AND…it doesn't say "House of Representatives"
"Speaker of the House"
BECAUSE THEY DON'T REPRESENT ANYONE
The same foreign lobbyists and Russians tied to the Trump probe were once associated to Senator John McCain when he ran for president.
Sen. John McCain, always the political maverick, recently bucked his own Republican Party by refusing to defend President Donald Trump in the Russia investigation and even suggesting the matter was reaching epic proportions.
“I think it is reaching the point it is a Watergate size and scale,” he declared last month during an event at his policy nonprofit, the International Republican Institute.
Davis and Manafort, who were already doing pro-Putin work against American national interests, were using potential meetings with McCain.
There was just one fact missing from his narrative: Exactly one decade earlier it was McCain’s own presidential campaign that was being roiled by concerns of possible Russian influence in his own inner circle.
Before there was Trump, there were concerns about some of the same people being around McCain about 10 years ago…
U.S. official
In fact, McCain’s drama involved the same foreign lobbyist Paul Manafort; one of the same Russian oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska; the same Russian diplomat, Sergey Kislyak, and the same wily Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, that now dominate the current Trump controversy.
The only difference?
The FBI has said that there is no evidence to date that Trump ever met with a Russian figure banned from the United States.
McCain actually met twice with Deripaska, a Russian businessman and Putin ally whose visa was blocked by the United States amidst intelligence community concerns about his ties to Moscow. The meetings were arranged by Manafort and his lobbying firm partner Rick Davis, who later would become McCain's campaign manager, according to interviews and documents. Deripaska, a metals magnet, is president of United Company RUSAL, and is considered to be one of the richest men in the world worth an estimated at $5.1 billion, according to Forbes.“My sense is that Davis and Manafort, who were already doing pro-Putin work against American national interests, were using potential meetings with McCain — who didn't know this and neither did we until after the fact – as bait to secure more rubles from the oligarchs,” John Weaver, one of McCain’s top advisers at the time, told Circa in an interview this month.
Davis was McCain's campaign manager in both 2000 and 2008. Manafort, who was Trump's campaign manager for a brief time, resigned in August 2016, over questions of prior work with Ukrainian political parties.
During the 2008 campaign, the Davis Manafort firm disclosed through its U.S. partner Daniel J. Edelman Inc., that it was working for the political party in Ukraine supporting Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, who was backed by Putin.
"Davis Manafort International LLC is directed by a foreign political party, the Ukraine Parties of Regions, to consult on the political campaign in Ukraine," the January 2008 Foreign Agent Registration Act filing showed.
The work included developing "a communications campaign to increase Prime Minister Yanukovych's visibility in the U.S. and Europe," the report added, indicating that Davis and Manafort were being paid a $35,000 a month retainer for the work that began in spring 2007.