city and a huge mansion on embassy road in washington, d.c., both properties were raided today by the fbi. now, both of these properties are owned by or at least associated with a man named oleg deripaska. deripaska is a russian oligarch, once the richest man in russia. for years he has been denied visas to visit the united states because the u.s. said were his purported ties to the russian mafia. deripaska was also formerly sanctioned by the u.s. government in 2018 with six other russian oligarchs as punishment for, quote, russian s malign worldwide activities. oleg deripaska and the other billionaire russians who were sanctioned in that order were accused of using what appeared to be, you know, sort of purportedly their private or commercial interests to actually act on behalf of the russian government. to actually carry out activities on behalf of the kremlin and on
evading the sanctions led to an interesting vote in the congress in 2019. the house and senate voted in 2019 on a resolution that would blocked the trump administration from easing up on the sanctions against deripaska and his companies. trump administration wanted to ease up on those sanctions markedly and congress voted that the trump administration should not do that. that said, despite a big majority vote in the house and a majority vote in the senate, it was republican majority leader mitch mcconnell who made sure that failed. made sure that that resolution was blocked by a senate filibuster. so, in fact, the trump administration was able to ease the sanctions on deripaska, even though most of congress wanted them not to. that is how mitch mcconnell got the nickname moscow mitch.
it emerged around the time of that vote that deripaska has dangled to mitch mcconnell they might build a new factory in mitch mcconnell s home state and mcconnell took those otherwise unthinkable steps in the senate to protect deripaska and ease the sanctions on him. listen, we don t know what the fbi raided these homes for today. the fbi is not talking. neither is the prosecutors office in the southern district of new york, which is apparently where the court orders came from for these raids today. so we don t know yet. i mean, who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, right? we ll do our best to figure it out. but who knows? wa-ha-ha!
behalf of russian president vladimir putin including messing with western democracies at the kremlin s direction. those sanctions were imposed in 2018. deripaska sued to have the sanctions against him dropped. a federal judge earlier this year threw out deripaska s lawsuit and kept the sanctions in place. in the midst of that case, the treasury department wrote to deripaska and told him the sanctions were still warranted in part because of recent allegations that deripaska was money-laundering on a grand scale for vladimir putin personally. effectively, that putin was hiding some vast personal fortune by running it through deripaska s companies with deripaska s knowing it. that said, if oleg deripaska s name does ring a bell for you at all, it s likely because of the russia investigation. he was the linchpin in that investigation, in the mueller report, in the senate intelligence committee s investigation, he was the linchpin of the most serious allegations about trump and the
materials would be passed on to deripaska. again, why does a russian oligarch need to see non-public, private sensitive campaign information in the middle of russia interfering in our election to help trump and why is a russian intelligence officer the conduit for that information from trump s campaign chairman? the senate intelligence committee in their investigation bluntly described deripaska like this. they said, quote, oleg deripaska is one of the kremlin s most significant malign influence operatives. he has close ties to the russian intelligence services and has been involved in the targeting of foreign elections. that s deripaska. and now today he had his place in d.c., his big mansion in d.c. and townhouse in greenwich village in new york raided by the fbi. why? no idea. but because all good ghost stories have eerie twists at the end, where you don t quite know