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Yeah why should a Professor of Political Science at Stanford who supposedly specializes in Russia need the Russian language anyway?
Michael McFaul is Professor of Political Science, Director and Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and the Peter and Helen Bing Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1995. He is also an analyst for NBC News and a contributing columnist to The Washington Post. Dr. McFaul served for five years in the Obama administration, first as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014). He was also the Distinguished Mingde Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Center at Peking University from June to August of 2015.In all fairness, you can't exactly lose what you never had in the first place - during his years as Obama's Russia ambassador, McFaul earned a reputation for his incessant rape of the Russian language.
Besides, there are persistent rumors that he doesn't even know English all that well.
But this is all quite beside the point. McFaul never failed upwards on account of his linguistic skills or (lack of) analytical prowess. Ever the consummate beigeocrat, he has always been carried forwards by scrupulous conformity to the Establishment line: Apologizing for Yeltsin's electoral fraud under Clinton, shilling for neocon wars under Bush, promoting "democratic" regime change in Russia under Obama, and reinventing himself as a Russiagate conspiracy theorist under Trump.
Update:
Comment: Is McFaul still a little sour from being banned from Russia? Perhaps he should have taken Simonyan's offer to have his own show on RT, and vent a little.