McCain refused to let Manafort run 2008 convention due to Russia ties: report
Source: The Hill
The late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) rejected a bid from Paul Manafort, President Trump's former campaign chairman, to manage the 2008 Republican National Convention because of concerns over Manafort's association with Russian oligarchs, The Atlantic reported Monday.
The news outlet reported that McCain's 2008 campaign manager, Rick Davis, worked with Manafort for years at a lobbying firm. One of the firm's top clients was Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin who was recently the subject of U.S. sanctions.
Davis and Manafort reportedly helped Deripaska interact with McCain in the months leading up to the 2008 presidential campaign. Deripaska reportedly hosted a party on a yacht near Montenegro to mark McCain's 70th birthday.
The Atlantic reported that McCain grew concerned after he learned Manafort was allegedly entangled with Russian oligarchs. An aide for the late senator told the news outlet that McCain ordered Manafort and Davis to cut ties with pro-Russia clients.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/403759-mccain-refused-to-let-manafort-run-2008-convention-due-to-russia
The original story from The Atlantic: John McCain’s Epiphany About Paul Manafort
This is what made McCain so admirable to those who disagree with his politics: a profound sense of humility, openness to learning from his own error, an ability to adjust core beliefs in response to changing evidence, an insatiable hunger for rebellion.
One of John McCain’s mistakes, which he would belatedly rectify, was a relationship with the just-convicted lobbyist Paul Manafort. It was really more of an association. John McCain was the type of man who attracted loyalists, a father figure who scooped up eager wannabe sons. If you hung around his world long enough, you got a taste for how his closest aides would fight each other for his attention, how they would cudgel and knife one another to achieve primacy in his eyes. Many of these aides have proven themselves as worthy protégés, inheriting the mentor’s eagerness for an internecine fight and forming the core of the Never Trumper movement.
Some of McCain’s protégés, however, also included the ranks of lobbyists. McCain had a strange blindness to their presence, which could be most charitably described as fierce loyalty. At the same time as he sincerely railed against influence-peddlers—and presented himself as a successor to Teddy Roosevelt’s progressive-era crusading—his inner circle contained the very forces he decried. One of these loyalists was the man who eventually managed his campaign in the 2008 presidential race, Rick Davis. For nearly a decade, Davis was the named partner in Paul Manafort’s lobbying firm, called Davis, Manafort.
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