Among the greatest opponents of the administration of President Trump, one name until recently has loomed large — that of a man from the Republican Party who ran for president in 2008 — Senator John McCain of Arizona. Until several months ago, McCain was one of the leading voices in the Senate urging investigation into Trump’s campaign ties to Russia. As evidence, McCain pointed to the so-called “Dirty Dossier” published by website BuzzFeed and reported on by CNN, which detailed supposedly illicit behavior by candidate Trump while he visited Moscow in 2013. Specifically, the Dossier stated that Trump had watched Russian prostitutes urinate on a bed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Moscow while staying there on a business trip, among other accusations of unethical, illegal and morally dubious conduct.
When the Dirty Dossier was first published by BuzzFeed in early January, President Trump’s Press Secretary Sean Spicer as well as Trump himself both were quick to denounce it as utter fiction. But despite these outright denials, the Dossier continued to plague Trump’s image for some time. Ultimately, it was one factor that led to a special counsel investigation into possible obstruction of justice involving Trump and FBI research into potential Russian collusion in the election of 2016 being overseen by former FBI Director Robert Mueller. While McCain’s criticisms of Trump have quieted since the president’s announced arms deal with McCain-endorsed ally Saudi Arabia (more on this below), McCain hasn’t let up his vitriolic attacks on his longstanding bogeyman, Russia.
Just what are the origins of the “Dirty Dossier”? The Dossier was assembled by British intelligence veteran Christopher Steele and the London consulting firm he co-founded, Orbis Business Intelligence Ltd. Steele claimed that his sources were undercover operatives in Moscow. But the Dossier as published by BuzzFeed was not put together for free; no — Steele and his firm were well paid, first by “Never Trump” Republicans and then by Democrats as early as 2015 for what was supposed to be “opposition research” on Trump.
October 2016 is when it’s said the Dossier began to be distributed selectively by Steele’s firm. It should be noted that McCain has a long history of being anti-Russia (a globalist position), and his daughter, political commentator Meghan McCain, supported the candidacy of “Never Trump” candidate (and former CIA agent) Evan McMullin in 2016.
Further revelations about the Dossier have now been revealed by a new lawsuit filed by Internet entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarov in the UK. According to the suit, both McCain and a small group of other people had full copies of the Dossier sometime before it was made available publicly. Former FBI Director James Comey said the first time he saw a copy of the Dossier was on January 6, when he received it from a McCain’s aide. The person who gave it to Comey was David Kramer, a former official at the State Department and sometime Senior Fellow with the 9/11-linked Project for the New American Century (PNAC). More recently, Kramer was the senior director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University.
The man who filed the lawsuit, Aleksej Gubarov, has been accused by Steele’s Russian sources of spying on the leadership of the Democratic Party. In the Dossier, Gubarov’s U.S.-based web hosting companies Webzilla and XBT are accused of being the culprits behind the planting of computer viruses, bugs and data alliterating code on Democratic servers. Gubarov claims that the press has named him in various articles as a conspirator without any proof; he’s attempting to sue Steele’s company for defamation.
In response, Steele’s lawyer Nicola Cain, said that the part of the Dossier dealing with Gubarov was finished after the 2016 election and was considered “raw,” rather than vetted, research and was promulgated as such.
It should be noted that 80-year-old McCain is one of the Senate’s least popular members, coming in 10th in a survey of that chamber’s least popular Senators according to their constituents. Among Arizona voters, McCain currently enjoys only a 43 percent favorability rating. By most accounts, his election to a sixth term in the Senate was his most difficult election, won only with the help of a massive $12.2 million war chest.
The Arizona Senator currently is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a post he won in 2015, and in this role he oversees $600 billion in appropriations for the Pentagon. As such, he’s considered one of the most powerful men in government, and in some ways, he has greater power over the nation’s military than President Trump, with the obvious exception of ordering direct military action.
In terms of funding wars, regional actions, military hardware and special projects, McCain’s power is probably only second to Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s, which calls into question how much the Senator has been able to see eye-to-eye with the president. Certainly, before Trump took office, the president-elect was strongly in favor of winding down ongoing U.S. conflicts and avoiding new ones, with the exception of “defeating” ISIS, a mere 20,000-fighter-strong force, according to a 2014 CIA assessment.
Contrast that position with McCain, who critics charge has never heard of a war he didn’t want the United States to enter or fund in one way or another. That the two men have been in relative conflict since before Trump took office seems logical. Trump’s saying in 2015 that he was unhappy that McCain was taken prisoner in Vietnam certainly didn’t help matters any. McCain, who had half-heartedly supported Trump’s candidacy when it became clear voters in his state might put his Senatorial career in jeopardy in 2016, conveniently cut off support for Trump after the latter’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape became public.
In a now infamous photo, McCain is said to be seen conferring with the former head of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, when the Senator made a surprise visit to Syria in 2013. While it’s never been proven that the man to the left of McCain is indeed al-Baghdadi, McCain has made no secret of supporting “moderate rebels” in Syria fighting against the regime of Bashar Assad, even after many reports have shown that those same rebels have in many cases been indistinguishable from ISIS.
When President Trump traveled to the Middle East recently, he announced a massive half trillion-dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia. While the U.S. has openly declared war on ISIS, there’s speculation that at least some of the arms directed to Saudi Arabia might ultimately go to ISIS, a natural Saudi Arabia ally (both are pro-Wahhabist Sunni Muslim factions) that whistleblower organization WikiLeaks has said has been funded by Saudi Arabia in the past. If this were true, it would effectively let the U.S. sell weapons to both sides in the long-running Syrian conflict, keeping the destructive war there going for many more years.
Certainly, since the deal was announced, McCain’s withering criticisms of Trump appears to have diminished greatly or even vanished entirely. It should also be noted that unlike former President Obama, who wished to take a direct hands-on role in military action in countries such as Libya, Somalia and Yemen, President Trump has sought to have blood directly on his hands by handing over greater day-to-day responsibility for military affairs to his generals at the Pentagon.
With McCain holding up action on the new attempt in the Senate to repeal Obamacare (he was unable to vote on it due to an eye operation), it remains to be seen how much conflict the Senator will have with the president in the future. While the Dirty Dossier has been effectively discredited, McCain’s power in the Senate and Washington is still feared by many. New revelations from the lawsuit in the UK may have the effect of tarnishing some of that power.
