Back to 2008: Former adviser torches McCain for moves in presidential campaign

A former adviser to the late Sen. John McCain unloaded on the late senator and top aides in an online newsletter that revisited several key events in the 2008 presidential campaign.

The Substack post and a series of tweets by Steve Schmidt raised questions about a top McCain aide's associations with the Russian Federation, revived a New York Times story about McCain’s ties to a lobbyist and insulted his judgment for picking Sarah Palin as his running mate.

Schmidt long ago fell out of favor with the McCain family and has battled them publicly.

The senator's presidential campaign that year was a roller coaster of highs and lows, with rival factions battling for the candidate's ear.

Schmidt took aim Sunday at the family and Rick Davis, McCain's 2008 national campaign manager and the senator's longtime confidant.

Davis and Paul Manafort had been partners in a lobbying firm, with Davis leaving the firm in 2006. Schmidt wrote the lobbying firm represented Russian interests, including in Ukraine, a nation whose freedom McCain championed.

“Manafort was advancing the interests of the Russian Federation in Ukraine and across Eastern Europe,” Schmidt wrote on Substack.

“They worked for the Putin puppet Victor Yanukoych and Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. They advanced Russian interests from the Maidan to Montenegro. John McCain spent his 70th birthday with Oleg Deripaska and Rick Davis on a Russian Yacht at anchor in Montenegro.”

Davis, through a friend, told The Republic that he had never met Yanukoych and had not been to Ukraine. A 2018 story in The Atlantic detailed the visit to the yacht, claiming it was Deripaska's. The Davis friend said it was not Deripaska's boat.

Schmidt claimed McCain, who had been an outspoken critic of Russia and Russia’s aggression toward Ukraine until his death in 2018, “turned a blind eye” to Davis’ association with Manafort.

For subscribers: Sen. John McCain, revered in Ukraine, sounded alarms about Russia for years

Manafort later served as Donald Trump’s campaign chair during his first presidential run. Manafort was convicted on financial fraud charges in 2018. Trump later pardoned him.

The newsletter and tweets by Schmidt were emotional, described as a long-delayed attempt to set the record straight. They touched on a variety of other campaign issues of the time, including allegations raised in February 2008 involving McCain's association with a telecommunications lobbyist.

Schmidt wrote he helped orchestrate the discrediting of the New York Times story on the matter, in part with a news conference featuring John and Cindy McCain.

"Obviously, I'm very disappointed in the article — it's not true," John McCain said at the time during the nationally televised news conference in Toledo, Ohio.

The Times said Monday the lobbyist had dropped a lawsuit against the news organization a few months after she filed it. But about a year after the newspaper's initial story ran, an editor's note appeared on it: "The article did not state, and The Times did not intend to conclude, that (the lobbyist) had engaged in a romantic affair with Senator McCain or an unethical relationship on behalf of her clients in breach of the public trust."

Schmidt has feuded with McCain’s daughter, Meghan, on Twitter over the past few days, wrote he is no longer burdened by what he called the “lie” of discrediting that story.

"This lie is Senator John McCain’s lie. It is his family’s burden to carry, not mine,” he wrote.

The McCain family declined to comment.

Schmidt is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, which raised millions in its effort to discredit Donald Trump and his Republican allies. In the newsletter, he also revisited other key moments of McCain’s last presidential campaign, in which he lost to Democrat Barack Obama.

Schmidt wrote he suggested to Davis the campaign consider then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as the senator’s running mate.

Schmidt wrote when McCain invited him to attend a private meeting with Palin, where McCain was to interview her, Schmidt declined. In the newsletter, he recalled telling the senator it was McCain's responsibility to determine her qualifications.

“The first opportunity I had to discuss a substantive policy issue with her did not take place until we were leaving the Minneapolis convention,” he wrote. “It took less than three minutes for me to absorb the magnitude of the disaster. Should this have happened earlier, the selection of her would never have happened. This was a lapse in John’s judgment, not mine. My mistake was leaving John McCain alone in a room with her.”

After McCain’s loss, Schmidt wrote he asked the senator to ask Palin to stop publicly criticizing the campaign. But McCain would not, he wrote.

“Because he said that if he did, she would attack him,” Schmidt wrote. “ …The bravest man that I had ever met turned out to be terrified of the creature that he had created. His refusal to be honest about his mistake of picking her – and his unwillingness to confront the furies she unleashed — allowed an ember to grow into a conflagration that is foundational to our current catastrophic denial of reality and profound dishonesty of the far right.”

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Former adviser Steve Schmidt torches John McCain's moves in 2008 campaign