Nation, however, showed that the Montenegrin campaign wasn’t remotely what McCain described. The independence initiative was championed by a fantastically wealthy Russian mogul called Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska had parochial reasons for promoting independence. He had just purchased Montenegro’s aluminum industry and intended to buy broader swaths of its economy. But he was also doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, on whose good graces the fate of all Russian business ultimately hangs. The Nation quoted Deripaska boasting that “the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean.”
Manafort and Davis didn’t just snooker McCain into trumpeting their client’s cause; they endangered him politically, by arranging a series of meetings with Deripaska, who the U.S. had barred from entering the country because of his ties to organized crime. In 2006, they steered McCain to attend a dinner with the oligarch at a chalet near Davos, where Deripaska speechified for the 40 or so guests. (The Washington Post reported that the oligarch sent Davis and Manafort a thank-you note for arranging to see the senator in “such an intimate setting.”) Seven months later, Manafort and Davis took McCain to celebrate his 70th birthday with Deripaska on a yacht moored in the Adriatic.
Not everyone within the McCain camp felt comfortable with this relationship. One group of aides pushed hard for McCain to fire Rick Davis for sullying the senator with the firm’s muck. McCain intended to do just that. The senator had backed the cause of Ukrainian democracy and he couldn’t stomach his top aide’s firm working to undermine it. What’s more, aides had come to McCain with the rumor that Deripaska had purchased an apartment in Trump Tower for Davis and Manafort. But in the moment, McCain lost his nerve, as his aides have recounted the episode. Davis supplied a tear-filled soliloquy that saved his job. “Rick’s plea somehow worked—and that was the root of the divisions that tore apart the campaign,” one of McCain’s top advisers told me.
It was just unsubstantiated hearsay that Deripaska had paid for Manafort’s flat. Yet McCain aides were right to suspect the relationship. Manafort and Davis were hungry for the oligarch’s cash. As the Washington Post reported, they even convinced Deripaska to invest in a $200 million private equity fund they created. For their efforts, Deripaska paid Davis, Manafort, and another one of their partners a $7.5 million management fee. But apparently they didn’t do very much managing, or investing either. When Deripaska asked for an audit of the fund in 2008, Manafort and Davis never delivered one. In fact, according to a complaint that Deripaska filed in court, Davis and Manafort “provided no additional updates.” Deripaska was desperate to get his money back—which, the Post noted, coincided with Manafort’s strange disappearance from public view. At the time, Roger Stone wrote friends a cryptic email titled, “Where’s Paul Manafort?” He supplied a multiple-choice set of answers including “Was seen chauffeuring Yanukovych around Moscow” and “Was seen loading gold bullion on an Army Transport plane from a remote airstrip outside Kiev and taking off seconds before a mob arrived at the site.”
www.slate.com/...