Even in death, John McCain will apparently get one final shot at longtime nemesis Vladimir Putin by having a sworn enemy of the Russian president as one of the fourteen pallbearers at the Arizonan’s funeral this Saturday.
Vladimir Kara-Murza, who survived two near-fatal poisonings that his family believes were ordered by Putin, will join actor Warren Beatty, former Colorado Democratic Sen. Gary Hart, and others to carry McCain’s casket at National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. this weekend.
A filmmaker and onetime right-hand man to the late Putin foe and politician Boris Nemtsov, Kara-Murza, 37, almost died in February of 2017 when he was hospitalized in Russia for kidney failure.
The circumstances surrounding Kara-Murza’s coma (which lasted six days) were identical to those two years before when he was hospitalized following a collapse doctors believe was brought on by “toxic circumstances.”
As the dissident fought for his life in 2017, his wife Evgenia told reporters that she had no doubts her husband was poisoned and that she believed the Putin regime has "created such a climate in our country, that actually encourages this kind of behavior."
A month after Kara-Murza’s near death, he testified before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee in favor of further U.S. sanctions against Putin’s Russia. At the time, he told Newsmax he would be “happy to meet with representatives of the Trump administration.”
But the White House told us there were no plans for the President to meet with Kara-Murza.
McCain has met frequently with the Russian and hailed him for his courage. Kara-Murza, in turn, has long praised McCain. Of his two near-encounters with death, the filmmaker and vice president of the anti-Putin Open Russia group told Newsmax in ’17: “I’ve been fortunate to survive death twice. But I don’t think I will be fortunate if there is a third time.”
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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