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</div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/165782/republicans-putin-history-relationship-manafort">https://newrepublic.com/article/165782/republicans-putin-history-relationship-manafort</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></div><div><font face="Times New Roman" size="4" /><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">no lnx many</font></font></font></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Craig Unger/March 18, 2022</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>How Republicans Spent Decades Cozying Up to Putin’s Kremlin</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The man who once worked to connect Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff to Russia is now chief of staff to Marjorie Taylor Greene. Any questions?</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Do you think Americans give a fuck about Ukraine?!” </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking to NPR broadcaster Mary Louise Kelly in January 2020</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Whatever Americans were thinking two years ago, when Pompeo gave his NPR interview, they now do give a fuck about Ukraine—and therein lies a problem: For more than 25 years, the party of Reagan has been transforming itself into the party of Putin, only to discover that Vladimir Putin may not be a great role model after all. As a result, one leading Republican after another has begun to perform Simone Biles–level gymnastics in their bids to condemn their party’s most powerful patron. </div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Consider that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis now calls Putin “an authoritarian gas station attendant with some legacy nuclear weapons.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Putin “a ruthless thug who’s just invaded another sovereign country and killed thousands of innocent people.” And on Twitter, Senator Lindsey Graham openly called for Putin’s assassination. “The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” he tweeted. “You would be doing your country—and the world—a great service.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But if you think this is hard-line Cold War tough talk from the Reagan-era GOP of yore, think again. It’s not just Donald Trump who’s in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives funding and working with K Street lobbyists, political consultants, super PACs, campaign fundraising operations, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, social media operations, cyber-warfare efforts, money laundering schemes, think tanks harboring Russian intelligence operatives, and much, much more.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, has </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">observed the relationship for years. “If you go back to the days of Jack Abramoff, when Americans started going to Moscow in the ’90s, and then to Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and so on, you start to see the spine of a secret influence campaign between the Republicans and Russia that has been built up over decades,”</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> he said. “It goes right up to Tucker Carlson rooting for Putin on Fox today. It has been built up over decades, and it is not new, and it deeply infects the Republican Party. You have two forces with deep political ties that are fighting American democracy in order to keep Putin in power and install a Putin-like system in America. And to that end, they have penetrated deep into our think tanks, our media, our journalism—everything.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">Take Ed Buckham, the recently appointed chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> Today, Buckham handles a congresswoman who proudly attends “white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin” rallies, as Congresswoman Liz Cheney characterized them, and has become renowned for touting conspiracy theories about how the California wildfires were started by<b> Jewish space lasers. On Thursday, when the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, Greene, not surprisingly, was one of eight Republicans who voted against it.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Buckham’s ties to Russian interests date back 25 years to 1997—before Putin came to power—when he served as an aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. This was the heyday of “Casino Jack” Abramoff,</b> the lobbyist-conman who took on pay-for-play clients ranging from the Choctaw Indian tribe of Mississippi to the Kremlin with a panache made for Hollywood.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> At the time, Buckham, in addition to his job with DeLay, oversaw a lobbying outfit called the U.S. Family Network, which presented itself as a public advocacy group but was really a vehicle funded largely by clients of Jack Abramoff.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In this case, the relevant clients linked to Abramoff were executives from </span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Naftasib, the Russian energy giant</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. If DeLay’s lavish six-day excursion to Moscow in 1997 is any indication, the Russians made cultivating DeLay a high priority and spared little expense, as the junket involved golf, lavish dinners, and a meeting with Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. </span><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But the icing on the cake was a $1 million contribution by the Russians to the</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> U.S. Family Network.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> According to The Washington Post, Buckham told the former president of the U.S. Family Network that Russians made the $1 million contribution specifically to influence DeLay’s vote on legislation to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.</span></b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Ultimately, DeLay was forced out of Congress, indicted, convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison for money laundering and conspiracy charges relating to campaign financing.</b> In 2013, however, his conviction was overturned on appeal. Abramoff served 43 months in jail for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials, and tax evasion. As for Buckham, he is now back in the fray, a top aide to one of the most controversial and extreme members of Congress. (Buckham did not respond to multiple requests for an interview for this article.)</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But Buckham’s and DeLay’s Russian intrigues paled next to those of </b><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Paul Manafort,</b><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> the Roy Cohn–trained fixer and political consultant who represented the interests of corrupt despots the world over—the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Romania’s Nicolai Ceausescu, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko—and Vladimir Putin. </b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Manafort’s ties with Russia go back to 2004, when he began his journey into the shadowy world of flight capital, offshore companies, and Russian intelligence. In all, over $75 million in Russian funds flowed through Manafort’s operations into his offshore accounts. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Manafort appointed his constant companion, a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik, as head of his Ukraine operations with full “power of attorney” to interact with pro-Putin oligarchs who were funding Manafort. </span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Manafort set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives</b>.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">He also set up sophisticated disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> As Manafort’s deputy, Rick Gates, once explained, “Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure.… In every ministry, he has a guy.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” <b>And much of it was in service to Putin’s objective of taking over Ukraine, not by military force as we are seeing today but from the inside, via the pro-Putin Party of Regions, whose oligarchs paid Manafort, and its candidate Viktor Yanukovych, an oligarch worth $12 billion.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Manafort launched Yanukovych into the Ukrainian presidency in 2010. But by 2013 the pro-European facade he had created for his candidate had been stripped away, revealing Yanukovych to be merely another of Putin’s pawns. After the massive protests in Maidan Square in 2014, when nearly 100 activists were killed, Yanukovych was forced to leave the presidency and flee to Moscow.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Text messages between Manafort’s two daughters, Andrea and Jessica, suggest they felt their father was responsible for the deaths that took place at Maidan. “Don’t fool yourself,” Andrea Manafort texted her sister. “That money we have is blood money.”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">So by the time Manafort became Donald Trump’s campaign manager, the die had been cast. Deeply in debt to Putin’s oligarchs, he maintained, according to the report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 2020 cited above, <b>ongoing contacts with Kilimnik that “represented a grave counterintelligence threat”</b> because his “presence on the Campaign and proximity to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>According to the Mueller Report, in August 2016, Manafort met with Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Club in New York and, according to an assessment by the Treasury Department, provided “Russian Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and strategy,” presumably for use in influence campaigns on behalf of Trump.</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Of course, Manafort was not alone among Republican lobbyists in carrying water for Putin. According to Open Secrets,<b> quite apart from Manafort, Russian interests have spent about $182 million on lobbying, influence operations, and propaganda in the last six years</b></span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>.</b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">As I reported in American Kompromat,<b> Jones Day, </b>the fourth-largest law firm in the land, represented at least 10 major corporations and organizations close to Putin.</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">These included: Oleg Deripaska’s Basic Element; the Alfa Group and Access-Renova Group, which jointly own billions in oil and gas assets; Alfa Bank, the largest private commercial bank in Russia; Letterone, a $30 billion holding company for assets in technology, oil, and gas; Rosneft, the world’s largest listed oil company; the Sapir Organization, which helped fund Bayrock’s Trump SoHo; and more.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Likewise, Kirkland and Ellis is the biggest law firm in the world, with a star-studded cast of GOP power brokers in its ranks—among them, former Attorney General William Barr; former solicitor general and GOP attack dog Kenneth Starr; Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh; Viet Dinh, chief legal and policy officer of Fox Corporation, and as such the secret power behind Fox News; and former national security adviser John Bolton, to name but a few. <b>Its most prized Russian clients have included Alfa Bank, whose key figures, Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, were entirely dependent on Putin for their wealth, and Oleg Deripaska’s En+ Group, the largest producer of aluminum in the world outside of China. </b></span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>
</b></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><b>Now that Putin has begun waging an old-fashioned war with bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground, and is doing so in an astonishingly brutal and clumsy fashion, it is tempting to forget that in recent years, he has been far, far more successful with the kind of asymmetric hybrid warfare we saw in the 2016 election.</b> So as the horrifying carnage in Ukraine flickers across our television screens, l</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">et’s not forget Russian trolls activating strategic influence operations on multiple social media platforms, the money laundering through real estate that enriched Donald Trump and his associates, and the Russian conspiracy theories that just happen to be echoed by QAnon, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and the like.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Of course, now that there are far more forceful sanctions in play and Russia has become a pariah state and Operation Kleptocapture is underway, the once-close relationship between figures on the American right and the Kremlin was bound to change. It wasn’t that long ago that Steven Brogan, the powerful managing partner of Jones Day, could interact with<b> partners Don McGahn and Vladimir Lechtman, the head of Jones Day’s Russia practice</b>, and in doing so talk to one man who served as Donald Trump’s attorney and another who was likely the single most trusted corporate counsel to Putin’s oligarchs. Things can’t be quite that cozy these days.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The sanctions that have been put into place are intended to choke Putin’s entire system of economic as well as military power. In the near term, there is nothing but risk for those who engage with Russia, and intense pressure to withdraw from Russian relationships,” says Jonathan Winer, who is credited with coming up with the Magnitsky Act, applying sanctions to Russian officials who were responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the tax accountant for Hermitage Capital Management who uncovered massive corruption by Russian officials and was tortured to death. “The international law firms and accounting firms operating in Russia are mostly shutting down for now,” he added.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“Russian security state influence networks are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">But that doesn’t mean it’s all over between Russia and the GOP. When Lindsey Graham calls for the head of Vladimir Putin, me thinks he doth protest too much. The relationship will continue. “Russia has been in the influence business a very long time, and it’s a core part of its military doctrine, especially during what others think of as peacetime,” says Winer. “Russian security state influence networks are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person. Instead, they are likely to just go deeper underground.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“The oligarchs relied on twin pillars for support, both of which are under attack right now,” Winer adds. “Putin was the wallet, and the West provided entry into the global elite.”</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As for the first pillar, the whole world can monitor Putin’s fate day by day, hour by hour, as his army slowly slogs its way across Ukraine getting shelled mercilessly in a showdown that had been billed as an easy win.</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">And as for the second, the consequences of truly harsh sanctions, of Task Force KleptoCapture, and of other efforts will become evident over time in terms of how much Putin’s oligarchs will be able to enjoy the riches of the West. “That is the great question,” said Winer. <b>“What is our capacity to enforce money laundering? The EU finally made it illegal for corporations to pay bribes. But how will they enforce it?”</b></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">And finally, there are other areas, such as cryptocurrency, that are so new that one can’t make any predictions at all. “We know for sure the Russians use crypto for influence operations working out of their St. Petersburg troll farm,” Winer added. “But it is grossly unregulated.” What happens with crypto may be the biggest question of all.</span></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Craig Unger is the author of five books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including, most recently, NYT bestsellers House of Trump, House of Putin, and American Kompromat, which has just been published in paperback.</div></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"></font></div></div><div>
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</font><div style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www<b>.exposedbycmd.org/2016</b>/11/26/20161126trump-appoints-controversial-lawyer-as-white-house-counsel/</font></div><div style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="color: rgb(49, 49, 49); font-family: Cabin, sans-serif; font-size: 17px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President-elect Donald Trump has named the controversial chief lawyer for his campaign and transition, Don McGahn, to become White House Counsel.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Expect trouble.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">McGahn was ethics lawyer to scandal-ridden Rep. Tom DeLay, played a lead role in transforming the FEC into a toothless watchdog,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> and has represented the Koch Brothers’ </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Freedom Partners</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> and its PAC, which bankroll a large network of right-wing groups and political campaigns.</span></b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A prominent Republican campaign finance attorney, McGahn has been a controversial figure for more than a decade, and is notorious for politicizing and <b>crippling enforcement of federal campaign finance laws while serving as a GOP-selected FEC commissioner from 2009-2013.</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">McGahn’s embrace of dubious campaign finance and ethics practices as counsel to Rep. <b>Tom Delay and the National Republican Campaign Committee–</b>combined with his disdain for laws enacted by Congress–raise serious concerns about what advice he is providing Trump and his transition team. Trump’s recent decisions to meet with investors and to sidestep creating a truly blind trust mix business and politics in ways that present serious conflicts of interest and raise the specter of Trump cashing in on the presidency.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 10px; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MCGAHN AND THE TOM DELAY SCANDALS</font></h3><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">McGahn served as counsel and ethics advisor to Rep. Tom DeLay in the early 2000s, at a time that DeLay was in the thick of numerous ethics and campaign finance scandals.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">As House Majority Whip, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">DeLay led an aggressive campaign to push through a mid-decade <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Texas_redistricting" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">redistricting plan</a> for Texas in 2003</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> that </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">allowed Republicans to capture a majority of Texas U.S. House seats in the 2004 elections for the first time since Reconstruction.</span></b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>DeLay organized a political action committee, Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC), and in 2005 was indicted for conspiring to launder corporate cash into campaign contributions to the PAC to help Republicans win a majority in the state legislature in the 2002 elections</b>. DeLay was found guilty by a jury and sentenced to three years in prison. DeLay’s conviction was overturned in 2013 by the state Court of Appeals in a 2-1 decision that split along party lines.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>As DeLay’s lawyer, McGahn <a href="http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-10-05-delay-blunt-funds_x.htm" target="blank" style="box-sizing: inherit; background: 0px 0px; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">defended the scheme</a>. </b>“[M]oney gets transferred all the time. This was disclosed to the extent required to be disclosed by applicable law.<b> It just shows that donors don’t control funds once they’re given.”</b></font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">DeLay was also admonished by the House Ethics Committee for improperly seeking to have the FBI arrest Democratic members of the Texas legislature who fled to Oklahoma to block passage of DeLay’s redistricting plan, and for seeking FAA assistance in tracking the legislators dow</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">n.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>An FEC audit in 2005 also found that DeLay’s ARMPAC (Americans for a Republican Majority), under McGahn’s legal watch, improperly spent more than $200,000 in soft money and failed to report another $300,000 owed to vendors in the 2002 elections. McGahn dismissed the violations as </b><a href="http://www.democracy21.org/archives/issues/fec/congressional-leaders-proposing-new-fec-commissioners-including-delay-campaign-finance-lawyer/" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;"><b>technicalitie</b>s</a>.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">During the same period, DeLay was investigated by the Justice Department for allegedly accepting trips, gifts, and political donations from Jack Abramoff in exchange for providing legislative favors to Abramoff’s clients. Two of DeLay’s political aides, as well as Abramoff, pled guilty to related charges in 2006, but DeLay escaped indictment. Nonetheless, media exposés at the time <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_DeLay#cite_ref-39" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">documented</a> DeLay’s corruption in connection with blocking labor laws for the North Mariana Island, providing favors for donors to DeLay’s ARMPAC, and cutting deals concerning tribal casinos.</font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 10px; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MCGAHN DEFENDED DELAY IN THE RUSSIAN PAY-TO-PLAY SCANDAL</font></h3><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">One of the scandals surrounding DeLay involved a 1997 trip he made to Moscow, where he wa</span><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">s joined by Abramoff, paid for by conservative nonprofit, the National Center for Public Policy Research</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">The group also financed two trips to Moscow by DeLay’s chief of staff, Edwin Buckham, who went on to become a corporate lobbyist.</span></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The trips were organized by prominent Russian businessmen who, joined by the <b>Russian government, were mounting a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28319-2005Apr5.html" target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">major lobbying effort</a> for increased foreign aid</b>. In 1998, <b>“DeLay voted for a bill that included the replenishment of billions of dollars in IMF funds used to bail out the Russian economy.”</b></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">According to associates of Buckham, Russian oil and gas executives subsequently gave $1 million to the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/U.S.Family_Network,Inc." target="blank" style="background-image: initial; background-position: 0px 0px; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">U.S. Family Network</a>, a conservative advocacy group founded by Buckham in 1996. The Network was part of DeLay’s “political money carousel,” and<b> later received $500,000 from the National Republican Campaign Committee, where McGahn was also in-house counsel.</b></span> The group was named in a <a href="http://www.citizen.org/congress/article_redirect.cfm?ID=12585" target="blank" style="background: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">RICO lawsuit</a> against DeLay filed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 1998.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: inherit; margin: 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">McGahn defended the huge contribution and denied that it had any ties to Russia </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">when Public Campaign ran </span><a href="http://www.chron.com/neighborhood/article/Truth-half-truth-and-lie-in-anti-DeLay-ad-9590415.php" target="blank" style="background: 0px 0px; box-sizing: inherit; transition: all 500ms ease-in-out 0s; text-decoration-line: none;">political ads</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> in 2006 attacking DeLay for the scandal.</span></font></p><h3 style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: inherit; line-height: 1.2; margin: 0px 0px 10px; text-transform: uppercase;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MCGAHN’S ROLE IN NATIONAL REPUBLICAN CAMPAIGN COMMITTEE CONTROVERSIES....</font></h3></div></div><div></div></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/mission-to-moscow">https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/mission-to-moscow</a></font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wow WE</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">oN APRIL 7 THE<b> CAMPAIGN for America's Future</b>, a liberal group, bought a full-page ad in the conservative Washington Times. The ad displays photos of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, Dwight Eisenhower, and Tom DeLay. "Once upon a time," the ad begins, "conservatives stood for honest government. . . . Now, their chosen leader"--that would be DeLay, the House majority leader--"is the symbol of money and corruption in Washington."</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ad appeared the day after both the New York Times and the Washington Post recycled moldy charges against DeLay in front-page stories. It was all part of an ongoing effort to discredit the Texas Republican, who has been admonished by the House Ethics committee more times than any other member of Congress but whose main offense seems to have been success: boosting the power of his party, passing legislation Democrats don't like, and raising large amounts of money.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some of that money goes to his family. The New York Times story--"<b>Political Groups Paid Two Relatives of House Leader"--reported that DeLay's wife and daughter have been paid more than $500,000 as employees of his political action committees since 2001. </b>But, as DeLay's staff was quick to observe, employing your husband, wife, son, or daughter and paying them with campaign funds violates no law or congressional ethics rule--and, according to the Los Angeles Times, at least 39 members of Congress do it, from both parties.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Meanwhile the April 6 <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Washington Post story highlighted an August 1997 "fact-finding" mission DeLay, his wife, and top staff took to Moscow. According to forms DeLay's staff filed with the House travel office, the trip was paid for by the </span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">National Center for Public Policy Research</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">, </span></b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">a conservative nonprofit on Capitol Hill. The trip lasted six days and cost about $60,000. The Post story distilled and strengthened reporting from the March 18 edition of National Journal's CongressDaily. CongressDaily's article cited "two sources familiar with travel planning," and began: "An August 1997 trip to Moscow by then-House Majority Whip DeLay and four congressional staffers was funded largely by a Russian energy firm or a key affiliate which was a client of former lobbyist Jack Abramoff."</span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Abramoff, as all Washington insiders know, is under investigation by the Justice Department, the Interior Department, the IRS, the FBI, a special interagency task force, and the Senate Finance and Indian Affairs committees, among others, for allegedly defrauding Indian gaming interests of somewhere between $66 and $88 million (see Andrew Ferguson's "A Lobbyist's Progress," The Weekly Standard, Dec. 20, 2004). <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Until recently Abramoff sat on the board of the National Center for Public Policy Research.</span><b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> </span>In 1997, when the Center bankrolled Delay's trip to Russia, he was employed as a lobbyist at the firm Preston Gates Ellis </b>& Rouvelas Meeds LLP. House rules forbid members from having travel bills paid for by lobbyists.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Sometime in early 1997 Abramoff registered as a lobbyist for Chelsea Commercial Enterprises Ltd. Chelsea was incorporated--here the documentary record is contradictory--either in the Bahamas or in Jersey, an island in the English Channel that is known for its lax financial disclosure laws. In his registration, <b>Abramoff specified that Chelsea was paying him to build "support for policies of the Russian government for progressive market reforms and trade with the United States."</b> To that end he was paid $260,000 in 1997 and, according to the Post, "less than $10,000 in 1998." Chelsea also paid a New York law firm, </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);"><b>Cadwalader, </b>Wickersham & Taft LLP, $180,000 in '97 and about $30,000 between '98 and 2001 to work on its behalf.</span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Another source" handed the Post reporters a memo taken from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, dated May 6, 1997. In the memo, Ellen S. Levinson, then a lobbyist for Chelsea at Cadwalader, outlines a year-long schedule of junkets to Russia. <b>The six junkets </b>mentioned in Levinson's memo, the Post reported, included a trip for an "advance team" in May 1997, a visit by journalists and foreign policy wonks in June, and a trip by <b>DeLay in August. Abramoff </b>was cc'd on the memo.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>DeLay's chief of staff at the time, Ed Buckham, may have been part of that "advance team.</b>" In a January 21, 1998, AP story (headline: "You Won't Find Congressional Travelers in Coach"),<b> Buckham, </b>who now runs his own lobbying firm, said he had taken the Concorde from Paris to Washington in July 1997 after visiting Russia in advance of his boss. Buckham said his Concorde ticket, like the August 1997 junket, was paid for by the National Center for Public Policy Research. "We told the travel agent to just find the best flight,</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 153, 0);">" Amy Ridenour, the president of the National Center,</font><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> told AP at the time. "Ed took the Concorde. I didn't realize that's what the travel agent picked."</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>But where did the National Center get the money? The Wall Street Journal's David Rogers provided an answer on April 13. "The Russia trip was covered from an estimated $165,000 payment [to the center] from an international law firm seeking to promote exchanges with Russian businessmen</b>,<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">" Rogers wrote--which would suggest the firm in question was the New York-based Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. But it could also have been another firm, of course--Abramoff's, perhaps, or one friendly to Abramoff, who was friendly with Ridenour. Both were friends of DeLay's.</span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Wherever the money ultimately came from, the trip was a success. DeLay, his wife, and his top staff were joined in Moscow first by Ridenour, then Abramoff, then Julius Kaplan, a lawyer on the Chelsea account at Cadwalader</b>. They golfed, met with Russian religious leaders, visited tourist attractions, and<b> spoke with Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. </b>One night the group attended a<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> sumptuous dinner party hosted by the heads of NaftaSib, a Russian energy company. DeLay met NaftaSib's president, Alexander Koulakovsky, and its executive vice president, Marina Nevskaya. <b>NaftaSib was another client of Abramoff's at Preston Gates.</b></span></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Little is known about NaftaSib's executives. Alexander Koulakovsky "graduated from Odessa Technological Institute in 1975," according to his company's literature, and left the Russian oil giant SibNeft in 1993 to start NaftaSib. Other than that I could find only an October 26, 1994, dispatch from Tass, the Russian news agency, which reported that an<b> Alexander Koulakovsky was "arrested by authorities of Hatichohe, Northern Honshu, Japan, . . . for illegal storage of a handgun and 150 rounds of ammunition."</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even less is known about Marina Nevskaya. The NaftaSib promotional material says she "taught at the Military Diplomatic Academy and lectured at Moscow State University" until 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed. Apparently she is "the author of several publications on the economy of Southeast Asia, economic cooperation between the USSR and Asian countries and textbooks on oriental languages." She is fluent, we are told, "in English, Vietnamese and French." There is no record of her in the Nexis news database prior to 2005.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Except this. The August 23, 2004, issue of the Russian Oil and Gas Report had an article on <b>NaftaSib's bid to buy the remnants of YUKOS,</b> the giant Russian oil firm run by Mikhail Khodorkovsky until he became a prisoner of the Russian governmen</span>t. The article--published six months before the latest controversy over DeLay--contains this aside:</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The names of Kulakovsky and Nevskaya, not very well known in Russia, are sufficiently well known in the U.S. Thus, in 1997 Naftasib paid for the Moscow part of the visit of leader of the house of representative of the US Congress Tom DeLay. Nevskaya accompanied DeLay on that visit to Moscow.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If NaftaSib paid for DeLay's trip, however, it did so indirectly. And thus we--and DeLay's critics--reach an impasse. Looking back, lobbyists were involved in the planning and execution of DeLay's trip to Russia; Russian energy interests took credit for the trip; the only question is who paid for it.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And that question has already been answered, more or less: the National Center for Public Policy Research. And according to the House rules, as long as lobbyists don't pay a congressman's expenses directly, everything is peachy. Were all such congressional trips to receive the level of scrutiny applied to DeLay's Russia boondoggle, it's safe to say, few of his colleagues would escape censure.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>
</b></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>As Amy Ridenour said in a statement last week: "The National Center for Public Policy Research </b>was careful to pay all the expenses associated with Congressman DeLay's trip." If that's so, DeLay may still be a symbol of the unappealing intersection of money and politics in Washington. But symbolism has never been a firing offense.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Matthew Continetti</b> is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Matthew Continetti Magazine</font></div></div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">=</font></p></div><div>=</div>