This seems particularly unhinged. The media is constantly buzzing about how President Trump is unstable, but McCain’s behavior seems a bit…unusual.
Presidential hopeful Senator Amy Klobuchar told a crowd on the campaign trail that the late John McCain muttered the names of dictators as he watched Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“John McCain kept reciting to me names of dictators during that speech,” the Minnesota senator said, “because he knew more than any of what we were facing as a nation, he understood it.”
She continued: “He knew because he knew this man more than any of us did.”
Or it was because he was angry he would never be president like Trump and that despite his best efforts, Trump won the election? That could be a reason too.
One of McCain’s final public statements about Trump was made in reference to Trump’s meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “The damage inflicted by President Trump’s naiveté, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats is difficult to calculate,” he said.
McCain’s role in disseminating the salacious and unverified dossier, used to interfere with Trump’s election, should not be forgotten.
“… I think he (Steele) felt that … having Sen. McCain provide it to the FBI would give it a little more oomph than it had had up until that point,” said David Kramer, former McCain associate said in a deposition.
It helped that McCain, a six-term senator and chairman of the influential Senate Armed Services Committee, “was better to be the recipient of this rather than a Democrat because if it were a Democrat, I think that the view was that it would have been dismissed as a political attack.”
It was Kramer who gave the dossier to BuzzFeed and the website subsequently published the entire thing.
Kramer acknowledged during the deposition that he gave a copy of the memos to reporters at BuzzFeed News, McClatchy news service, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio. Kramer said Steele and Simpson were aware of some of his contacts with media outlets; he said Steele specifically asked him to meet with a BuzzFeed reporter and veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, which he did.
“I, you know, became aware that other journalists either had seen it or had it,” Kramer said in the deposition. “I stressed to every person I met the sensitivity of the document, the need to verify or refute it, and not to publish it. Unless or until that would be done. And if it was refuted, it was obviously no reason to publish it.”
Kramer met with a BuzzFeed reporter on Dec. 29, 2016, at the McCain Institute in Washington, D.C. The office was closed for the holidays, he said. They met for no more than an hour.
“I was never a fan of John McCain and I will never be,” Trump said earlier this year.
(Photo By Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call)