The Washington, D.C. swamp is full of hypocrites, but it is not every day when one’s hypocrisy is on full display as it is right this minute for former Gov. John Kasich (R-OH) adviser John Weaver.
For the past two years, Weaver and his former boss have stoked the Russia-collusion narrative — going so far as to suggest Special Counsel Robert Mueller was wrong not to charge former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort with conspiracy because he gave internal polling data to a Ukraine associate. On April 18, 2019, Weaver tweeted, “This is collusion. This is conspiracy,” in response to a section of Mueller’s final report detailing Manafort’s interactions with his associate Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the media suggested had ties to Russian intelligence.
Just last week, Kasich explained to CNN’s Don Lemon the Russian involvement found in Mueller’s report.
“And part of the Mueller report, from my understanding, is that it outlines exactly many of the ways in which the Russians got involved. Think about this — the Russians. When I was a kid, we used to hide under the desk thinking we were going to have a nuclear war because of what was happening in Cuba,” Kasich said.
“They are interfering in our election, there is no doubt about that. They tried to manipulate us, and nobody is doing anything about it,” he added. “I don’t understand that. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Now Kasich’s former 2016 campaign adviser — who has worked on numerous failed presidential bids, to be sure — has filed as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agent Registration Act in order to lobby U.S. lawmakers against Russian sanctions. This is the same adviser who previously told The Associated Press: “When a campaign manager gives a Russian agent polling data, what is that?”
Weaver now claims, in a statement to Politico, that he will “work with Congress and, hopefully, make sure they don’t come up with something vis-a-vis Russia that ends up hurting the United States.”
As Bonchie wrote at Redstate, Weaver is trying to make it seem like he is doing something beneficial to the United States, when in reality he’s just collecting a huge paycheck. Weaver has signed a six-month contract worth $350,000 “plus expenses, with an option to extend if necessary,” Politico reported.
Weaver’s statement is even more hilarious when you consider his past views on sanctions against Russia. On January 27, 2019, Weaver tweeted: “Of course Trump ended the sanctions on [Russian oligarch Oleg] Deripaska. You think Putin invested all of that just for chaos?” In another tweet, Weaver said, “The ‘president*’ gave Russia two huge gifts today … the decision by tweet to abandon Syria & overturning sanctions on Putin’s oligarch best friends. #NotShocked #OneTermOrLess.”
As my Federalist colleague Sean Davis wrote in response to the news about Weaver:
“You have got to be kidding me. This pathetic hack spent the last two years accusing everyone to his right of being a secret Russian agent, and now he’s the one getting paid by corrupt Russians?”