EDITORIAL
McFaul Speaks?

Michael McFaul
Here’s something you don’t see every day, a classic bit of Internet adventure. Someone claiming to be Michael McFaul, Barack Obama’s chief Russia advisor, has posted two comments to Oleg Kozlovsky’s Facebook page under a post which Oleg also blogged in which he discussed a report quoting McFaul in the Kommersant newspaper; Kommersant reported that McFaul had said the U.S. would back away from pressuring Russian on human rights. On Facebook (screenshot after the jump for those without Facebook accounts) “Michael McFaul” wrote:
Kommersant grossly misquoted me. See Interfax transcript if you want to see what I really said. And anyone who knows anything about my thinking would be suspicious of such an assessment of my views.
LR founder and publisher Kim Zigfeld has intiated a little dialogue with “McFaul” using our Facebook account, for those who are Facebook members and wish to follow it, for what it is worth. We’ve previously discussed McFaul’s alleged appeasing statements to Kommersant . Obviously, they tended to seriously undermine the impetus to stand up to Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship, and although McFaul claims not to have made them there is scant evidence of either he or Barack Obama saying anything to the contrary, directly challenging Putin on human rights, since Obama came to power. In other words, perhaps what’s most troubling about the McFaul quote was that it was credible, not whether it was actually true or not.
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