MAJOR BREAKING NEWS: New Report Raises Possibility Putin Sought to Infiltrate 2008 GOP Presidential Ticket Through Sarah Palin

A stunning set of developments late Saturday night has set off a chain reaction in American politics that may forever alter the timeline of the Trump-Russia scandal. Proof has new revelations to add.

ABOVE: Then–private citizen Sarah Palin becomes one of former president Donald Trump’s earliest endorsers during his successful 2016 run for president.

Introduction

It’s one of the most robustly sourced—yet easily mocked—components of the decades-long Trump-Russia timeline: the fact that Donald Trump was desperately seeking Kremlin patronage as early as the 1980s and 1990s, when he made a series of trips to Russia still shrouded in mystery but believed to have involved wild sexual escapades, furious (if failed) attempts at deal-making, and contact between a future president and some of the richest men in what would very shortly become Vladimir Putin’s fiefdom.

This sordid history—recounted in harrowing detail in books like celebrated journalist Craig Unger’s highly regarded House of Trump, House of Putin—often gets ignored in contemporary accounts of the Trump-Russia scandal because, after all, would an ex-KGB agent like Putin really have played the long game on Russian imperialism precisely the way he was trained to do by the most unscrupulously patient spy agency on Earth?

It is, one supposes, far easier to imagine (and more importantly, easier to understand) a considerably more daft scenario: that Putin was among the very last, not the first, to see Trump’s potential utility as a “useful idiot” for the Kremlin. And so—the thinking goes—it’s likely that Putin cleared his hackers and propagandists to support the 2016 Trump campaign only after it was clear that vocal Putin critic Hillary Clinton was the Kremlin’s only other option.

Needless to say, this puerile narrative is bunk, as the 2,500 pages—and for that matter, 12,000 major-media sources—of the bestselling Proof trilogy make abundantly clear.

But what that trilogy did not contemplate, and indeed what it seems almost no one had contemplated until late last night—Saturday, May 7, 2022—is that the 2008 John McCain presidential campaign was actually the first national Republican presidential campaign Putin attempted to infiltrate, not through the famously anti-Russia McCain (who at the time he ran was widely thought to be a reasonable candidate to die of old age in office) but the young, largely unknown running mate who’d be president of the United States if something happened to McCain, then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

Of course, if the third of Americans susceptible to Donald Trump’s idiosyncratic con are unable to conceive of Trump as someone willing to throw America under the bus for the most lucrative business deal of his professional life in Russia—Trump Tower Moscow being an ambition he admits to having harbored for many decades, even as he admits he’s been broadly motivated by greed his entire adult life—they are even less likely to see a potential Kremlin stooge in the almost gratuitously vapid Palin, whose selection by the war hero McCain was not just an unexpected turn of events but in short order sank his entire presidential bid. Hardly any American, it seemed, wanted Sarah Palin just a heartbeat away from the American presidency.

But there’s increasing evidence to suggest that this is exactly what the Kremlin wanted.

Sarah Palin’s Public Posture on Russia

It would easy to read major-media reports of Palin’s term as Governor of Alaska and see in them little evidence of any special relationship between Gov. Palin and Alaska’s neighbor to the west. Indeed, one might make the opposite observation and declare Palin’s attitude toward Russia—at least in public—almost melodramatically standoffish.

As the Seattle Times reported in 2008, referring to the eight-nation Northern Forum that includes Russia and often sees its international meetings hosted in Anchorage,

[Governor] Palin—unlike [in] the previous administrations of Gov. Frank Murkowski [R] and Gov. Tony Knowles [D]—stopped sending representatives to Northern Forum’s annual meetings, including one last year [2007] for regional governors held in the heart of Russia’s oil territory.

“It was an opportunity for the Alaska governor to take a delegation of business leaders to the largest oil-producing region in Russia, and she would have been shaking hands with major leaders in Russia”, [Northern Forum Executive Director Priscilla] Wohl said.

Perhaps Palin feared some highly public diplomatic stumble. Perhaps she feared blowback within a Republican Party that was, at the time, staunchly anti-Russia.

Indeed—though this may credit Palin with too much foresight—she might’ve been aware that the man who was then the leading candidate for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), was famously hostile to Russia.

Or it could have been something simpler yet: that Palin was a bad governor who not only fumbled in her basic duties but regularly missed opportunities to be ambitious (though in this case she appears to have gone even farther, declining to continue a tradition in Alaska politics that it would’ve cost her nothing politically to continue).

It is hard to imagine Palin having any native hostility toward Russia. By the time she was elected governor, not only had the Cold War been over for fifteen years but, as the Seattle Times notes, Americans of Soviet descent were positively everywhere in Palin’s immediate orbit: one of every 14 high-school students in Wasilla, the town of which Palin was mayor before she ran for governor, was of “Russian [or] Ukrainian descent.”

Perhaps more telling, however, is that whatever Sarah Palin’s attitude toward funding or staffing or attending meetings of the Northern Forum, the new GOP governor did indeed meet with a top Russian official—in private—while she was the State of Alaska’s chief executive. And in fact this meeting now appears to be one of the most lied-about meetings the Republican Party’s 2008 vice presidential nominee ever attended.

Russia Reaches Out to Palin

As reported by the Times in September 2008 (in an article entitled, “Are Russian Ties a Palin Priority?”), in May 2007 a Russian politician by the name of Vladimir Yetylin came to the United States on a diplomatic mission. But he didn’t go to Washington; indeed, he didn’t go to the “Lower 48” at all. Instead, he travelled to the largest city in Alaska—Anchorage—to see Alaska’s then-Governor.

During the Palin-Yetylin meeting, all of the following allegedly happened, per Yetylin:

(1) Yetylin invited Palin to come to Russia.

(2) Palin expressed an interest in going to Russia.

(3) Yetylin judged that Palin was very “modern and forward-thinking.”

The Times adds the following information:

(4) The Yetylin-Palin meeting took place at a time when Putin might not have been happy with GOP leadership, as “it was a time of growing tension between the [George W.] Bush administration and [Putin].”

(5) A Palin ally, Alaska Republican Mead Treadwell, sought to arrange a trip by Palin to Russia in summer 2008, perhaps in response to Yetylin’s open invitation, with the trip scuttled only because of an unexpected “special session of the state legislature.”

(6) “Opportunities abound for Alaska governors to engage in Russian diplomacy, with the state host to several organizations focusing on Arctic issues. Anchorage is the seat of the Northern Forum, an 18-year-old organization that represents the leaders of regional governments in Russia [and six other countries].”

While Palin never did go to Russia, the six points above—along with one another, this being Palin’s never-explained statement, during her infamous Katie Couric interview, to the effect that her gubernatorial administration had had “trade missions back and forth” with Russia—are worth some new consideration in light of the recent breaking news in the United States here in May 2022.

But before we go there, Proof must add a seventh (or eighth) data-point to this analysis: a May 2009 Atlantic article that revealed that Yetylin’s invitation to have Palin come to Russia wasn’t the first such invitation Palin had received. The magazine reported that soon after as she was elected to office in December 2006, Palin had a communication from Russian Federation Honorary Consul Steve Smirnoff, who not only asked her to “open a dialogue [with Russia]” but do something more audacious: “be instrumental in reviving relationships between Alaska and Russia, and the rest of the world.”

Smirnoff’s oddly punctuated entreaty appeared to position Sarah Palin as the linchpin to Russia “reviving [its] relationships” with “the rest of the world,” particularly the U.S., at a time when Putin was facing international scrutiny—prepare to experience some déjà vu—over Russian war crimes originating from Kremlin aggression in Europe, specifically in Chechnya, a breakaway Russian republic that was hoping to remain independent from the Kremlin but which Russia’s autocratic leader was determined to bring to heel at the barrel of a gun. The horribly bloody Second Chechen War would last until 2009, though in August 2008 Putin would nevertheless ramp up his feverish imperialist ambitions by invading the former Soviet republic of Georgia as well.

In other words, just as Vladimir Yetylin had good reason to want the chief executive of America’s largest state by land area to feel kindly toward Russia when he sought a Palin trip to Russia in 2007—almost getting it in 2008—when Smirnoff angled to have Palin become one of America’s leading emissaries to Russia in 2006, indeed a U.S. pol capable of “reviving relationships between….[Russia] and the rest of the world,” it was at a time when Vladimir Putin desperately needed there to be some public sign that he and his agents were capable of being warmly received by someone in elected office in the United States, even if it were “only” the Governor of the lightly populated Alaska.

Yetylin’s assessment of Palin as “modern and forward-thinking” suggests that the Russian assessment of Palin had more to do with her openness—exhibited in what fashion or context we don’t know—to comity with Russia rather than the mere proximity of her administration to Russian soil. In my years writing on Russia as a Trump biographer, I’ve consistently found that Russian politicians call Americans some version of “forward-thinking” when they mean to say the person in question is uniquely open to a historic detente between the two longtime Cold War superpowers.

If that seems far-fetched to you, consider that while the Russian-born Smirnoff was a naturalized American, he had been (as his 2016 obituary explains) “[wearing] out his passport over and over again” via trips between the United States and Russia from 1977—the year he was named an emissary to the Soviet Union—to the time of his letter to Palin in 2006. Not only did Smirnoff have “a passion of all things Russian”, but his work as a transpacific emissary was sufficiently high level that he had met Russians at all levels of government—including Kremlin executives such as President Boris Yeltsin himself. {Note: To be clear, Smirnoff is not accused of any wrongdoing here or anywhere else, and his outreach to Palin was ignored by the new chief executive of Alaska. The point is that Smirnoff was well-connected in Russia, wanted better relations between the United States and the Kremlin, and appeared to earnestly believe Palin could fill that role even before there had been any significant speculation about her seeking higher office in D.C.}

Yet Palin did not meet with Smirnoff—so while the well-connected, Russian-born U.S. citizen may well have had high hopes for Palin in 2006, we have to look to 2007 (i.e., the Vladimir Yetylin meeting with Palin) to get a better sense of how Palin was being sized up by the Kremlin. Indeed, the Yetylin-Palin meeting may help explain one of the strangest (and arguably most deceitful) things Palin ever said to American media.

Palin’s Mysterious Trade Missions To (and From) Russia

So what, precisely, was Palin referring to when she told CBS News that she personally had foreign policy experience because of “trade missions back and forth” with Russia?

The simple answer is, we don’t know. But perhaps it’s time for someone to find out.

Per a 2008 report by the Associated Press (summarized by the New York Daily News),

[Palin] has not met with Russian leaders or delegations, negotiated any Russian issues or visited the country, according to an Associated Press review of records from the governor’s office.

The Daily News opined that Palin’s statement on “trade missions” was an “odd lie.”

Yet it wasn’t entirely a lie, as it turns out.

As we now know, Palin did meet with at least one “Russian leader”: Vladimir Yetylin.

And lest you think Yetylin doesn’t deserve that appellation, think again. Even if you only looked at Yetylin’s Wikipedia page rather than doing a deeper dive—as Proof has—you would learn that through the end of 2003, many years into Putin’s increasingly autocratic reign atop the Kremlin superstructure, Mr. Yetylin worked in Moscow as a member of the Russian government’s lower house (the equivalent of America’s House of Representatives). You would learn, too, that the Soviet-born Yetylin was a member of the Supreme Soviet Committee on Foreign Affairs until the Soviet Union’s demise.

That’s right: Yetylin was for several years a top Soviet expert on foreign relations.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Yetylin undertook a series of unsuccessful runs for the Russia Duma throughout the 1990s; his best placement on the lists was second—an election he lost to Trump family friend Roman Abramovich, which at a minimum means a Russian oligarch close to the American businessman who would become Putin’s greatest fan and ally knew who Vladimir Yetylin was (indeed had been solely focused on him for months, in the midst of a political campaign) at the time Yetylin flew to Anchorage to invite Palin to Russia so she could be the bridge between Russia and America that Roman’s friend Donald Trump would subsequently become instead.

If this sounds a bit attenuated, Proof is glad to report that matters are simplified by the fact that Vladimir Yetylin was for years a political adviser to Trump family friend Roman Abramovich, and indeed was finally elected to the Duma, Russia’s version of our American House of Representatives, exclusively due to Abramovich’s largesse; indeed, Yetylin actually took Abramovich’s seat in the Duma when Abramovich was elected to an even higher office within Putin’s orbit.

Yetylin’s party at the time? The pro-Putin People’s Party of the Russian Federation.

So this is the man who sized up Palin—in person—as a likely Kremlin ally in May of 2007, fifteen months before GOP presidential candidate John McCain picked Palin as his vice presidential running mate but (more importantly) just a few months before American media began noting, as the Spokane Spokesman-Review did in this late 2007 article, that speculation had begun to run rampant nationwide that Sarah Palin would “leave Juneau for higher [federal] office [in Washington] before her term expires.”

{Note: The New Yorker pegs July 2007—less than 60 days after the Putin-Yetyin summit—as the start of a national frenzy over Sarah Palin as a potential 2008 vice presidential candidate. According to the magazine, however, the search for a GOP vice presidential candidate began in February 2007—three months before a Kremlin-linked Russian official came to see Palin.}

So a top political adviser for a Russian oligarch who is a widely recognized member of “Team Putin” meets with Palin at a time when she is seen as a candidate for federal office; this adviser is a Russia Duma member who, like Putin, previously worked for the Soviet Union’s Communist Party (in this case, in the Supreme Soviet Committee on Foreign Affairs); this Kremlin agent’s meeting with Palin results in him assessing her to be “forward-thinking” in her approach to American relations with the Kremlin; Palin appears to reference this meeting with a Kremlin agent in a nationally televised CBS News interview, calling it a “trade mission” that was part of a “back and forth” between her administration and the Russian government; and the AP responds to all these facts by falsely declaring “Palin has not met with Russian leaders or delegations.”

But it appears that the AP, one of the most reliable news organizations in the world, got these critical facts wrong because it did a thorough review of “records from the governor’s office” and could find nothing in Palin’s official records about a meeting with Vladimir Yetylin. It may also have gotten its facts wrong because certain of Sarah Palin’s agents at least appear to have lied to the media. As the Atlantic wrote in 2009,

Patricia Eckert, who works in the [Alaska] governor’s Office of International Trade, confirmed that Palin had not held meetings with Russian officials during her term. The closest interaction she cited was when the Seattle-based Russian consul general attended a reception for the diplomatic corps that Palin hosted in Fairbanks.

Eckert couldn’t have been referring to either Yetylin or Smirnoff, or Palin’s meeting with Yetylin in Anchorage, so while Palin’s then-employee deserves kudos for telling the Atlantic of a potential contact between Palin and a Russian national that the AP had not been able to dig up a year earlier, Eckert still failed to draw Palin’s meeting with Yetylin—elided from Palin administration records—to U.S. media’s attention.

And yet, the meeting did occur.

Which means that not only did Gov. Sarah Palin meet with a Kremlin agent under the circumstances described above, but she did so in a way that her official records either hid or elided altogether—and did so just a matter of months before becoming the vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party.

How Palin Became a GOP Vice Presidential Nominee

The story is one many of us who follow politics have heard for years: GOP political operative Steve Schmidt was responsible for 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain making the catastrophic, seemingly inexplicable decision to tap Palin as his running mate. This is the story that’s been told in bestselling books, on television, in podcasts, on radio, in newspapers, and across social media for well over a decade.

And now Steve Schmidt has publicly declared—in the last twelve hours—that it’s a lie.

Even more importantly, Schmidt has told America the truth, a truth that is harrowing because it dovetails with the troubling facts about Palin and Russia recounted above.

In what may be one of the most stunning threads ever posted on Twitter, Schmidt now says the following about the 2008 John McCain campaign (emphasis in original):

There was a pro-democracy faction [inside the 2008 GOP presidential campaign] and there was a pro-Russia faction….the pro-Russia faction was led by a Washington lobbyist [Rick Davis] who was in business with [future Trump campaign manager] Paul Manafort. Like Manafort, [Davis] had a Trump Tower residence. He was in charge of the [2008 McCain] campaign’s finances and bankrupted the campaign through a series of unethical transactions and markups with Manafort and a company [allegedly funded in part by Putin agent and Manafort co-boss Oleg Deripaska] called 3eDC.

….

[Senator McCain] tolerated his campaign chairman [Davis] being in business [with] and working for [Vladimir] Putin through his association with [Manafort co-boss and Kremlin puppet Viktor] Yanukovych, [the Kremlin-backed Ukrainian president].

[McCain was] the same as Trump [in this regard].

Yanukovych was Putin’s puppet in Ukraine. The story of American corruption in Ukraine starts here. It starts in John McCain’s [2008 campaign] operation, not Trump’s.

Did you know that [McCain] was taken on Oleg Deripaska’s yacht in Montenegro for his seventieth birthday by his top aide [Davis]? It was a McCain guy [Davis] who represented the interests of the [Kremlin] in the Montenegro independence referendum….[and] this is why the [McCain] campaign went kaboom in July of 2008 and [McCain] went from front-runner to middle seat on a Southwest flight with the national press corps gathered in New Hampshire waiting for him to drop out.

That is when John McCain called me and asked me for help. It is the opening scene of [the nonfiction political-thriller film] Game Change. I helped [McCain], and his corresponding comeback made him the Republican nominee for President of the United States.

….

Here is the serious part. The person I’m talking about, [Rick Davis], is the one who was in charge of vetting the [2008 GOP] vice presidential candidate, [Sarah Palin]. True. Putin’s guy, [Rick Davis], the one who was Viktor Yanukovych’s henchman, was in charge of all of the due diligence around [McCain’s selection of] Palin.

As Proof established in the 2018 New York Times bestseller Proof of Collusion, at the time Rick Davis was running the McCain campaign in 2008, Davis’s business partner, Manafort, was under contract with self-admitted Kremlin agent Oleg Deripaska to advance Vladimir Putin’s interests not just inside Russia and Ukraine but the United States as well. Indeed, McCain campaign manager Davis’s business partner Manafort was getting $10 million annually to advance Putin’s interests in America—a course of foreign lobbying that began with Manafort moving into Trump Tower and rekindling a friendship with Donald Trump that he had had since the 1980s, when Manafort took on Trump as the first client in his newly minted consulting business.

As Schmidt indicates above, Manafort was a top political adviser to the very President of Ukraine whose betrayal of that country in 2013 led to the Euromaidan Revolution and Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea (see 2020 Proof bestseller Proof of Corruption for more). Schmidt alleges that Davis was also an adviser to Kremlin puppet Yanukovych.

What Schmidt does not say—but Proof will now, with citation to the New York Times—is that Kremlin agent Manafort expected Davis’s closeness to the 2008 Republican presidential candidate to allow him (Manafort) to get close to McCain as well, indeed to be McCain’s convention manager for the 2008 Republican National Convention.

As the Times reports, McCain rejected Manafort for a campaign role Manafort felt was his “birthright” precisely because McCain believed—correctly—that Manafort (who we now know was under contract with the Kremlin at the time) was too close to Putin.

In view of all the foregoing, why John McCain let Manafort’s business partner Rick Davis pick his vice presidential running mate is a mystery that we may never unravel.

{Note: While Manafort did his work for Putin as co-partner—with Rick Davis—of a political consulting operation literally named Davis Manafort, The Nation notes that “Davis has claimed no connection to his partner Manafort’s controversial activities in Ukraine.” But The Nation quickly adds a caveat that seems to swallow Davis’s protestations whole: “Davis nevertheless hired [for his pro-Kremlin work for Oleg Deripaska in Montenegro] at least three specialists recommended by Manafort, from the same team Manafort used for Yanukovych’s victory [in Ukraine], to work [for Davis and Deripaska] on Montenegro’s independence referendum. They [the specialists] included Russian political operative Andrei Ryabchuk, an elections specialist who had previously worked on pro-Putin campaigns in Russia. Ryabchuk told The Nation that he was “recruited by Manafort’s people” out of Moscow to the Ukraine operation and then on to Montenegro. Davis’s team was vetted by Montenegro’s Russian ambassador [Milan] Rocen, who…return[ed] from Moscow to oversee the [Kremlin-supported] independence campaign [in Montenegro].”

The Nation observes, too, that, despite Davis’s claims, his boss in 2008—John McCain—was so absolutely certain that Davis’s co-partnership in Davis Manafort meant he had ties to the Russian operation to thwart democracy in Ukraine that, as the outlet wrote, “McCain was…so angry about Davis Manafort’s role in stifling Ukraine’s [late 2004 pro-democracy] ‘Orange Revolution’ that he almost removed Davis as [his 2008] campaign manager.”}

Palin’s Strange Relationship with Russia

What we do know for certain is that Sarah Palin has had something odd going on with or involving Russia from the very start of her selection as McCain’s running mate.

It wasn’t just that Palin was at great pains (sometimes almost comically so) to give the impression she had significant experience in dealing with the Russians (without ever getting specific about her experience with Russia or apparently allowing it to be memorialized in her administration’s official records), but that in the rare moments she seemed to know something about foreign policy it did, oddly enough, often have to do with Russia—but in ways that were deeply unnerving, rather than reassuring.

To be very clear, Proof is not saying that Palin had any foreign policy experience at the time McCain selected her; or that she acquired significant foreign policy knowledge during the 2008 presidential campaign; or that any of the foreign policy statements that Palin made during that 2008 presidential campaign were of her own devising.

In fact, Proof is submitting, as any political journalist alive during the 2008 election would, that Palin’s foreign policy knowledge that year—slim as it was—was entirely the product of outside coaching. Indeed, the McCain campaign even admitted as much, noting several times, as delicately as it could, that Palin was getting a crash course in international politics though her surprise appearance on the GOP presidential ticket.

So who was providing all this coaching to Sarah Palin? We don’t know for certain, but Schmidt certainly implies, in his Saturday statement, that the same man who was solely responsible for determining whether Palin was ready to be a vice presidential nominee—Rick Davis—might have had a major role in ensuring, once Palin had been picked at his suggestion, that Palin indeed had the political chops Davis had sought to convince a dubious John McCain the 44 year-old new Alaskan governor possessed.

Palin in Reno

Consider: in October 2008, less than a month before the 2008 presidential election, Palin made a statement during a political speech in Reno, Nevada that was quickly dubbed “strange” by Blake Hounshell in Foreign Policy. Hounshell said that Palin had come up with a “far-fetched” foreign policy scenario—or, we might say now, whoever had been coaching Palin had focused her on such a scenario—Palin’s deployment of which was bizarre. Here’s what Palin said at the time, speaking of 2008 Democratic presidential candidate (and future President of the United States) Barack Obama:

After the Russian army invaded the nation of Georgia [earlier in 2008], Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

Palin’s statement—especially coming from one of the four people in the United States who was, depending on how things played out, just 90 days away from moving into the White House—was startling not only because it appeared to speculate about a Russian invasion of Europe (which would have in 2008, as it has in 2022, risked World War III); not only because no one anywhere was talking about Putin launching a third war from Moscow (as his army was already engaged in major hostilities in both Chechnya and Georgia); but because Ukraine had not been a topic of discussion in the 2008 presidential campaign. There was no shortage of hot spots around the world for Palin to talk about in Reno—and to her credit she did mention some of them, such as Iran and Iraq—so her referencing Ukraine in the context of ongoing Russian aggression in two quite different places (Chechnya and Georgia) came out of left field, as Blake Hounshell and undoubtedly other journalists quickly registered at the time.

Notably, just days after Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2014, Palin was on future Trump domestic policy adviser Sean Hannity’s Fox News television program claiming that she—the same person who’d said so many dim-witted things in the public arena there are now Ranker articles cataloging them—uniquely foresaw Russia’s invasion of Ukraine six years in advance using nothing but her own down-home common sense. As she told Hannity at the time, “Anyone who carries the commonsense gene would know that Putin doesn’t change his stripes. He hearkens back to the era of the czars, and he wants that Russian empire to grow again. He wants to exert huge power and dominance. So he has to get to those border areas and he has to capture them.” Palin seemed very keen to eliminate even the possibility that her “foreknowledge” of Russia’s designs on Ukraine had come from anyone else.

In the same March interview, reports MSNBC—and as Putin was committing war crimes in Ukraine—Palin had even more to say about Putin. Specifically, she chose to sing his praises. “People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president [Obama] as one who wears mom jeans.”

Given that Palin likely couldn’t have located Ukraine on a map in 2008—as former Trump National Security Advisor John Bolton recently intimated was the case with Trump during his presidency—who that was close to her on the McCain campaign had sufficient knowledge of Ukraine to put such a strange talking point in her ear?

Is it reasonable, here, to note that the very man who picked Palin for the 2008 GOP ticket was then (according to Schmidt) advising the President of Ukraine, a Kremlin puppet?

Is it reasonable to say that Sarah Palin raising the prospect of Putin invading Ukraine moved the Overton Window on the issue in a measurable way—meaning that, for the first time, the possibility of Russia invading Ukraine was suddenly on America’s map of acceptable political discourse and conceivable geopolitical outcomes?

Perhaps we should put an even finer point on this, using the information we have now:

1. In 2008, Yanukovych was fresh off a term as Ukraine’s Prime Minister;

2. Yanukovych (allegedly advised by McCain’s campaign manager and Sarah Palin’s patron, Rick Davis, as well as by 2016 Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort) spent 2008 and 2009 preparing for the 2010 Ukrainian presidential elections, which he won;

3. Vladimir Putin’s perspective on Ukraine in 2008 was that if his chosen puppet (Yanukovych) were to lose the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election to vocal anti-Kremlin crusader Yulia Tymoshenko, it might necessitate the Kremlin taking dramatic acts to protect Kremlin interests in Ukraine, most notably in invading Crimea, the southernmost region of Ukraine;

4. it was therefore part of the calculations of the Kremlin in October of 2008, and just as importantly a necessary part of the calculations of the Kremlin puppet Yanukovych’s political adviser corps (including Davis and Manafort) in 2008, to consider the likelihood of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine if Manafort and Davis couldn’t ensure the fruition of Yanukovych’s slow rise to power in Ukraine in 2010; and

5. Sarah Palin declaring—just weeks before an election it was perfectly clear (by October 2008) she would lose—that if the Democratic Party ticket (comprising Obama and future United States president Joe Biden) were to win and Vladimir Putin were to at some point between 2008 and 2012 invade Ukraine it would not be Davis’s, Manafort’s, Yanukovych’s or Putin’s fault but the fault of Obama and Biden was therefore precisely the message the Kremlin wanted to release.

In fact, the message Palin may well have gotten from a man arguably in league with Kremlin agents in 2008 is exactly the message both the Kremlin and the Republican Party are pushing today, 14 years later. Donald Trump in particular—whose 2016 run for president was advised by Kremlin agent Paul Manafort—seems singularly focused on blaming Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on two people: Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Worth noting is that Palin made her Reno speech the very same month that The Nation published a report entitled, “John McCain’s Kremlin Ties.” The report’s sub-headline revealed that “John McCain’s political advisors”—including the man responsible for Palin being in Reno in October 2008, Rick Davis—“have advanced Putin’s imperial ambitions.” These same ambitions led Putin to illegally invade Ukraine 75 days ago, in late February of 2022.

The Nation report that preceded Palin’s bizarre 2008 allusion to a Russia-Ukraine war accused the McCain adviser that picked Palin of “cultivat[ing] deep ties with Russia’s oligarchy…[and] promot[ing] the Kremlin’s geopolitical and economic interests, as well as some of its most unsavory business figures, through greedy cynicism and geopolitical stupor. The most notable example is…how McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis, advanced what became a key victory for the Kremlin: gaining control over the small but strategically important country of Montenegro.”

Consider that the Nation not only here accuses the leader of the Republican Party in 2008 of running a political team that “promoted the Kremlin’s geopolitical interests” but more specifically reports that the man who chose Palin for the 2008 GOP ticket sought to aid Putin in forcibly exerting dominion over his European neighbors—the very topic that Palin suddenly decided to wax poetic on days before a U.S. national election.

In short, had The Nation known what Palin was going to say in Reno days later, it surely would have been compelled to note that Palin was advancing the very same “Kremlin geopolitical interests” as the men who had selected her to be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

But The Nation didn’t stop its October 2008 report on the GOP and Russia there.

It said, in no uncertain terms, that the political advising operation Rick Davis was at once orchestrating in the United States and in the former Soviet republic of Ukraine was “underwritten by powerful Russian business interests”—which presumably was the case indirectly if not directly when Davis (per Schmidt) made the otherwise wholly inexplicable decision to push Sarah Palin of all people on an unsuspecting McCain. If Davis had chosen a vice presidential candidate for the Republican Party that wasn’t to the Kremlin’s liking, it could’ve harmed his bottom line and future business interests.

How do we know that Davis may well have been thinking this way? Because we know for certain that this is what Davis’s business partner, Paul Manafort, was thinking—in the same circumstances, and for the same reason—when he begged Trump friend Thomas Barrack to help him “get to” the 2016 Republican presidential candidate in order to “get whole” with Russian oligarch and self-admitted Kremlin agent Oleg Deripaska: the very man Davis and Manafort were working for so diligently in 2008.

When Davis allegedly helped rig a Russian referendum in Montenegro for Putin in the 2000s, it was to help the Kremlin, per the Nation, “establish a Russian outpost in the Mediterranean”; by raising the seemingly distant prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine and then preemptively blaming it on Americans (Obama and Biden), Palin was helping Putin to establish a “Russian outpost” of precisely the same sort—simply on a different sea, the Black Sea.

These synchronicities are too many and too precise to be ignored by U.S. intelligence agents and other federal investigators, particularly if (see below) Sarah Palin is about to make her way back to D.C. as a powerful federal official. And by the same token, the description The Nation gave of Montenegro in 2008 could serve almost as well as a description of what Ukraine will become if Putin attains his military victory there:

Montenegro is [now] nicknamed “Moscow by the Mediterranean.” Russian oligarchs control huge chunks of the country’s industry and prized coastline—and Russians exert a powerful influence over the country’s political culture. “Montenegro is almost a new Russian colony, as rubles flow in to buy property and business in the tiny state,” Denis MacShane, [former UK Prime Minister] Tony Blair’s former Europe minister, wrote in Newsweek in June. The takeover of Montenegro has been a Russian geostrategic victory—quietly accomplished, paradoxically enough, with the help of McCain and his top aides.

In mid-September [2008] The Nation published a photo of McCain celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006 at a yacht party….On the same day one of the largest mega-yachts in the world, the Queen K, was moored in the same bay of Kotor. This was where the real party was. The owner of the Queen K was known as “Putin’s oligarch”: Oleg Deripaska, controlling shareholder of the Russian aluminum giant RusAl, currently listed as the ninth-richest man in the world, with a rap sheet as abundant as his wealth. By mid-2005 [the year that Manafort signed his contract with Deripaska and the Kremlin, and a year before he moved into Trump Tower] Deripaska had already virtually taken control of Montenegro’s economy by snapping up its aluminum plant, KAP—which accounts for up to 40% of the country’s GDP and some 80% of its export earnings—in a non-transparent privatization tender strongly criticized by NGO watchdogs, Montenegrin politicians and journalists.

The Nation has learned that Deripaska told one of his closest associates that he bought the plant “because Putin encouraged him to do it.” The reason: “the Kremlin wanted an area of influence in the Mediterranean.”

….

Russia’s virtual takeover of Montenegro was well under way by January 2006, when Rick Davis introduced Deripaska to McCain at a villa in Davos, Switzerland. They met again seven months later, at a reception in Montenegro celebrating McCain’s birthday, as reported in The Washington Post. The story of how Deripaska, 40, rose from a Cossack village to become a Putin-blessed aluminum tycoon with an estimated $40 billion fortune does not begin with a lemonade stand and old-fashioned elbow grease. Like most post-Soviet success stories, Deripaska’s rise began abruptly and violently, during the chaotic reign of Boris Yeltsin.

…

Deripaska understands that success in Russia today comes from a mixture of brute force, political influence and personal connections. In 2001, about a year after Putin signed a decree granting legal immunity to Boris Yeltsin’s family, Deripaska married Yeltsin’s granddaughter, thereby cementing his own immunity and power.

{Note: Proof underlines that this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Yeltsin’s name in this account.}

How much more desperately did Putin want influence in America in 2008 than he ever could’ve wanted influence in Montenegro three years earlier? It isn’t a hard question to answer—especially as the Nation told its readers in clear terms in 2008 that Putin was personally invested in augmenting Deripaska’s influence in the U.S. specifically. One part of that plan was getting Manafort on the Kremlin payroll, which Deripaska did in 2005 at a time that Rick Davis was Manafort’s business partner, but so committed was Putin to this effort that he was still working on it himself, per the Nation, years later:

Putin has lobbied for Deripaska’s U.S. visa. In an interview with [French media outlet] Le Monde earlier this year, Putin complained, “I have asked my American colleagues why [Deripaska cannot get a U.S. visa]. If you have reasons for not delivering him a visa, if you have documents on illegal activities, give us them…. They give us nothing, explain to us nothing, and forbid him from entry.”

If Putin couldn’t have Deripaska in the U.S. during the 2008 presidential election, he at least had the next best thing: two of Deripaska’s top agents, Davis and Manafort.

Nor did Deripaska sit idle as Putin—one of the most powerful men in the world—worked as his personal advocate. Per the Nation, to try to expand his influence inside America, “Deripaska turned to powerful GOP figures to solve his [visa] problem.”

One of those men was 2008 McCain campaign adviser Richard Burt, who would next be seen in U.S. politics co-writing Donald Trump’s historically pro-Russia policy in March of 2016.

Yes, really.

{Note: In 2007, Burt was working for Henry Kissinger—the man who introduced Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner to Putin’s self-described “friend” Dimitri Simes, who co-wrote Trump’s Russia policy with Burt, became the Trump campaign’s top Russia adviser thereafter, and fled to Russia the moment Kremlin spy Maria Butina was arrested by the FBI in July 2018, as she had named him as one of her handlers in the United States. Simes now works for the Kremlin as a highly paid on-air propagandist. Yes, really; feel free to Google any part of that narrative.}

What It All Means

To be clear, just as most of the writing about the Trump-Russia scandal (including the writing here at Proof and in the Proof trilogy) positions Mr. Trump not as a scheming Kremlin agent but a voluntarily useful idiot for Kremlin schemes—a position Trump allowed himself to be in because he thought it would profit him financially—Proof is not here suggesting that Palin had the intelligence, wherewithal, or gumption to hatch a complex 2008 collusion plot with the Kremlin. To put it mildly, that’s clearly not so.

But what does appear likely from the evidence we have—though more investigation is required to confirm it—is that Putin and the Kremlin had the desire, the means, and the instruments to assess Palin’s utility as a useful idiot for the Kremlin in 2008 and to use the same instruments to try to bump the 2008 GOP presidential campaign in the Kremlin’s direction as they would later use to do the very same thing to the 2016 GOP presidential campaign.

It must be noted, too, that Russian intelligence would have made the same assessment of both Trump and Palin that has now been made by countless American journalists: (1) neither Trump nor Palin have any earnest core beliefs; (2) both Trump and Palin are amenable to participating in acts of government corruption; (3) both Trump and Palin are venal; (4) both Trump and Palin are dull-witted and incurious, charismatic without being leaders or visionaries, and interested in bucking conventional wisdom merely as a matter of branding rather than a matter of principle (to include the wisdom that says neither Putin nor anyone associated with the Kremlin can be trusted); and (5) both Trump and Palin were political outsiders with so little natural cachet within the GOP that they would be inclined to feel enormous gratitude to anyone at all—whether U.S. native or a foreign national—willing to work to put them on the national political map.

Indeed, Palin may well have presented to the Kremlin as a “[2008] Plan A” to Trump’s “[2016] Plan B,” for a host of compelling reasons: (a) unlike Trump, Palin was only on the Republican ticket as a vice presidential candidate, meaning that she would receive less scrutiny than her running mate even as she would (due to John McCain’s age and health) be in a prime position to eventually occupy a role no one really anticipated for her when they entered the voting booth; (b) Palin didn’t have a decades-long history of cozying up to the Kremlin like Trump did, making her a far less risky associate for a Kremlin that certainly wouldn’t want its influence operations to be detected by U.S. intelligence; (c) Palin had a better chance of reaching the White House, as an initial matter, than Trump, not only because she had more political experience than Trump but because she didn’t bear the burden of being her ticket’s main attraction (and main focus of attention), thereby diminishing the importance and visibility of her personal faults; (d) Palin’s candidacy would have the benefit of being historic—if elected she would be America’s first woman vice president—whereas Trump’s would offer no such attractive luster, given that he was an old rich white man who had already been in the public eye in America for decades; and (e) Palin was likely to be more pliable and susceptible to outside advice than the famously narcissistic, recalcitrant Trump.

But there is also something else to consider: that, as the Proof trilogy has outlined, Trump floated (through his attorney Michael Cohen) presidential runs in both 2008 and 2012, after spending the twenty years before that telling anyone who would listen that he intended to be President of the United States one day, all of which may have made the Kremlin feel—even if Trump were their top pick to be a useful idiot for the Kremlin—that the New York City businessman wasn’t ever going to make good on his promises and run for president. In short, Putin and his advisers would have had good reason to believe, as the November 2008 election in the United States approached, that Palin was the best option they were likely to get in the near term. She presented to the Kremlin, which was then in the midst of two wars and contemplating a third—all of which the United States could interfere with in gutting ways either unilaterally or through its influence upon NATO—as an opportunity it simply couldn’t pass up.

And none of this required much of Palin herself at all.

While the Kremlin failed to get its agent Manafort into the “convention manager” role Manafort would successfully secure with Trump eight years later, it did have Davis atop the McCain campaign. And it had a McCain running mate who well knew she owed her national political career to Davis. All Palin needed to do, really, was be herself—with perhaps some light guidance from the outside—in order to destabilize America.

For instance, while it is not hard to find statements from Palin that must be taken as stridently anti-Russia—for instance, as the Nation observes, “in her first major [in-campaign] interview [Palin said] that the United States might have to go to war with Russia one day in order to protect Georgia”—those who’ve researched and published on the Trump-Russia scandal know that the Kremlin doesn’t back a U.S. politician because that politician is a policy wonk with a carefully drawn-up agenda that will in all particulars benefit Russia, but rather because American politics can be unsettled, to the benefit of Russia, simply by being headlined by unscrupulous “outsiders” who are liable to say something both domestically and internationally destabilizing at the drop of a hat. Certainly, Putin has always known that the United States will not get directly engaged in a conflict between the former Soviet Union and any of its non-NATO ex-republics; he relies upon this even today, as his soldiers are committing war crimes en masse in Ukraine. So Palin’s statement about Georgia in 2008 was no actual threat to the Kremlin, while the very fact that she’d say something so reckless and stupid was a grave threat to the continued stable operation of political debate in the United States.

And after all, what did Trump most threaten, during his years in office, as much as anything else? The continued stable operation of political debate in the United States.

We see the fallout from Trump’s destabilization of American political discourse in the nation’s inability to effectively respond to the worst public health crisis to hit America (or the world) in over a century. In other words, there are consequences to U.S. leaders saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, whether it’s suggesting that Americans may be able to save themselves from COVID-19 by injecting themselves with bleach or a failed vice presidential candidate giving a partisan political speech out of turn on the night America elected the first Black president in its long, racially fraught history.

If you’re not familiar with that latter near-disaster, you should be. So let’s discuss it.

Was Palin Planning to Disrupt the Transfer of Power in 2008?

In considering some of the evidence that Sarah Palin was the Kremlin’s “Plan A” and Trump its “Plan B,” it’s worth considering, too, the other bombshell revelation Steve Schmidt dropped last night. It relates to the peaceful transfer of power from a GOP president (George W. Bush) to the nation’s first-ever Black president (Barack Obama, a Democrat) in 2008.

According to Schmidt, on the night in November 2008 that John McCain ended his campaign for president and acknowledged the peaceful transfer of power from GOP rule of the executive branch to a Democratic administration, Sarah Palin wanted to break with centuries of American tradition and address the nation. Moreover, it is clear from Schmidt’s comments on Saturday that, unlike the gracious speech McCain actually did deliver on the night of November 4, 2008, the speech Palin wanted to give would’ve looked backward rather than forward—and been highly partisan in nature.

Again, it’s worth noting that such a speech would have been historically disruptive to the natural order of U.S. politics with respect to the acceptance of election results—an issue all America is now singularly focused upon in 2022. As Steve Schmidt puts it on Twitter, the scene below (from Game Change) is “almost precisely what happened” during his “last interaction with the profoundly unfit [to serve] loon Sarah Palin”:

The Lincoln Watchman👀🇺🇸 @LincolnWatchman

Did you know that @WoodyHarrelson played @SteveSchmidtSES in the 2012 movie “Game Change?” The plot revolved around the McCain campaign and @SarahPalinUSA. Here is a clip of Steve “Woody” Schmidt savagely shredding Palin:

In the clip, Palin insists on giving an election-night “concession speech” to the nation that she had previously (without any support from, or even knowledge by, top McCain advisers) “prepared” in advance. The purpose of the speech, Palin told Schmidt at the time, would be to “salute John [McCain] for everything he’s done for this country.”

Needless to say, Palin’s speech wouldn’t likely have incited (let alone sought to incite) violence in the way that Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 speech conspicuously did do and meant to do. But it would nevertheless have disrupted the transfer of power in at least three ways: (1) it would’ve been the first “concession” speech delivered by a vice presidential candidate in modern American political history, and in so being would have suggested to the nation a split between McCain and his running mate (as even if Palin’s speech saluted McCain, the very fact that it had been given would clearly seem to indicate Palin “going rogue”, which as it happens was the title of Sarah Palin’s 2009 political autobiography); (2) it would give Palin a chance to address America via words that had not been carefully vetted by any political professional, a frightening prospect given that Obama’s election had undoubtedly caused some unrest among militants on the far right, who may have been waiting for a signal that mischief was afoot or that they were being encouraged to commit acts of mischief; (3) it would’ve made election night, as Schmidt told Palin at the time, “about you [Palin]” rather than the country or President-elect Obama, meaning it would have made November 4, 2008 into a launch party for Sarah Palin’s then-presumptive 2012 presidential campaign. Indeed, if Palin had any future political ambitions at all in November of 2008, an address to the nation on election night would certainly have been an ideal time to take pot-shots at the man she’d be running against in four years.

In other words, Palin could have profoundly disrupted election night in 2008.

According to Schmidt, the movie Game Change has “almost precisely [right]” that Palin’s response to being told she could not address the nation on election night in 2008 was the following: “Yeah, well there’s a lot of things that have never been done before.” These words seem chilling now not because Palin was knowingly part of some eldritch Kremlin plot in 2008, but because they encapsulate certain qualities in Palin—e.g., so-called “modern and forward-thinking” ones—that would have made her an attractive mark to Putin when (apparently) he’d assessed her for Kremlin use via intermediary in 2007. Palin was, to use a non-Kremlin euphemism, a chaos agent the Kremlin could have relied upon to destabilize America’s political institutions in precisely the way she intended to do on November 4, 2008—arguably one of the most politically sensitive days in recent U.S. history. As Schmidt (approximately) told Palin that night (emphasis in original),

This country has just elected the first African-American president in the history of its existence. And it is the concession speech [by John McCain] that will legitimize his [Barack Obama’s] succession as commander-in-chief. It is a serious and solemn occasion, and John McCain—and only John McCain—will be giving this sacred [concession] speech. This is how it has been done in every presidential election since the dawn of the Republic. And you, Sarah Palin, will not change the importance of this proud, American tradition.

If McCain’s political advisers were capable of apprehending, in 2008, how disruptive Sarah Palin could be to the “succession” of one American leader following another, presumably the Kremlin was, after long study, equally well-positioned to make this judgment.

Certainly, Schmidt is particularly focused in 2022 (and intimates that he was pretty strongly focused in 2008) on the fact that Palin was associated with Davis, a man he now calls “One of [Kremlin agent Viktor] Yanukovych and [Kremlin agent Oleg] Deripaska’s top guys”, who worked for both “at the highest level.” Schmidt even intimates that Davis’s role in selecting Palin was at least in some distant way related to the “massive American corruption in Ukraine” that is “shameful” and that John McCain “turned a blind eye [to]” in the 2008 campaign.

While we have no idea who, if anyone, convinced Palin that she might be allowed to—for the first time in modern American political history—address the nation as the losing vice presidential candidate, it is not hard to imagine that anyone who might have served this function was someone who, like the former Soviet official Yetylin, saw in Palin a person who could bring conventional U.S. politics, and thus America, to its knees.

Conclusion

What are the implications of Vladimir Putin’s plot against America originating in 2008 rather than 2016? How does it change our understanding of the threat America now faces to think that Russia may have been concocting it for 14 years rather than “only” six? Given that apparent Russian outreach to Sarah Palin through multiple intermediaries more than a decade ago featured all the components still in play today—a pliable political cipher, Russian global energy interests (one of the only political topics Palin was known to have any interest in or knowledge of as Alaska governor), Russian imperialism in Europe, and the disruption of American civic life using racial divides as a wedge issue—does this deepen our sense that the Kremlin has America dead to rights, and that we’re on a collision course to be decimated by a transnational scheme hatched by a KGB agent?

It probably should.

But we should also consider the photograph atop this article, which depicts Palin endorsing Donald Trump in 2016 well before almost anyone else in the Republican Party would—a curious fact in itself. The photo thus calls to mind the fact that just a few weeks ago Donald Trump endorsed the political comeback and U.S. congressional candidacy of his predecessor as a potential useful idiot for the Kremlin (Sarah Palin) almost immediately after she announced her return to politics. At a time when D.C. Republicans have been refusing, en masse, to get behind Palin—even those who sang her praises in 2008—Trump’s early, ebullient endorsement of Palin really stands out.

It also comes at a time when Trump is planning to run for President of the United States in 2024; has no running mate; would likely need to select a woman for that role due to both Vice President Kamala Harris’s presence on the 2024 Democratic ticket and the likely abolition of abortion rights by Trump’s Supreme Court appointees in 2022; and is known—post-January 6—to be seeking a running mate (likely a woman) who is at once telegenic, unscrupulous, dependent upon him for her political life, and willing to do more or less anything he says. Presumably it’d be a bonus if this person were someone the Kremlin is happy with, as certainly now seems to have been the case with Palin. Trump is aware, too, that given his age and weight, anyone he selects to run with him in 2024 has a real chance of becoming President of the United States.

Trump surely knew all this, and the Kremlin surely knew all this, when Trump leapt to endorse Palin in a congressional race that, if she wins it, would bring her back to D.C. and legitimize her as a national political candidate in a way her Alaska governorship did not. Trump—and the Kremlin—would likely also be mindful of how Palin’s views on the Kremlin have changed over time:

This is what Sarah Palin tweeted in December of 2016, as America learned that it had been under Russian cyberattack to a degree it hadn’t previously imagined for at least half a year. This historic assessment by the U.S. intelligence community was called a mere political scrape—the whine of “the defeated”—by Palin, even as she minimized Putin’s cyberattacks on America’s critical infrastructure as Russia merely “getting out of hand.”

Is it really too much to see in Sarah Palin a potential 2024 Trump running mate? 2024 is not 2008; what made Palin unpalatable to an American “political middle” that quite candidly no longer exists now makes her a potential darling (yet again) to the MAGA “movement.” Certainly, no one has been more loyal to Trump than Palin; she well outshines the other GOP politicians in her demographic (e.g., former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and one-time Trump critic Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York) in this regard, and is more of a follower than the even-more-ambitious Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD) is.

These new revelations about Palin—which, admittedly, may have come to light almost exclusively because a longtime GOP political operative (Schmidt) is currently in a very public feud with John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, who has apparently tried to tar Schmidt with the “pedophile” label because Schmidt worked at The Lincoln Project alongside a man accused of inappropriate sexual conduct of various kinds—are therefore potentially significant in three separate (but equally important) ways.

1. They may reveal how long Putin has plotted his war on Ukraine;

2. they may reveal how long Putin has plotted his war on America; and

3. they may presage Trump’s next move in his war on America.

If we can already see these shocking implications in a breaking news story that is at present only twelve hours old—augmented, here, by a Trump biographer using a small part of everything he learned about the Trump-Russia and Trump-Ukraine scandals in writing a bestselling trilogy on these subjects—how much more will we know about what Schmidt’s disclosures portend a week from now? A month? A year? And given that in a week, a month, or a year Vladimir Putin may have reignited his cyberwar on America, launched tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and sat and watched with smug satisfaction as Trump takes a twentieth and twenty-first step toward making his third profoundly destructive run for the American presidency, getting a handle on this breaking news in the shortest timeframe possible might be not just fruitful but urgent.

Almost a decade before Americans began to doubt, en masse, whether Donald Trump was working for the United States or his own business interests—and, if the latter, whether this violation of his Oath of Office had been prompted by lucrative Russian business offers—The Nation wrote of Trump’s 2008 predecessor as a Republican Party presidential candidate, John McCain, that “The story of how McCain’s closest aides and employees have been undermining his vociferously expressed opposition to Putin and Russia’s oligarchs offers a highly disturbing preview of what a McCain [White House] administration might look like. When McCain’s campaign proclaims ‘country first,’ one has to wonder, Which country? The one with the highest bidder?”

America now faces the prospect of not only a 2008 McCain campaign that had been compromised by the Kremlin in this way, not only a 2016 “America First” Trump campaign that had been compromised by the Kremlin in this way, but an ultimately abandoned 2012 Sarah Palin presidential campaign that perhaps would have been compromised in this way—and even more terrifying, a prospective 2024 Trump-Palin presidential ticket that could still be doubly compromised in this way.

All of which is to say, outside of Utah senator Mitt Romney (the sole Republican to vote for Trump’s impeachment over the Trump-Ukraine scandal, and also the man who famously called Russia America’s foremost geopolitical adversary in one of his 2012 debates with Barack Obama), has any Republican presidential candidate of the last eighteen years been untainted by the spectre of Kremlin aid and encouragement? For that matter, has the United States been in a proxy war with Russia—waged not just through cyberterrorism and propaganda but dangerous influence operations—for the entirety of this century? And if this proxy war becomes a “hot” war this year or next, what do we do if Sarah Palin enters Congress and Trump declares a presidential run, or, worse still, if Trump and Palin decide to make a run for the White House together?

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