Rachel Maddow takes her laser focus to Mitch McConnell, and the part he plays in long-term Russian strategy to destabilize America.
"The short story here about Mitch McConnell is that he, more than anybody else in Washington, has blocked U.S. efforts to constrain or respond to Russia’s recent attacks. That’s why they’re calling him Moscow Mitch now. But in this particular instance, his state, an economically disadvantaged part of his state, got a $200 million investment from a Kremlin-connected oligarch immediately after McConnell personally stepped in to make sure sanctions on that oligarch were dropped, despite his role in what happened to our election in 2016 and despite bipartisan support even from his own party for those sanctions," Maddow said.
"But don’t just look back at this. Look forward. Right? I mean, the FBI says Russia’s going to do to our election in 2020 what they did to it in 2016. No reason to expect 2020 is going to be any different. If Oleg Deripaska is one of the two or three oligarchs Putin looks to get his work done around the world, given what we know he did in 2016, should we expect Deripaska is going to be involved in Russia’s 2020 operations as well? You have to say the odds of that are better now than they were before Mitch McConnell sold off this corner of his state. I mean, after all, before McConnell did what he did, Oleg Deripaska might have felt worried about participating in any Russian attack on us in 2020, right? He might have worried about those crippling sanctions that the U.S. Government put on him at least for a while after 2016.
"I mean, McConnell made sure those were gone, but maybe he’d worry if he did more in 2020, he would get those sanctions back or he’d be further sanctioned in his business activities. He might have had to worry about that before Mitch McConnell did what he did. But now, Oleg Deripaska’s business activities, the health of his business empire, that’s part and parcel of the hard-scrabble economy in one of Kentucky’s neediest economies."
Lots more, watch.
