Tornado Alley (PROG)

[Da Kine 17]

McCain might know, he had Russian connections as well. Iran would probably be a good guess.

John McCain talked a good game against Russia and Vladimir Putin and all the trappings of the vintage Sovietesque lifestyle.

That is as long as McCain wasn’t boozing it up on Oleg Deripaska’s yacht — the same Deripaska that is best friends with Putin. How did a U.S. Senator get on one of the largest mega yachts — the Queen B — in the world?

Maybe we can track down the high-priced hookers that were on board. Or query convicted Italian felon Raffaello Follieri and his movie-star girlfriend Anne Hathaway — who arranged the 70th birthday bash for McCain on a yacht in Montenegro in 2006. And of course, Derispaska was there too.

In fact, Deripaska was likely the target of a FBI probe for alleged Russian organized crime during the time McCain was boozing it up on his yacht.

So we had a prominent U.S. Senator with direct connections to FBI oversight drinking, eating, conversing (and who knows what else McCain was doing on the yacht) with Deripaska at the same time the Putin-linked billionaire was an alleged target of the FBI.

Great optics.

But we thought Trump was the one supposedly rubbing elbows with the Kremlin?

No wonder they D.C. elites who flocked to McCain’s funeral failed to mention any of these details.

From The Nation:

In mid-September The Nation’s website published a photo of McCain celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006 at a yacht party hosted by convicted Italian felon Raffaello Follieri and his movie-star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. On the same day one of the largest mega-yachts in the world, the Queen K, was moored in the same bay of Kotor. This was where the real party was. The owner of the Queen K was known as “Putin’s oligarch”: Oleg Deripaska, controlling shareholder of the Russian aluminum giant RusAl, currently listed as the ninth-richest man in the world, with a rap sheet as abundant as his wealth. By mid-2005 Deripaska had already virtually taken control of Montenegro’s economy by snapping up its aluminum plant, KAP—which accounts for up to 40 percent of the country’s GDP and some 80 percent of its export earnings—in a nontransparent privatization tender strongly criticized by NGO watchdogs, Montenegrin politicians and journalists. The Nation has learned that Deripaska told one of his closest associates that he bought the plant “because Putin encouraged him to do it.” The reason: “the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean.”

In mid-2005 Ambassador Richard Sklar, the former lead US official in the Balkans, ceased advising the Montenegrin government (he’d worked as a pro bono adviser after leaving the US diplomatic service) when it became clear the plant was being handed to Deripaska under heavy Russian pressure. “I quit because it was a bad deal, not for any political reasons. The Russians scared all the other buyers off. They offered far too little money and got themselves a sweetheart deal.”

Russia’s virtual takeover of Montenegro was well under way by January 2006, when Rick Davis introduced Deripaska to McCain at a villa in Davos Switzerland. They met again seven months later, at a reception in Montenegro celebrating McCain’s birthday, as reported in The Washington Post.


https://truepundit.com/photos-surface-of-mccain-on-putin-linked-deripaskas-yacht-oligarch-threw-mccain-birthday-bash-while-fbi-probed-russian-for-organized-crime-ties/

McCain’s Kremlin Ties
He may talk tough about Russia, but John McCain’s political advisors have advanced Putin’s imperial ambitions.
By Mark Ames and Ari BermanOCTOBER 1, 2008

Roughly two years later, in March of this year, Rothschild hosted a high-dollar fundraiser for McCain at London’s posh eighteenth-century Spencer House, which Rothschild donated for the occasion. Given the close relationship between Rothschild and Deripaska some speculated that Deripaska was the hidden hand behind the event. The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that the fundraiser amounted to an illegal contribution by foreign nationals to McCain’s campaign.

Aside from a little campaign dough, what has McCain gotten out of all this? It’s hard to tell–either he was utterly clueless while his top advisers and political allies ran around the former Soviet domain promoting the Kremlin’s interests for cash, or he was aware of it and didn’t care. McCain was reportedly so angry about Davis Manafort’s role in stifling Ukraine’s Orange Revolution that he almost removed Davis as campaign manager. But in the case of Montenegro, he should have known what Davis & Co. were up to. After all, McCain lent a helping hand. And by the time he visited the country, the Russian takeover was plain to see.

The story of how McCain’s closest aides and employees have been undermining his vociferously expressed opposition to Putin and Russia’s oligarchs offers a highly disturbing preview of what a McCain administration might look like. When McCain’s campaign proclaims “country first,” one has to wonder, Which country? The one with the highest bidder?


https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/mccains-kremlin-ties/