#MoscowMitch as a meme is not going away anytime soon.

Within five weeks of Mitch McConnell getting that call from David Vitter saying, Hey I've got an aluminum plant we're going to put in your home state! Thanks from Oleg! Ã¢ÂÂWendy Vitter's nomination got pulled off the trash heap by McConnell and now she is a federal judge. For life. pic.twitter.com/RCC4W1kVCW

x Russia's influence strategy, Kentucky's economic need, and Mitch McConnell; here's the full vide of tonight's A block: https://t.co/WIiB3XZ4fB Ã¢ÂÂ Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) August 15, 2019

x Time correspondent Vera Bergengruen explains how a Kremlin-linked firm that had been under sanctions was able to invest millions in Sen. Mitch McConnellÃ¢ÂÂs home state of Kentucky. https://t.co/TRRsmrZkyo — MSNBC (@MSNBC) August 15, 2019

The fight is not over in Washington. Treasury “needs to take potential harm to national security from Rusal’s proposed investment seriously,” Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Finance, said in an Aug. 11 statement to TIME. Wyden has been pushing for a review of the deal. Other Democrats say if Rusal is banking on its investment in American jobs to protect it from future sanctions, that highlights a bigger problem. “The situation with Rusal broadly raises concerns that entities may in effect be ‘too big to sanction’ given the inter-connectedness of the global economy,” says a Senate Democratic aide.

It’s not as if the U.S. has no protections against malign foreign investment. But thanks to a regulatory loophole, the Rusal–Braidy deal skated past the agency that vets foreign investments for threats to national security. According to the mandate of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the agency does not investigate so-called greenfield projects, which are built from the ground up. And brand-new plants like the one in Ashland might just fit through that loophole, says Aimen Mir, who ran the agency for four years until 2018. As a general rule, he tells TIME, the agency tries to keep the U.S. as open as possible to legitimate foreign capital. “All other things being equal,” Mir says, “we should be welcoming of investment.”

That attitude has begun to shift under the Trump Administration. Through legislation passed last summer, CFIUS will get expanded powers to collect data on foreign investments and block the ones it deems to be a threat. In April, the agency pressured the Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman to sell his fund’s stake in a U.S. cybersecurity firm, Cofense Inc.

Those powers may soon be tested, because there are signs Rusal is not done investing in the U.S. Soon after the Kentucky deal was announced, Lord Barker sent a letter to the governors of eight more U.S. states. In the April 18 note, he touted the benefits of the Rusal investment and said the company was “eager to evaluate other opportunities around the country and your state in particular.”

To critics of Russian economic influence, the letter sounded one particularly ominous chord. “As part of our international growth strategy, we see significant opportunities across the whole industry value chain in North America,” Barker wrote. The investment in Kentucky, he added, “is just the beginning of our long-term ambitions.”

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