The first meeting of the U.S.-Russia Bilateral...

RFE/RL correspondent Heather Maher spoke to McFaul just after the meeting ended and asked him about the day’s progress and the controversy in Congress over his Russian co-chair.

RFE/RL: This first meeting of the Civil Society Working Group dealt with the subject of civil society"s role in helping end state corruption. Did the two sides reach any agreement on the role that civil society groups can and should play, and were there any disagreements?

Michael McFaul: We talked first in a government-to-government setting in the morning on that subject, and we had U.S. officials talking about the role that American NGOs have played in fighting corruption and actually changing the U.S. government structure going back 30 or 40 years. We had one example of that, where the office of government ethics was created as a result of NGO lobbying. And then the Russian side did a similar thing where the government people talked about the way they understood how they interact with

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