Schmidtstorm

I suspect that most people haven't seen didn’t see this on Twitter from Steve Schmidt.  It was a 17-part message he wrote on Saturday that I happened to come across yesterday.  (If you subsequently see it written about as being "16 parts," that's how it was numbered, but actually he accidentally numbered two tweets the same.)

I wasn't initially sure sure what brought it on.  My guess was that that Meghan McCain writes badly about him in her book that was just published, and he decided to unload.  And “unload” is the proper word.  But though that's the foundation of the issue, it turns out that a tweet she sent may have been the trigger.  More on that at the end -- because it's this thread from Schmidt which is the more important, substantive one.

It starts with him talking about when McCain’s primary campaign in 2008 was floundering, and then Schmidt came in and helped him get the GOP nomination.
 
Here's the first tweet how it appeared online.  I’ve then cleaned up all 17 tweets and tried to make it more readable as if it had been written as an article.  I fixed a few typos that made it hard to follow, but have left if largely as he wrote it.  And also included a bit of an addendum at the end with his response to a reply. 

​Buckle your seat belt --
​

I had no interest whatsoever in running a Presidential Campaign in 2008. One of my closest friends was running John McCain’s campaign and John Weaver was the chief strategist. There were two factions in the campaign. There was a pro-democracy faction and there was

— Steve Schmidt (@SteveSchmidtSES) May 8, 2022

"I had no interest whatsoever in running a Presidential Campaign in 2008. One of my closest friends was running John McCain’s campaign and John Weaver was the chief strategist. There were two factions in the campaign. There was a pro-democracy faction and there was a pro Russia faction. The pro democracy faction was led by Weaver and the pro Russia faction was led by a Washington lobbyist who was in business with Paul Manafort. Like Manafort, he had a Trump Tower residence. He was in charge of the campaigns finances and bankrupted the campaign through a series of unethical transactions and markups with Manafort and a company called 3 EDC. The campaign was destroyed over a massive fight over John McCain’s greatest blind spot, willful or otherwise.
 
"@MeghanMcCain this is the story of the man you call Uncle Rick and it explains how we met. [Note: this is Rick Davis who was Paul Manafort's partner.] I’ll attach a story from @thenation that I only read recently, though it is from 2008. It is spot on @MeghanMcCain. Your Father tolerated his campaign chairman being in business and working for Putin through his association with Yanukovych.
 
"SAME AS TRUMP.
 
"Yanukovych, as you probably have no idea, was Putin’s puppet in Ukraine. The story of American corruption in Ukraine starts here. It starts in John McCain’s operation, not Trumps.

"@MeghanMcCain, did you know that your dad was taken on Oleg Deripaskas yacht in Montenegro for his 70th Birthday by his top aide? It was a McCain guy who represented the interests of the Russian Government in the Montenegro Independence referendum. Weaver was aghast. This is why the campaign went KABOOM in July of 2008 and your father went from front runner to middle seat on a SouthWest Flight with the National Press Corps gathered in NH waiting for him to drop out. That is when John McCain called me and asked me for help. It is the opening scene of Game Change. I helped him and his corresponding comeback made him the GOP a nominee for POTUS.
  
"In return, 14 non stop years of abuse from @MeghanMcCain, the singularly most rotten person I have ever met. The McCain Institute is supposed to fight for freedom and liberty but it has Putin and Yanukovych alumni on the Board. It is gross and we live in an era that requires the exposure of corruption and hypocrisy not its accommodation. Do you have any idea how disappointed the brave people in Ukraine would be learning that one of Victor Yanukovych right hands is on the Board of the McCain Institute. Let’s ask.
 
"@visegrad24
@KyivIndependent
@olex_scherba
 
"[It] was outrageous then and it is outrageous now. Here is the serious part. The person I’m talking about, is the one who was in charge of VETTING the VP candidate. True. Putin’s guy, the one who was Victor Yanukovich’s henchman was in charge of ALL of the DUE DILIGENCE around Palin. I wasn’t. This was reported at the time and is detailed in Game Change. I was focused on dealing with a different catastrophe. Get back to me @MeghanMcCain if you want to hear more. Here’s a preview
 
"Quick but true story. The first time I went to see a therapist was in 2011 to deal with the personal fallout from the chaos, disgustingness and insanity of the McCain campaign. I didn’t really know where to start, I had arranged a 2 hour session and I just blurted out that the therapist would probably think they should be paying me by the end of the session. I talked stream of consciousness for 1:50, non stop.
 
"Ten minutes out the Therapist stopped me and explained that when a person goes through a trauma and talks about it for the first time they do what I did which is talk non stop. The second thing she noted was that during her 30 years of practice that many clients had said she should be paying them for their story. She said that always made for an easy Narcissist Personality diagnosis. However, she added, I was the exception. She said she absolutely would have paid for it and it was one of the most amazing and shocking stories she ever heard. Not a fucking word about it appears in Game Change because no person has protected John McCain’s legacy with less reason to do so than me. Let’s just leave it there for the night."
 
                                                   *    *    *
 
And that’s the end of his 17-part post.  However, Schmidt posted more, which I wasn't able to find, but it's referenced on Rawstory.  That article about Schmidt's tweetstorm mostly focuses on the selection of Sarah Palin to run with John McCain.  It continues the story and at one point adds --

"'Rick said he would get the job done. The rest is history,' wrote Schmidt. 'John McCain walked into a room alone and picked Sarah Palin. I wasn’t there. He was the 72-year-old Senior Senator from Arizona and the presumptive nominee for President. He wasn’t my ward and he wasn’t in a conservatorship. He had agency and control. His decision was idiotic, reckless and historic.'

"He recalled Palin rolling up to McCain's property in Sedona, Arizona. McCain assumed that Schmidt and Davis were going to be part of the conversation with her, but Schmidt said that it should be just the two of them.

"'I said it was his first Presidential decision and that he alone had to make the decision if she was qualified to take the Oath of Office,' he wrote. 'They went off and met alone. No one will ever have any knowledge about the inanities and nonsense that took place in the room that day.'

"He noted he's taken the heat for '14 years over this stupidity.' But the reality of the decision is that it was McCain's. Had he known then what he learned after the RNC convention in Minneapolis, he said he would have tied himself to the bumper of the car to stop it.

"He recalled that Palin outright lied to him and the others in the campaign about her political beliefs and philosophy.
​
"'We focused primarily on her views around evolution. She lied and told us that her dad was a science teacher and she rejected creationism,' he wrote. 'This was a big thing to a bunch of us. It was simple really, if you believed that people and dinosaurs lived together —no go. It was called the [Mark] Salter principle. We talked about the realities of the campaign and asked her if she would agree to abide by a structure if asked to serve. She looked me in the eye and said yes to everything and broke every promise.'"

You can read the full article here.

Further, there’s a slight addendum that I did see. The long thread by Steve Schmidt received the following tweet by Simon Rosenberg, founder of the New Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.  Rosenberg wrote –
 
“It's critical that someday, soon, the story of Russia's deep penetration of the Republican Party be written.
 
“We need to understand how a hostile foreign power got so deep into one of our parties, and ensure it never happens again.
 
“Read this thread from @SteveSchmidtSES.”
 
To which Schmidt then replied –

"Through one shady DC firm. That’s all it takes. That one firm ran the 96 Dole Campaign (legendary theft reported). 08 McCain. 16 Trump. It’s two guys. It was all in the open just like @WINRED and @HolmesJosh. Kushner took 2B from the Saudis."
​

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As I said at the beginning, there was another thread from Steve Schmidt that seems to explain why he chose to post that long tale on Saturday.  It seems that while the two have had a battle for many years, this outburst came as a result of Meghan McCain “Liking” a tweet from someone saying that Steve Schmidt ran a pedophile ring during the Trump administration.  That was enough to set him off.  (No kidding.)  The other thread above is the more interesting, important one.  But this one explains what lead to him writing it and lays out his years crossing paths with her --
 
 
"@MeghanMcCain has been trying to have a conversation with me for almost 14 years. Once again, today, she called me a Pedophile. It is a slander. It is disgusting. It is untrue and it says everything about her. Here she is liking the tweet of a far right liar and piece of filth.  After 14 years of abuse and attacks, today is the day I have decided to respond. I am happy to keep the story going after this thread, it only gets better.
 
"I was the first adult that @MeghanMcCain ever encountered that she heard the word NO from. I told her she was unimportant and that the Presidential election wasn’t about her. I left her on the tarmac when she didn’t make the plane because as I explained to her, the 5000 people who were waiting to see her father speak and took the time to do it deserved to have him show up on time. That was the way John McCain saw it. He was appalled by @MeghanMcCain conduct on the campaign. Appalled and embarrassed. The tantrums were beyond anything I have ever witnessed from any other human being. They were epic meltdowns that would test the range of Meryl Streep, Kate Winslett, Jodi Foster and Anne Hathaway on their best days. Raging, screaming, crying, at the staff, at the makeup people at Secret Service. Without any doubt it was the most rotten, entitled, spoiled, cruel, mean and bullying behavior I have ever witnessed. It was my job to confront it and I did. I talked to 24 year old @MeghanMcCain the way an adult should have talked to the Trump kids. I talked to her the way a retired USMC 4 Star General failed to do in the WH with Ivanka, Jared and Jr. They are all the same people. I told her that she was unimportant and that everything around her had nothing to do with her. I told her she was privileged and lucky and should be grateful. She told me and anyone else who would listen in response, “Do you know who the Fuck my Dad is” It was the miserable anthem of the total chaos that was the McCain Campaign. It never stopped until one day when I said ENOUGH!
 
"@MeghanMcCain is a bully, entitled, unaccomplished, spoiled and mean. She has rejected her Family’s history of service for a shallow and purposeless celebrity where she trades on a famous name like a fourth generation wannabe clipping coupons while pretending to be an heir.
 
"I was a volunteer for John McCain. He called me when that campaign went belly up. Everyone quit and he called and asked for my help and I never asked him for a dime. I never took a dime. I left my three year old for a year and did everything I could for John McCain.  He was the only person I ever worked for who put in a position where I became involved in a public lie. When that campaign ended, I made a vow that that would never happen again and it hasn’t."