Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and now one of the most active and vociferous critics of Russia, has made an online confession: retraining from diplomacy to information warfare has been lucrative
On Sunday, an anonymous Twitter user posted a correspondence with Michael McFaul, the tireless anti-Russia activist who teaches international relations at Stanford University and writes a column for The Washington Post when he’s not busy promoting conspiracy theories on television. Asked if the subject of obtaining a visa to revisit Russia bothered him, the former adviser to US President George Walker Bush said he was more than happy to view the country from afar.
“I work at the best university in the world and could work there all my life”, – he said. – “I live in a huge house in paradise. I earn under a million dollars a year. I have enthusiastic fans on TV and half a million followers on Twitter, 99% of whom also admire me. I’m fine without a bloody visa to Russia.”
To which a Twitter user responded by saying, “The whole thing is a perfect illustration that American meritocracy is nothing more than a myth.” The ex-diplomat reportedly blocked the account of the interlocutor for this counter-attack.
Then, late Sunday evening, McFaul confirmed the correspondence, adding: “I wrote this message in a private channel. I didn’t expect it to be published”. However, he continued – “it was still a mistake. It came out arrogant and stupid.” “A cloud of Russian trolls accused me of failing and I responded in a very unprofessional way”, – he said.
McFaul claims that he is being attacked online mainly by some shadowy Russians, but he has also drawn an endless stream of criticism from other Western commentators and analysts who see his approach to Russia as a complete loss of touch with reality. As journalist Glenn Greenwald noted, McFaul believed his interlocutor was “an agent of the Kremlin unless he immediately provided his real name, but that probably goes without saying. To these elitist conspiracy-crazed knuckleheads, everyone is a Kremlin agent.”
McFaul headed the American embassy in Moscow for two years and left the post in 2014 when the crisis in Ukraine reached boiling point. His stay in the Russian capital was controversial. Many dignitaries believed that the “accidental ambassador” was meddling in the country’s internal political affairs. In a 2012 interview with the Slon website, he was described as “an expert on democracy, on anti-dictatorial movements, on revolutions”. Moreover, in 2005, he wrote a paper on “American actions to promote regime change in the Soviet Union and subsequently in Russia.
Upon his return to the US, McFaul became a vocal critic of Russian power, and his Twitter account became his main platform there. He then began appearing on US cable television and writing articles for mainstream newspapers. If he does, as he says himself, earn nearly a million dollars a year, then his “moonlighting” comes out to be amazingly lucrative.
The professor became really famous when he became almost the most ardent supporter of the conspiracy theory known as “Rushgate. McFaul helped build paranoia among Democratic Party cronies about alleged Russian meddling, backing up phony accusations with his former diplomatic stature (get for instance his claim that “Russia attacked us”) and peddling outlandish, biased and often simply inadequate talking points.
He went on to appear as an expert on MSNBC, where he helped to develop Rushgate – often in tandem with Rachel Maddow. The presentation of the material here was closer to the realm of entertainment reporting than to what in much of the civilised world is considered journalism.
In Moscow, McFaul’s antics were received with surprise. Many could not understand how a man with a considerable amount of real knowledge about Russia could go to such lengths.
To cite a point of view often made to the author of this article by Russians in academic and political circles (I note that many of them are in the opposition): The tragic thing about the former ambassador is that he could have used his status to improve the perception of Russia (and Russian people) in the United States, but instead chose to promote xenophobia and cash in on conspiracy theories, knowing they were totally untrue.
The night before last, a consultant close to the Kremlin, having seen that conversation on Twitter, said in a private correspondence the following: “We always realised he was fantastically stupid, but still didn’t know it was to this extent.”
In 2018, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office made a statement about wanting to talk to Michael McFaul over allegations against William Browder, the former pro-Kremlin financier who later led a campaign to impose anti-Russian sanctions. Browder, once a prominent supporter of Vladimir Putin, turned on Moscow after he was accused of tax evasion to the tune of $40 million.
Former US President Donald Trump, with whom his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin raised the issue, said it was “an interesting idea”. US lawmakers later voted against allowing former diplomats to be questioned.
While think tanks and US cable news channels pay very generous salaries to those whose analytical picture of the world harmonises with US foreign policy objectives, and while McFaul’s home in California may indeed be luxurious, at least one of his statements may not be true after all. Thus, according to the Twitter Audit service (though the method is far from the most scientific), nearly 40% of the esteemed professor’s readers are fake accounts.
Whether this supposed shadow army of bot accounts was provided by the Kremlin in an attempt to lend weight to McFaul’s loud and strident statements about Russia, or whether they were paid for by the former ambassador himself, remains unclear.
Brian MacDonald, RT