A Senator Who Never Met the Russian Ambassador Never Had Dinner With Him and It Wasn't Paid for by Secret Donor

Free image via Pixabay https://pixabay.com/en/man-surprise-shock-surprised-211505/

It has become sort of a joke that no one in Washington, D.C. will admit to having met Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak despite documentary evidence. While the anti-Trumpers like to harp on Jeff Sessions, there are others. For instance, Nancy Pelosi.

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House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Friday that she’s never met with the current Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

“Not with this Russian ambassador, no,” Pelosi told POLITICO’s Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer during a Playbook interview, when asked whether she had ever met with the Russian envoy.

But a file photo from Pelosi’s 2010 meeting with Russian President Dmitriy Medvedev shows Kislyak at the table across from Pelosi — then House speaker — and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.). Medvedev had been in the country for a meeting with President Barack Obama a day earlier and stopped in on Capitol Hill to meet with congressional leaders as well.

Now we have another. Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) took to Twitter in March and announced she never met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during her time on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

However, McCaskill in 2015 attended a reception honoring former Rep. James Symington (D-MO) at the Russian ambassador’s Washington residence, CNN reported.

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Well, yeah, CNN, so it might not be true.

But what makes the whole thing drip with schadenfreude is that the bill for dinner was footed by a foundation on whose board McCaskill sits and her role in the foundation was not disclosed as required by law.

McCaskill’s attendance at the dinner was accompanied by an $873 payment to the American-Russian Cultural Cooperation Foundation, where Kislyak serves on the board of directors as honorary chairman.

The payment to Kislyak’s foundation was not made directly by McCaskill—it was made through a foundation, the Shepard Family Foundation, that she set up with her husband Jon Shepard in 2013 but failed to disclose in filings to the Senate ethics committee until three weeks ago.

A McCaskill spokesman said the senator’s decision to use the then-undisclosed foundation to pay for the dinner was not part of an attempt to hide it.

“Senator McCaskill and her family support a variety of causes through the Shepard Family Foundation, including this donation at a nonprofit event honoring a beloved Missouri Congressman,” said John LaBombard.

The payment to Kislyak’s foundation was properly disclosed in the foundation’s 2015 tax filing, which also lists a $10,000 contribution to Planned Parenthood.

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McCaskill has been in the Senate since 2007. How did being on the board of directors of a family foundation escape her annual ethics filing? The obvious answer is that it didn’t and she only declared it when it became obvious that people were sniffing around Kislyak.

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