Inside McConnell’s tie to indicted Putin ally | Will Bunch Newsletter

In 2011, I was still awkwardly figuring out how to send texts on a flip phone. That’s how long it’s been since my Phillies clinched a berth in baseball’s playoffs ... until Monday night. A pitching gem by Aaron Nola — tossing his past reputation as a September choke artist down the memory hole — brought a 3-0 win, a wild-card slot in the MLB post-season, and joy to the former Mudville known as Philadelphia.

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Something unusual happened this weekend. I saw people online expressing sympathy for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. It happened after what should have been a shocking (except our capacity for shock has long vanished) social media diatribe by Donald Trump that told his increasingly violent supporters that the Kentuckian has a “DEATH WISH” and concluded with a racist slur against his Chinese-American wife, the former Cabinet secretary Elaine Chao.

This gross, beyond-unpresidential attack from the 45th president (who wants to become our 47th in 2025) ought to be a bigger deal, and yet personally I found it hard to muster any positive vibes for McConnell. For one thing, the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill could have removed the Trumpian curse from American politics by backing his open-and-shut impeachment conviction for the Jan. 6 insurrection, but he chickened out. Also, this week marks a new term for the right-wing Supreme Court that McConnell hijacked from America’s first Black president, which has already taken away rights such as abortion, with more bad stuff in the pipeline.

But the Trump-McConnell flareup also happened amid a story that makes me wonder if Congress and prosecutors, let alone the mainstream media, are ever going to investigate the questionable ties between McConnell, some of his allies, the Republican Party that he nominally leads, and one of the worst nations on the planet, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Last week, the U.S. Justice Department announced the indictment of billionaire Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, for his efforts to evade U.S. sanctions that were personally imposed on the oligarch in 2018 over his ties to Putin, his profiting from the dictator’s unlawful seizure of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and his business practices that include bribery, extortion, and, allegedly, murder-for-hire. The criminal charges assert that Deripaska and two allies plotted to evade the sanctions so that his girlfriend could birth their child on U.S. soil and the oligarch could buy a California music studio, among their various schemes.

But the complicated other half of the Deripaska story is how this bad guy’s lucrative business empire was able to beat back U.S. sanctions — not by evading the statutes but because Republican Party politicians, including McConnell, were willing to swing their aluminum bat to bend the law for a Putin pal.

In January 2019, McConnell — then the Senate majority leader — used his clout to muster just enough GOP votes to kill a Democratic bill meant to block the Trump administration from lifting sanctions on the Deripaska-led aluminum conglomerate, Rusal, and related companies. The Washington Post reported that McConnell’s legislative victory came at almost the same time that an American entrepreneur named Craig Bouchard was cementing a deal for Deripaska’s Rusal to take a 40% stake in a new U.S. aluminum plant that would be built in McConnell’s Kentucky.

A few months later, Politico reported that two former aides to McConnell were hired to lobby for the Deripaska-backed plant in Kentucky, as the Trump administration — famously soft on Team Putin — completed the deal to lift sanctions on the oligarch’s companies by accepting his claim that he’d sold off some of his ownership, albeit to close allies. There were cries by some Democrats that the deal and McConnell’s critical role in this stank to high heaven — “It is shocking how blatantly transactional this arrangement looks,” former U.S. Russia ambassador Michael McFaul said at the time — but there was little fallout for the man critics have dubbed “Moscow Mitch.”

Whatever games Deripaska was playing around the sanctions, the Kentucky plant — which at least would have brought some jobs to McConnell’s depressed Appalachian state — was never built. Also last week, Democratic governor Andy Beshear announced that the Bluegrass State is recovering $15 million that Republicans had approved to aid the project in an opaque, dead-of-night 2017 vote.

That, and the tougher U.S. stance toward Russian oligarchs suggested by the new criminal charges against Deripaska, are both good news, but we all should be asking a couple of questions about McConnell, Putin’s Russia, and the Republican Party.

First, we need to get to the bottom of Russia’s deep ties, including possible financial entanglements, with the U.S. conservative movement. Why, for example, did the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, tweet (then quickly delete) its seeming support for Putin’s sham annexations in eastern Ukraine? What is the truth about Russia’s treatment of the National Rifle Association, or NRA, as a “foreign asset,” and how much money was pumped into the group at the same time the NRA spent millions on Trump’s 2016 election? We’ve confirmed that Russia spent at least $300 million meddling in elections all over the globe, so why are we balking at a full-fledged probe of what’s been invested in the United States?

Second, the lack of any real follow-up investigation on why D.C.’s top Republican did the legislative heavy lifting for a businessman now facing felony charges feels like a cherry on top of our total breakdown of accountability for the powerful in this country. It’s no wonder that a Republican like Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis can run an operation that employed fraud to transport and dump migrants across state lines, or that Trump can be linked to more criminal schemes than Al Capone — because nothing seems to ever happen. If the American Experiment dies from rot, it was because this fish was stinking from the head, yet we held our nose and looked away.

Question: What should/can colleges and universities do after the U.S. Supreme Court outlaws affirmative action this term? — Via Steve Lincoln @LeftCoastWords on Twitter

Answer: Steve, I share your sense that the Trump Supreme Court ending more than a half-century of gradually weakened affirmative-action programs to boost Black and brown enrollment on college campuses between now and next June is a done deal. While I disagree with the end of affirmative action both as a matter of law and as a matter of good policy, I also hope a reversal from the High Court will help college administrators focus on why enrollment for students of color was steadily declining under their current rules and practices. Most people don’t realize that for a time in the 1970s, Black people attended college at a rate comparable to their percentage in the overall U.S. population. What changed? Tuitions soared, admissions offices doubled down on “legacy admissions” for elite families, the rich also benefitted from things like SAT or essay prep, and schools focused more on recruiting rich, out-of-state white kids on the “party track” than finding deserving kids in less-advantaged neighborhoods. Hopefully the end of legal affirmative action will be a wake up call to fix these things — which would have been more effective, anyway.

It feels like the world is on fire right now. A combustible mix of economic misery across a planet struggling to shake off a pandemic, and political conflict between the forces of authoritarianism and liberal modernity, has brought protests and sometimes riots all across the globe. In the last week, I’ve been tracking large protests in a slew of nations, from Russia (against Vladimir Putin’s mobilization for the Ukraine war) to England (rising prices, fuel shortages) to Cuba (years of deprivation). The mother of all uprisings right now is taking place in the streets of Iran, where women are burning their hijabs, cutting their hair, and risking their lives to protest the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini by the morality police of a suddenly shaky regime. But for all the drama in the streets, you may have noticed that the worst regimes like Putin or Iran’s ayatollahs remain in power, often with violent repression. Experts are noticing too.

Harvard data that was picked up and promulgated by the New York Times last week argues that while protest waves have become ubiquitous in the age of Twitter and Instagram, these large-scale movements are also failing to succeed at a rate not seen since the last great era of rising authoritarianism: the 1930s. Protest tracker Erica Chenoweth wrote recently that “nonviolent campaigns are seeing their lowest success rates in more than a century,” with 2020-21 as the worst years on record. Factors include the nature of the world’s current political divide — with right-wing populists often backing the regimes suppressing these protests, instead of joining them — as well as the seemingly ephemeral nature of protests that arise on social media, without leaders or an organizational structure. I’ve bemoaned these trends here in the United States, where millions of marchers over George Floyd’s murder in 2020 seemed to vanish as quickly as they came — with minimal results.

Still, the Harvard research and the Times’ characterization received a lot of pushback, and understandably so. Many noted that a once tiny and obscure protest movement that emerged from the ashes of 2011′s Occupy Wall Street spent a decade getting the idea of student-loan cancellation on the American agenda, leading to President Biden’s historic move to wipe out some $400 billion in debt. Protests have also coincided with progress on climate change in Congress and on the minimum wage in states and localities. But the disappointments in other areas like post-George-Floyd police accountability suggest that we can do a lot better. At the risk of sounding like a cranky baby boomer, I believe movements need more visible leaders and more permanent structures. Look to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., his Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the voting and civil-rights laws of the mid-1960s. In an era of dictators, we need more (Martin Luther) Kings.