Republicans Seem to Think Our Russia Problems Are Over?
They could at least make it look hard. In April, the administration* slapped sanctions on Oleg Deripaska, one of the more notorious of the Volga Bagmen, and his aluminum empire. From The New York Times:
Portrayed as little more than a thug by his critics and suspected by United States officials of having ties to Russian organized crime, Mr. Deripaska, 50, has spent two decades trying to buy respect in the West. London welcomed him; Washington still mostly has not. Successive administrations have limited his ability to travel to the United States. Even Mr. Putin was unable to resolve the situation when he interceded personally with Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama on Mr. Deripaska’s behalf.
“Oleg Deripaska understands better than most Russian oligarchs how money buys influence in Washington,” said Michael R. Carpenter, a former National Security Council official during the Obama administration who is now senior director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. “It seems like he’s now using that knowledge to try to save his skin.”
Well, isn't he just the luckiest fellow? Also, he used to employ future prison laundry worker Paul Manafort. Again, from the Times:
Mr. Manafort, a longtime Republican lobbyist, had earned millions working for a pro-Kremlin leader in Ukraine and had a history of business dealings with Oleg Deripaska, a Russian aluminum magnate close to Mr. Putin. He was nearly broke when he joined the Trump campaign in March 2016 - hired to help prevent a mass defection of convention delegates - and yet he offered to work on the campaign unpaid.
Anyway, on Wednesday, there was cloture vote in the Senate to move along a measure that would've forbade the Treasury Department from lifting the sanctions on Deripaska's businesses. The vote failed to get the required 60 votes, passing only 57-42. To their credit, 11 Republicans broke away to vote with the Democrats. These included Marco Rubio of Florida, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, all three of whom have national aspirations. Unfortunately, Mitch McConnell was able to hold the line at 11.
In April of 2017, the Senate voted 98-2 to support the sanctions and to give Congress the power to override any decision by the Treasury Department to soften or lift them. It is transparently absurd to lift these sanctions now. Has anything happened in the past year that would account for Wednesday's vote? Do we know less about the Russian ratfcking and influence peddling now than we knew then?
I know that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin is worried about "turmoil" in the world's aluminum markets. That's certainly keeping me up nights, but not as often as does the fact that a Russian sublet may be living in the White House, and that a majority of the Republicans in the United States seems to be perfectly fine with that state of affairs. I still believe there's a river of dirty money running underground through the Republican Party. I think people are getting what they paid for.
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