Much of the event was spent criticizing Hontareva. Mack wore his old congressional pin on his lapel throughout. He opened by musing about his time on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. It was always important for us as a committee and as a Congress to understand whats happening around the world, and the topic of corruption would always come up, he said.
Curiously, James Woolsey, the former Clinton Administration CIA director and former Trump campaign adviser, also attended and briefly spoke during the event.
Mack identified Woolsey as a special guest with us today. Woolsey got up from his seat in the sparse audience and recalled the time years ago when he helped negotiate a conventional arms treaty in Europe. He mentioned Ukraine in that context, but did not talk about corruption. Woolsey said in part that after the fall of the Berlin Wall, For the next three to four years, the Russians were very easy to get along with. They were sweethearts. The former CIA director went on to say, I would love to see the international events work out in such a way that we end up being able to do two things. One, is to deal with the existence of corruption in the way that you referred to and that many people here are experts on. And the other is to keep Ukraine and other states in the region, such as Poland, from feeling that they are constantly under pressure from Russia to do the wrong thing. Resuscitate the days of friendly Russia in the early 90s.