John McCain has one final dig planned for two of his biggest foes — Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump — at a moment when much of the world will be watching (including Trump, who aides say will be watching from Camp David.)
The Republican senator from Arizona, who planned his own funeral, chose Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza as one of the dignitaries to carry his coffin to the front of the Washington National Cathedral at his memorial service.
The choice of Kara-Murza, who twice suffered organ failure from poisoning, appears aimed at sending a last message to Putin and Trump, who McCain had criticized for sounding too cozy with the Russian leader, amid an investigation into whether the U.S. president’s allies cooperated with Moscow’s efforts to intervene in the 2016 election.
For more than seven years, McCain and Kara-Murza had each other’s backs as each criticized Putin and what they saw as his autocratic tendencies in Russia.
“Vladimir is a brave, outspoken, and relentless advocate for freedom and democracy in Russia. And as has happened to other Putin critics, Vladimir was poisoned in order to intimidate him or worse,” McCain said, calling Kara-Murza as “a personal hero whose courage, selflessness and idealism I find awe-inspiring.”
Kara-Murza on Monday said of McCain’s death. “We all knew this day was coming, but hoped against hope that it would not be coming so soon,” he said. “He was a true leader and a dear friend, and it will always be among the greatest blessings of my life to know him.”
A month into his presidency, Trump was asked by a TV interviewer about Putin’s penchant for murdering political adversaries. “We’ve got a lot of killers,” he retorted. “What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
That outraged McCain, who said in an angry speech that his friend Kara-Murza “knew that there was no moral equivalence between the United States and Putin’s Russia. I repeat, there is no moral equivalence between that butcher and thug and KGB colonel and the United States of America, the country that Ronald Reagan used to call a shining city on a hill.”
