A bombshell segment on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show says Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expedited the confirmation of U.S. District Judge Wendy Vitter as payback for the work her lobbyist husband David Vitter did to land an aluminium plant linked to Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska in Kentucky. David Vitter, a former Republican U.S. Senator from Louisiana is now a lobbyist for Rusal, the Russian firm tied to Oligarch Oleg Deripaska and previously sanctioned by the U.S. government. It is Rusal that has committed $200 million to build an aluminium plant in Mitch McConnell’s Kentucky.
According to the Maddow segment, the confirmation of Wendy Vitter as a federal judge had stalled because a lot of Republicans did not feel she was qualified for the job. However according to Maddow, five weeks after her lobbyist husband David Vitter called McConnell confirming that Rusal will invest in Kentucky, McConnell used his position as Senate Majority Leader to expedite Wendy Vitters confirmation–a clear cut case of pay-for-play corruption and abuse of power.
Maddow specifically said, “Within five weeks of David Vitter calling Mitch McConnell to tell him that Rusal was going to put this plant in Kentucky, Rusal was going to dump hundreds of millions of dollars into Mitch McConnell’s home state, within five weeks of that call, the nomination of David Vitter’s wife to be a federal judge, a nomination that had been languishing for a year and a half because she was so humiliatingly and embarrassingly and obviously unqualified for the job, whose confirmation hearing went so badly it went viral and got her nomination buried, turns out within five weeks of Mitch McConnell getting that call from David Vitter saying hey I got an aluminium plant we are going to put in your home state thanks from Oleg, within five weeks of that call, Wendy Vitter’s nomination got pulled off the trash heap by McConnell and Mitch McConnell expedited it, put it on top of the list and now she’s a federal judge for life. Must be nice.”
Bottom line, there are already a lot of questions surrounding Mitch McConnell and Russia that warrant an investigation. This new pay-for-play twist involving a federal judge should definitely be explored further both by Democrats and the mainstream media. Simply put, McConnell should not be allowed to abuse his position as Senate Majority Leader to push bills in the Senate that seemingly benefit him personally. More importantly, McConnell should not be allowed to continue ruining the credibility of federal courts with pay-for-play confirmation of federal judges. McConnell has already done enough damage to the credibility of federal courts with the Kavanaugh incident.
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