Paul Erickson
new cat resurrection:
omfg
https://thinkprogress.org/green-new-deal-jack-abramoff-opposition-trump-ocasio-cortez-mcconnell-a9015688f09a/
Opposition to the Green New Deal is swiftly taking shape, with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff now attached to an effort targeting progressive initiativesincluding the sweeping resolution to combat climate change.
A new political action committee (PAC) was launched on Feb. 7 — the Protect American Values PAC— according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings. The New Jersey-based PAC was created by Elizabeth Curtis, whose LinkedIn describes her as a “political compliance associate.” Abramoff is listed as the PAC’s “honorary chairman.”
According to the PAC’s FEC description, it “supports/opposes more than one Federal candidate.” And the PAC has already begun fundraising via emails to supporters.
The effort to fight the Green New Deal through a serious PAC fundraising push comes as conservatives mobilize against the resolution. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has moved to call for a vote on the proposal in an effort to weaken Democratic support.a
and Abramoff is wasting no time sending emails attacking the Green New Deal and other progressive agenda items on behalf of the PAC.
“Thesesocialists are so confused, and their messaging is getting worse by the minute. They seem to think that cows and airplanes are a threat to our future,” wrote Abramoff in a Feb. 18 email to subscribers, first shared by E&E. He went on to argue that the “radical Left” is working to “force their Green New Deal down your throat” in addition to other proposals, like a 70 percent marginal tax rate.
‘Radical socialism’ and ‘cow farts’: Green New Deal opponents lash out as resolution gains momentum
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wasn’t even in diapers when I started fighting the Left, and I’m about to teach her and her cronies a few things they are going to wish they never learned,” Abramoff wrote in his Monday email.
In reaction to the email, Green New Deal supporter Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) pointed to the lobbyist’s scandal-ridden past in a tweet on Tuesday. “If you are undecided on the Green New Deal one data point is that Jack Abramoff has started a super PAC against it,” Schatz wrote.
Indeed, the move marks a dramatic return to the public eye for Abramoff, who pleaded guilty to charges including fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion over a decade ago. A lifelong conservative who built strong ties with Republican lawmakers and other officials, Abramoff infamously over-billed Native American tribes for casino lobbying, in addition to conspiring to bribe public officials, actions that ultimately led to his imprisonment.
After a six-year prison sentence, Abramoff railed against lobbying and began working as an accountant at a kosher pizza restaurant — a move he touted as an effort to distance himself from money and politics.
But he soon returned to lobbying, working to arrange meetings between President Donald Trump and international officials in countries like the Republic of Congo. He has also been linked to alleged Russian spy**Maria Butina**— her partner, Paul Erickson, is a long-time friend and business partner of Abramoff. [vid]
and while Abramoff’s Twitter still describes him as a “former” lobbyist, he is currently registered as one— and now appears to be turning his attention to fighting efforts like the Green New Deal.
Daniel Auble, a senior researcher with the nonpartisan nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics, told ThinkProgress on Wednesday that Abramoff’s history is likely to attract heightened scrutiny.
“Obviously, his past political fundraising was not just problematic but criminal so we will keep a close eye on whatever he does,” Auble said. “Coordination is always a concern with super PACs meaning any return to lobbying activities would warrant even further scrutiny.”
Introduced two weeks ago by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA), the Green New Deal resolution serves as a blueprint for what many climate activists hope will be a host of policy efforts to massively decarbonize the U.S. economy within a decade.
The resolution is backed by progressive groups like the youth-led nonprofit Sunrise Movement, who say the proposal is currently the only roadmap being offered to help the United States avoid a dangerous threshold of global warming. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned in 2018 that the world only had about 12 years left before reaching that tipping-point.
When it was a progressive talking point during the 2018 primaries, conservative figures largely ignored the Green New Deal. But since the resolution’s introduction, opposition has grown rapidly.
Much of that hinges on the bungled release of a “frequently asked questions” document circulated by Ocasio-Cortez’s office. The fact sheet called for dramatically reducing air flights and scaling back “farting cows” in agriculture — both significant sources of greenhouse gases.
While Ocasio-Cortez’s office has downplayed the document and removed it from the representative’s website, Green New Deal opponents seized on its contents immediately, with even Trump tweeting that the proposal would “permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military[.]”
And now Abramoff’s email on behalf of Protect American Values — entitled “More cows, less Democrats” — also draws on the contents of this document.
It’s unclear whether labeling the Green New Deal a “socialist” effort aimed at hurting farmers and prioritizing train travel will prove a winning strategy. But it is proving an easy messaging tactic. A number of Republican lawmakers have already seized on the furor over the fact sheet and are working to make the Green New Deal a losing issue for supporters.
Part of this effort came last week when McConnell called for a vote in the Senate on the Green New Deal resolution. The move is widely understood to be intended to force Democrats into an uncomfortable position of clarifying their support for the climate initiative. Support for the Green New Deal has ranged among Democrats, with some enthusiastically backing it and others expressing more tepid backing.
Green New Deal’s path forward could lie in infrastructure legislation, experts say
A number of 2020 presidential contenders, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Kamala Harris (D-CA), co-sponsored the resolution but its specifics remain vague as does what support could ultimately entail. Some Democrats have moreover expressed skepticism about components of the resolution, something McConnell wants to make clear with a Senate vote, one that could fracture the opposition party in the Republican-controlled chamber.
While only 12 senators have endorsed the Green New Deal, Democrats have largely united in critiquing McConnell’s vote effort and slamming the majority leader’s threats. And Ocasio-Cortez has dismissed it as an attempt to “stop this freight train of momentum” powering the Green New Deal.
==
cf trms email says trip to give conduit to djt
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/leaked-documents-incriminate-gop-russia-ties-with-nra-as-a-common-denominator/
Leaked emails obtained by several news outlets contradict the NRA’s denials that it had nothing to do with its members traveling to Moscow to meet top Russian officials on a 2015 trip organized by admitted Russian agent Maria Butina.
Butina, who recently pleaded guilty to federal conspiracy charges after she was accused of working as a Russian agent to infiltrate conservative circles, organized a 2015 trip to Moscow for top NRA officials. While there, they met with Russia’s then-foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and other prominent figures as part of an apparent Russian campaign to gain influence with American conservatives.
Several NRA officials told the New York Times on Monday that NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre “was opposed to the trip” and ordered members not to go. “Given Mr. LaPierre’s power within the organization, it is unclear how such a trip would have proceeded at all despite his opposition to it,” the Times noted.
ABC News reported that internal NRA documents and emails, as well as photos on social media, appear to show that theNRA “was significantly involved in planning” the trip.
Among those who went on the trip was former NRA president David Keene.
An email obtained by the Daily Beast written by Paul Erickson, Butina’s boyfriend and longtime Republican operative, said that Russian Central Bank official and Butina’s handler Alexandr Torshin offered Keene, who was also a columnist for the Washington Times, an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“[I]mpressing the NRA’s Russian hosts is also the quickest way to secure a private interview with President Putin on behalf of David Keene and the Washington Times— a plum that was dangled in front of Keene by Torshin himself during a recent Torshin visit to Washington, DC,” Erickson, wrote according to the Daily Beast. “High stakes all around.”
Erickson’s email also said that the trip could ease tensions between the U.S. and Russia and pave the way for relations with a future Republican president.
“As we discussed over lunch in Iowa, Russia believes that high level contacts with the NRA might be the BEST means of neutral introduction to either the next American President OR to a meaningful re-set in relations with the Congress under a (God forbid) President Clinton,” he wrote. “This simple good will trip would have enormous diplomatic consequences for a future U.S. / Russia bilateral relationship to the world.”
The emails show thatKeene played a large part in organizing the trip with Butina, and was angry when another NRA official dropped out of the trip, putting Keene’s plans in jeopardy. Despite LaPierre’s claims, the NRA paid for Keene’s travel expenses, at least, and also bought official NRA “gifts” for the Russian delegation, according to the Times.
Among the members who accompanied Keene were Joseph Gregory, co-chair of the NRA’s Golden Ring of Freedom, a group for donors of $1 million or more; and Pete Brownell, the group’s vice president, who later became its president. Brownell also paid for former Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke, an NRA member, to go on the trip.Brownell later abruptly resigned from the NRA.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.,who is leading at least four investigations into the NRA’s ties to Russia, told ABC News that “it’s not credible for the NRA to claim that they played no official role in the 2015 Moscow trip.”
“Americans would rightly be outraged if they learned that officers of a powerful, taxpayer-subsidized organization were offered personal incentives by the Kremlin in exchange for access to elite Republican circles,” Wyden later told The Daily Beast. “That question is right at the heart of my inquiry.”
After the meeting, Butina wrote to Torshin about the successful trip she organized.
“We should let them express their gratitude now, we will put pressure on them quietly later,” she wrote.
Around the same time, Erickson wrote, in an email obtained by the FBI, that he was “involved in securing a VERY private line of communication between the Kremlin and key [unnamed political party] leaders through, of all conduits, the [unnamed gun-rights organization].”
When FBI agents raided Erickson’s South Dakota home, they found a note in whichErickson mused, “How to respond to FSB offer of employment?” The FSB is the Russian state intelligence agency, successor to the infamous Soviet-era KGB.
During this same period, the NRA, relying on an arm of the organization that is not required to disclose its donors, spent a record $30 million helping to elect President Trump, which was nearly three times the $12.5 million it spent to help Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. The NRA and the Trump campaign went as far as coordinating their ad buys for maximum impact, The Trace reported.
All this has caught the eye of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose team has been “raising questions about the relationship between the campaign and the gun group,” according to CNN.
Despite mounting suspicions and eyebrow-raising emails, William Hurd, a lawyer for Erickson, dismissed the reports even as his client faces his own possible charges.
Hurd told the New York Times, “Anyone who thinks that a freedom-loving group like the NRA is going to get all cozy with Vladimir Putin is living in Fantasyland.”
==
https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/nra-desperately-backpedaling-from-russia-as-investigators-look-closer/
==
==
https://www.thedailybeast.com/maria-butina-pleads-guilty-agrees-to-cooperate-with-us
==
...The NRA’s cozy ties with Russia
In December 2015, Butina’s Russian gun-rights organization called the Right to Bear Arms sponsored an NRA delegation to Moscow where attendees met with influential Russian officials including former deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin who had been under U.S. sanctions since 2014.
The convoy to Moscow included Keene, Trump campaign surrogate Sheriff David Clarke, president and CEO of the Outdoor Channel Jim Liberatore, soon-to-be NRA president Peter Brownell and NRA donors Jim Gregory, Arnold Goldschlager and Hilary Goldschlager.
Alexander Torshin — a Russian politician and longtime associate of Butina who has since come under U.S. sanctions — played a key role in the trip and, allegedly, Russia’s decade-long operation infiltrating American conservative groups. A conservative Nashville lawyer namedG. Kline Preston IVwho has done business in Russia claims that he first introduced David Keene to Torshin in 2011 while Keene was NRA president.
Keene and Torshin quickly forged an alliance based on mutual interests.
“Just a brief note to let you know just how much I enjoyed meeting in Pittsburgh during the NRA annual meeting,” Keene wrote in a 2011 letter later obtained by anti-corruption activists in Russia that extended a personal invitation to the NRA’s conference the following year.
Keene added, “If there is anything any of us can do to help you in your endeavors . . . please don’t hesitate to let us know.”
“We will start organizing our own Russian NRA,” Torshin tweeted shortly thereafter.
In 2011, Maria Butina became founding chair of a new Russian gun rights group called the Right to Bear Arms.
:{By 2013, Keene was introduced as an honored guest at the }
:{ conference in Moscow. “There are no peoples that are more alike than Americans and Russians,” Keene }:said:{. “We’re hunters. We’re shooters. We value the same kinds of things… we need to work together.”}:
Erickson accompanied Keene to the 2013 conference, where he reportedly first crossed paths with Butina.
Senate intelligence and finance committees have reportedly requested documents on the NRA’s connections to Russia, including documents related to whether the NRA took Russian money and the 2015 delegation. After spending a record $54.4 million to put President Donald Trump in the White House and support Republicans in Congress, the NRA’s membership dues dropped precipitously the following year.
Although the NRA’s lawyers initially denied the Russian money, they eventually admitted to receiving “a total of approximately $2,512.85 from people associated Russian addresses” and “about $525” from two Russian nationals living in the United States in a letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).
The NRA also acknowledged “membership dues” from Torshin, who has been a non-voting life member of the NRA since 2012 — the year after he first connected with Keene.
Even after his term as president of the NRA, Keene has maintained a cozy relationship with the gun rights organization. Keene is still listed as a director on the NRA’s’ board paid $32,000 last year for working an average of one hour per week, according to a new tax return reviewed by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Keene’s wife, in collaboration with Erickson, reportedly offered Butina $1 million to help secure 5 million barrels of Russian jet fuel — nearly two times all of Russia’s refineries exports in a month — in an unsuccessful scheme to sell the fuel through an American middleman in 2017.
Keene’s history as a foreign agent
Amidst all of the buzz surrounding his ties to alleged Russian agent Maria Butina, NRA board member and former NRA president David Keene took a different approach, registering as a foreign agent representing the interests of the government of Algeria.
Unlike Butina and Erickson, who are alleged to be Russian agents under Section 951, Keene has now registered as a foreign agent under FARA.
This is hardly the first time Keene has had a hand in foreign influence operations.
Keene kicked off his first registered foreign lobbying and influence shop, Keene,:{ Shirley:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: & Associates, in 1987 by inking a $60,000-per-year contract with the National Farmers’ Federation of Australia before signing on to representNicaraguan interests the following year. The firm’s board of directors included Keene’s wife, Diana, and another political consultant named Craigan Shirley.
Perhaps most well-known is Keene’s lobbying for Nigeria and Algeria — which was disclosed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Keene went on to lobby for a broad array of interests, including the World Wrestling Federation.
Now David Keene has again registered as a foreign agent, according to FARA filings made available through CRP’s Foreign Lobby Watch tool.
Outlining the terms of their $360,000 lobbying agreement, Algeria’s government issued a cheeky press release titled “Algeria is Keen on NRA Alum Keene.”
One chapter of Keene’s lobbying history has made even fewer headlines: The time he, Paul Erickson and Jack Abramoff were lobbying for a widely recognized dictator’s entry into the United States.
Erickson and Abramoff had been longtime friends whose professional lives often intertwined. After college Republicans, Erickson and Abramoff went on to do more than just develop the anti-Communist Dolph Lundgren flick *Red Scorpion* together.
In 1995, Erickson obtained a $30,000 contract for a six-week stint lobbying for entrance into the United States on behalf ofMobutu Sese Seko, the president of the Republic of Congo during the Rwandan genocide who was widely referenced as a military dictator. Mobutu had been banned from the entering the United States after he developed political ties while working as a journalist then formed an authoritarian regime. He was notorious for corruption, nepotism, and embezzlement between $4 and $15 billion during his reign as well as widespread human rights violations.
As Abramoff noted in the FARA disclosures, he was “under no illusion we are dealing with Thomas Jefferson.”
The official foreign principal who hired Erickson’s firm was Andre Soussan, a “Danish citizen residing in Paris who is a close political advisor to President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire,” according to the FARA disclosures obtained by CRP.
Soussan reportedly “acted as an intermediary for President Mobutu’s quest for a U.S. visa,” which entailed rallying together members of Congress to write letters of support and “employment of Mr. Keene to assist in Andrew Soussan’s visa quest.” But the FARA disclosures discovered through Foreign Lobby Watch’s full-text search feature show Soussan played little role in the operation.
In the FARA disclosure, Abramoff argued that negotiations in the United States, “where Mobutu has few or no friends — would be less susceptible to manipulation.” U.S. officials did not agree, reportedly pushing back that Mobutu merely wanted to sanitize his image by appearing to support democratic reforms so he could stage controlled elections and further consolidate his power.
The State Department ultimately rejected Mobutu’s entrance into the United States. He stayed in power until he was expelled in 1997.
Abramoff has again been implicated in Erickson’s schemes related to Butina, though the full extent and scope of Abramoff’s role is unclear.
Anti-fraud investigators at Wells Fargo bank, acting on a tip from federal investigators, flagged potentially suspicious bank transfers from an account held jointly by Butina and Erickson to what appeared to be a shell company tied to Abramoff’s family. Erickson sent wire transfers for $15,000 to a California company incorporated in March 2017 out of the home of Abramoff’s son who is listed as its CEO and sole director while Abramoff’s brother is the registered agent.
A tale of two types of foreign agent
...
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/maria-butina-pleads-guilty-admits-details
Butina, the Russian gun rights activist who was arrested earlier this year amid questions about her attempts to influence U.S. politics on Moscow's behalf, has changed her plea to guilty on charges of conspiracy, according to a new report from ABC News.
Butina, who has been dating longtime GOP strategist Paul Erickson, is the founder of the Russian organization "Right to Bear Arms." She has long been suspected of trying to influence the National Rifle Association and draw together American and Russian gun rights groups. But according to ABC News, the latest revelations out of her plea deal obtained by the outlet reveal new details about this influence operation:
Butina was arrested in July and accused of ensnaring Erickson in a "duplicitous relationship," using him for cover and connections as she developed an influence operation designed to “advance the agenda of the Russian Federation.” She pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy and failure to register as a foreign agent.
But now, according to the agreement, Butina has acknowledged that with U.S. Person 1's assistance, she drafted a proposal called "Description of the Diplomacy Project" in March of 2015 which was later sent to the Russian Official, in which she said that she had already "laid the groundwork for an unofficial channel of communication with the next U.S. administration" and requested $125,000 from a Russian billionaire to attend conferences and meetings to further develop those ties. The Russian Official, the agreement said, confirmed that her proposal would be at least partially supported.
The government has alleged that U.S. Person 1 "worked with Butina to arrange introductions to U.S. persons having influence in American politics," including high-ranking members of the National Rifle Association and organizers of the National Prayer Breakfast, that would ultimately give her a surprising level of access to conservative politicians, including — in one memorable interaction captured on video — to then-candidate Donald Trump.
"U.S. Person 1" is speculated to be Erickson, who is also facing investigation by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, for acting as an unregistered Russian agent.
It is hardly a surprise at this point that Trump would be close to Russian influence agents. But this information suggests that the plan, at least from Butina's perspective, went deeper than Trump. The revelation that Butina was not only close to major GOP-aligned interest groups, but also attempted to establish a future backchannel between Russian oligarchs and a future U.S. presidency before Trump had even won the GOP nomination, is stunning. And it raises questions about how much knowledge the NRA and conservative politicians had of what was going on.
The public deserves answers on how deep Butina's operation went.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/paul-erickson-investigated-maria-butina-russia-nra
Wednesday, The Daily Beast reported that GOP operative Paul Erickson is being investigated by prosecutors with the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia:
The Daily Beast reviewed a so-called "target letter" that federal investigators sent Erickson's lawyer, which said they are considering bringing charges against him under Section 951 of the U.S. code—the law barring people from secretly acting as agents of foreign governments.
The letter also said the government may bring a conspiracy chargeagainst Erickson, who is the boyfriend of accused foreign agent Maria Butina. The letter, which was sent in September by investigators working out of the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, does not accuse Erickson of any crimes or guarantee that he will face charges.
Erickson, a former board member of the American Conservative Union who advised the presidential campaigns of Pat Buchanan and Mitt Romney, has strong ties to the National Rifle Association. His romantic relationship with Butina, who helped found a Russian counterpart to the NRA and is imprisoned on suspicion as a Russian spy, has been heavily scrutinized as a possible conduit for Russian influence in the American gun rights movement, and Republican politics generally.
And there is increasing evidence Erickson was a willing participant. In 2016, Erickson emailed President Donald Trump's campaign informing them Russian President Vladimir Putin was "deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump." And court documents from Butina's case suggest one of her contacts — suspected to be Erickson — boasted of "securing a VERY private line of communication between the Kremlin" and the GOP.
Erickson, who is also accused of defrauding his former business partners in a separate case being pursued by federal prosecutors in South Dakota, has also been asked to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee to discuss his ties to Russia, but he has refused to do so.
As The Daily Beast notes, legal experts including former Pentagon attorney Ryan Goodman and former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti have said that charging Erickson under Section 951 in the context of Russian political activity would essentially be accusing him of "espionage-lite."
If Erickson were to be charged as a Russian agent, that would only intensify the questions surrounding the link between Russia and Republican-aligned interest groups. And the implications could force us to rethink how we understand these relationships.
==
ref
https://www.thedailybeast.com/feds-target-butinas-gop-boyfriend-as-foreign-agent
no lnx
Feds Target Butina’s GOP Boyfriend as Foreign Agent
Paul Erickson served as accused Kremlin spy Maria Butina’s guide as she penetrated the American conservative movement. Now he’s under investigation as a Russian agent, too.
Betsy Woodruff,
Erin Banco
12.05.18 8:00 AM ET
Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican politico whose Russian girlfriend is in jail on charges she acted as a covert foreign agent, has been informed that he may face similar accusations. The Daily Beast reviewed a “target letter” that federal investigators sent Erickson’s lawyer, which said they are considering bringing charges against him under Section 951 of the U.S. code—the law barring people from secretly acting as agents of foreign governments.
The letter also said the government may bring a conspiracy charge against Erickson, who is the boyfriend of accused foreign agent Maria Butina. The letter, which was sent in September by investigators working out of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, does not accuse Erickson of any crimes or guarantee that he will face charges.
RED MENACE
Cyber, Seduction, and Bumbling: Maria Butina’s Spy Career
Adam Rawnsley
If prosecutors bring the charges named in the letter, Erickson would be the first American embroiled in the 2016 Russia investigation charged under a statute that Justice Department lawyers describe as “espionage-lite.”
“Charging an American under 951 in the context of the Russia investigation is especially serious because that statute is generally reserved for espionage-like cases, such as intelligence-gathering on behalf of a foreign government,” said Ryan Goodman, a former Defense Department attorney who now teaches at the New York University School of Law.
“Essentially what it would say is that an American was acting to advance the interests of a foreign power, contrary to the interests of the United States of America,” said Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor.
A person familiar with the investigation told The Daily Beast that federal law-enforcement officers have interviewed people in Erickson’s orbit, some of whom provided statements to the FBI. Law-enforcement officials asked those sources about the former political insider’s business dealings and his reputation in conservative political circles, according to that person. As The Daily Beast previously reported, several of Erickson’s former business partners have claimed he defrauded them. The U.S. attorney’s office in South Dakota is leading an investigation into those claims.
Justice Department investigators aren’t the only ones interested in Erickson. Staffers with the Senate intelligence committee, which is probing Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential elections, have also asked to speak with him. But a lawyer for Erickson told them he would plead the Fifth Amendment if subpoenaed to testify, a source familiar with those communications confirmed to The Daily Beast. Investigators will not force Erickson to appear just to take the Fifth. William Hurd, who is representing Erickson on the Senate intelligence committee matter, declined to comment.
HAMMERED
Accused Russian Spy’s Boy Toy Is a Serial Fraud: Lawsuits
Adam Rawnsley
RELATED IN POLITICS
Maria Butina’s Beau Finally Lawyers Up
Assange ‘Has Been Charged,’ According to DOJ Filing
Trump Tries to Escape Mueller With Post-Election Smokescreen
According to The New York Times, Erickson wrote an email to the Trump campaign in May 2016 offering to set up a back-channel meeting between the candidate and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump,” Erickson wrote, the Times reported. “He wants to extend an invitation to Mr. Trump to visit him in the Kremlin before the election.”
By then, Erickson had known Butina for years. Butina, a gun-rights activist from Russia, attended grad school at American University while building relationships in the U.S. conservative movement, with Erickson often serving as her guide.
The pair made no secret of their affinity for Russia. As The Daily Beast previously reported, at her birthday party, she dressed as a Russian empress and he dressed as Rasputin. Guests drank vodka from a bottle emblazoned with a hammer and sickle.
And as Butina built relationships with conservative leaders, Erickson didn’t exactly keep his role under wraps. According to court documents filed by the prosecutors charging Butina, someone called “Person 1” and widely believed to be Erickson boasted that he was involved in “securing a VERY private line of communication between the Kremlin” and the Republican Party.
RISKY BUSINESS
Butina’s Beau Snookered Investors With a Shady Oil Deal
Erin Banco
:{
}:
The two also worked together on various other projects, including a deal to secure Russian jet fuel for an American middleman. Erickson and Butina worked on the failed business venture with Donna Keene, the wife of former NRA President David Keene, in 2017.
William Hurd of Troutman Sanders, a lawyer for Erickson, declined to comment. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office in D.C. declined to comment as well.
The U.S. Attorney’s Manual recommends that prosecutors send target letters to alert people they are in the feds’ sights.
“At the least, it’s a preliminary determination that they’re going to proceed to indictment,” said Sol Wisenberg, the co-chairman of the white-collar practice at Nelson Mullins.
Wisenberg said that while people can generally expect to be indicted within a few months of receiving a target letter, there’s no firm rule on how quickly any indictment should follow, if at all.
If investigators charge Erickson under Section 951, he could be the first American publicly accused of acting (or trying to act) as an agent of a foreign government in connection with Russia’s 2016 interference. Other Americans roped up in Russia investigations—including former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort and lobbyist Sam Patten—have faced charges for illegal lobbying, in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. But 951 is different. It’s a rare charge, and the Justice Department’s inspector general wrote in 2016 that prosecutors in its elite National Security Division describe it as “espionage-lite.”
“[A] Section 951 case generally involves espionage-like or clandestine behavior or an otherwise provable connection to an intelligence service, or information-gathering or procurement-type activity on behalf of a foreign government,” the inspector general wrote.
Prosecutors in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office charged Butina with violating Section 951.
Butina said on several occasions that she helped facilitate communications between the Trump campaign and Russia, multiple sources told The Daily Beast for a February 2017 story. In July, the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office charged her with acting as a covert foreign agent and conspiring to commit a crime. Both those charges are also identified in the Erickson target letter.
RED HEART
Maria Butina’s Beau Finally Lawyers Up
Erin Banco,
Betsy Woodruff
Special counsel Robert Mueller is not handling Butina’s prosecution. A spokesperson for his office declined to comment on why that is.
:{
}:
Butina is currently in an Alexandria, Virginia, jail. Erickson visits her there regularly, two individuals with knowledge of the meetings told The Daily Beast.
==
RS
...Butina and Torshin soon began leveraging their NRA connections to gain personal access to GOP presidential contenders. Not yet a declared candidate, Trump addressed the NRA’s 2015 convention in Nashville. “We need strength,” Trump said. “We need people that are respected. Putin has no respect for our president.” Torshin has claimed he met Trump in Nashville, and that Trump ribbed him: “ So, you’re from Russia – when are you going to invade Latvia?” The Trump White House has denied this encounter took place.
The Russians also rubbed elbows with Scott Walker, then a viable candidate, and the beneficiary of more than$3.5 million from the NRA over his career.Walker charmed Butina when they first met, she blogged, greeting her in Russian. “We talked about Russia,” she wrote. “I did not hear any aggression towards our country, the president or my compatriots.” Two months later, Butina traveled to Waukesha, Wisconsin, to attend Walker’s official presidential launch.
Butina was not keeping a low profile. In June, she wrote an English-language op-ed about U.S-Russia relations for The National Interest, the foreign-policy magazine founded by neoconservative Irving Kristol. Butina staked out a case for regime change in America: “It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States,” she wrote. “As improbable as it may sound, the Russian bear shares more interests with the Republican elephant than the Democratic donkey.” Citing the GOP’s coalition of social conservatives, businessmen and anti-terrorism hawks, Butina wrote, “These are values espoused by United Russia, the current ruling political party in Moscow.” The magazine identified Butina as the founder of “a Russian version of the NRA.” Not included in her bio: Butina was still on the government payroll, as special assistant to Torshin, who by now was deputy governor of the Russian central bank.
Butina soon appeared in Las Vegas for Freedom Fest, a libertarian conference where Trump spoke. Barely a month into his candidacy, Trump had said little formally about Russian relations. “I am from Russia,”
in lilting English from a microphone in a ballroom at the Planet Hollywood casino. “If you would be elected as the president, do you want to continue the politics of sanctions?”
“I know Putin,” Trump replied. “I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin. OK?” Then Trump gave an answer that was music to Kremlin ears: “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”
Butina’s intelligence, drive and charisma won her powerful friends in the NRA. But she became remarkably close with one lifelong GOP activist in particular: Paul Erickson. Six-feet-four, with a bald crown ringed by graying curls, Erickson has a skier’s build and greets fellow Yalies with a fight-song-inspired “Boola, Boola.” A member of the same cohort of college Republicans that produced Norquist, Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and disgraced super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Erickson has enjoyed a vivid and varied career. A rabid anti-communist, he spent the summer of 1983 sending supplies to insurgents battling the USSR in Afghanistan. He has lobbied on behalf of Zairean strongman Mobutu Sese Seko,mounted the “Love Hurts” media tour for celebrity penis amputee John Wayne Bobbitt and was credited as an executive producer on Abramoff’s 1989 B-movie Red Scorpion, starring Dolph Lundgren.
...
Like Keene, with whom he served on the board of the American Conservative Union, Erickson is a low-profile everywhere man, described by one friend as a “secret master of the political universe.” He has helped run a number of GOP presidential campaigns, serving as national political director for nativist Pat Buchanan’s 1992 run. (Erickson did not respond to repeated interview requests.) In 2013, Erickson joined the NRA’s first visit to the Right to Bear Arms conference in Moscow – the following September, according to Butina’s blog, he returned to Russia, solo, to address her group on behalf of the NRA.
As she tracked GOP presidential candidates in 2015, Butina touched down, repeatedly, in South Dakota, where Erickson lives. In July, she lectured at a camp for young Republicans with Erickson by her side. That same month, the duo appeared on a podcast in Manhattan. Erickson regaled the audience with a creation myth about Right to Bear Arms worthy of a Silicon Valley startup. “Maria is very humble,” Erickson said. “She started the Right to Bear Arms in the Russian version of McDonald’s with friends, and her work became noticed by the highest levels of the Russian government.” In September, the pair partied by the graveside of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Maryland. Butina wore a flapper’s silver headband and a long string of pearls; Erickson carried a bottle of rum and a copy of The Great Gatsby.
At the close of 2015, Torshin and Butina invited a new delegation of NRA members to a Right to Bear Arms convention in Moscow. The crowd included faces familiar and new, including Keene; Pete Brownell, CEO of one of America’s largest gun-sellers who is now the NRA’s president; Joe Gregory, the chair of the NRA’s Golden Ring of Freedom; as well as Trump surrogate and then-Milwaukee Sheriff David A. Clarke. Erickson reportedly also attended.
The Russians put on a wintry spectacle – replete with ornate Christmas trees and white chairs tied up like presents with red ribbons. Arnold Goldschlager, a major NRA donor who also attended, would tell McClatchy, “They were killing us with vodka and the best Russian food.” In a public filing, Clarke estimated Right to Bear Arms spent $6,000 on his hotels, meals, excursions and transportation around Moscow.
In these same days, Putin himself was pursuing other angles of influence with the American right. The Russian president met with right-wing pastor Franklin Graham for a 45-minute exchange. And on December 10th, Putin infamously sat next to Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s future national security adviser, at an RT gala in Moscow.
As they lived the high life in Moscow, the NRA delegation kept crossing paths with top Putin cabinet officials. Clarke tweeted about a meeting with “the Russian Foreign Minister” – who is Sergey Lavrov. NRA members also convened with Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister of Russia who is in charge of the defense industry, and a subject of U.S. sanctions. But for the representatives of the NRA, geopolitics seemed a distant concern. This trip was all fun and guns. Sheriff Clarke tweeted photos from Russian gunmaker Orsis, delighting, “I test fired one of their sniper rifles.”
The Russians, Hall believes, were seeking a “mechanism by which they can, sort of, control the NRA.”
If NRA members were having a carefree good time, the Russians were almost certainly watching their every move, seeking leverage, says Hall. “The FSB is set up first and foremost to collect compromising information on people who might later be useful to the Russian government,” he says. “It’s not always that,” he adds. “A lot of it involves establishing personal relationships that then could be leveraged into something different. That’s where a lot of the dinners, and the toasting, and the private meetings start. This is something the Russians have done for decades.”
The Russians, Hall believes, were seeking a “mechanism by which they can, sort of, control the NRA.” They might start with the “friendly route,” he says, “pulling the wool over the organization’s eyes, getting them to buy into: ‘Hey, we’re both real conservatives at heart. Russia is actually a friend of the United States. Why can’t we get past all of this ugliness?” The question is where the camaraderie ends. “Do they end up with a senior NRA guy who they formally recruited, who can now work clandestinely for them?”
Many recruits are oblivious of Russian influence – until it’s too late. “They’ll start it off with something seemingly innocuous,” Hall says. “And then they’ll move it as far as they possibly can. If they start hitting resistance, they might very well say, ‘Let’s not forget that trip to Moscow you took six months ago, where you had a few too many drinks and got a little too friendly with somebody.’ That’s there as well.”
At the beginning of 2016, Butina and Erickson were taking their relationship to a new level. Back in South Dakota, they became partners in a limited-liability corporation called Bridges; in legal documents, Butina and Erickson list their address at the same suite in Sioux Falls, but the purpose and activities of Bridges remain opaque. According to a conversation between Erickson and reporters for McClatchy, the corporation, founded in February 2016, “was established in case Butina needed any monetary assistance for her graduate studies.” (Months later, Butina would enroll in a master’s program at American University.) McClatchy deadpanned this would be “an unusual way to use an LLC.”
The timing of Bridges’ founding is notable. Three days later, Torshin tweeted from Russia, sharing news of the Republican presidential race: “Maria Butina is now in the U.S. She writes to me that D. Trump (a member of the NRA) is really for the cooperation with Russia.”
That spring, Erickson would attempt to broker a meeting between the GOP candidate and Torshin, with the hope that it would lead to a future sit-down between Trump and Putin. Erickson sent an e-mail to a top member of the Trump campaign in May, with the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” (The message, obtained by Congress, was shared with *The New York Times*.) Erickson explained that “happenstance” and NRA connections had enabled him to “slowly begin cultivating a back-channel to President Putin’s Kremlin.” He informed the campaign that “Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump” and wished candidate Trump “to visit him in the Kremlin.”Erickson implied that Moscow saw Hillary Clinton as “beyond redemption.”
Referring to “President Putin’s emissary on this front” – who :{The New York Times:(style="box-sizing:border-box;-webkit-font-smoothing:antialiased"):}: determined was Torshin – Erickson proposed an initial meeting would be possible between Trump and Torshin in Louisville, Kentucky. Timed with the 2016 NRA convention, Erickson wrote, the event weekend could be used by Torshin to “make ‘first contact.’ ”
The NRA officially endorsed Trump in Louisville on May 20th, marking the gun lobby’s earliest-ever presidential endorsement. Accepting the NRA’s backing, Trump vowed, “I will never let you down.” Torshin watched in the audience, later tweeting, “He was not simply endorsed at the NRA Congress at Louisville, it was unanimous. . . . the applause!”
Torshin, it seems, did not secure the face-to-face meeting with Trump. But the Russian banker did meet with the president’s son, lifetime NRA member Donald Trump Jr., at a dinner during the convention. (Outreach from Russia was coming strong: Weeks later, in early June, Trump Jr. would sit down with another cast of Russians promising “dirt” on Clinton at Trump Tower.) In July, Torshin received his medal from the FSB.
Through Election Day, the NRA would spend more than $30 million in federally recorded funds on behalf of Trump. Citing two sources close to the gun lobby, McClatchy reporters Peter Stone and Greg Gordon suggest the true total may be far greater –$70 million or more – noting that Internet advertising, field work and get-out-the-vote campaigns are not documented in federal disclosures.
The source of the millions spent by the NRA is untraceable; the organization is a dark-money giant that can hide its benefactors. This privilege of secrecy is granted to “social welfare” organizations, whose primary purpose is not political. Despite its prodigious power in our elections, the NRA spends most of its money on other activities – from magazine publishing to gun education to NRATV.
“TheNRA is routinely used as a conduit” for “sketchy” money spent on Republican politics, says Maguire, the investigator for the Center for Responsive Politics. “We’ve seen some of the groups in the Koch network give large, six- and seven-figure grants to the NRA – knowing that the NRA is going to spend that money on ads in an election,” Maguire says. “They get away with it.”
The Russians, Maguire says, could easily have funneled money into the NRA’s coffers, using a similar pathway: “It is not surprising that the NRA would be used in that way.” It might even have been legal, he says. The NRA is allowed to accept foreign cash; it’s only forbidden from spending that money directly on U.S. elections. But in an organization as vast and varied as the NRA, cash is fungible. A legal, ostensibly apolitical donation to the NRA by Russia could have freed up other, unrestricted funds to spend on politics. It’s also possible the gun lobby was duped. “The NRA may have been used without even knowing it,” Maguire says. “Russians could easily set up a Delaware corporation, with a name like ‘Americans for Gun Freedom LLC,’ and give the NRA a $5 million check. The NRA would just say, ‘Hey great, it sounds like our kind of people,’ ” and spend the cash.
...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/nra-maria-butina-spying-charges-trump-campaign/
For decades, the National Rifle Association has promoted its hardline politics with appeals to patriotism, freedom, and the staunch defense of the Second Amendment. But now, the controversial gun lobbying group finds itself deeply caught up in a wide-ranging effort to sabotage American democracy by an enemy foreign power.
Federal prosecutors unsealed charges this week against 29-year-old Russian national Maria Butina, a self-styled gun activist with long-running ties to the NRA who worked for Alexander Torshin, a high-level Russian government and banking official from President Vladimir Putin’s party. Butina, who was a graduate student at American University until this spring, began traveling to the United States in 2014 and operated as a “covert Russian agent,” according to an FBI affidavit. She acted as an unregistered foreign agent and participated in a multiyear conspiracy to infiltrate conservative political groups including the NRA, federal prosecutors say, in order to “advance the interests of the Russian Federation.”
Butina and Torshin—who for years also traveled to America for NRA events and were among Russian officials sanctioned by the Treasury Department in April—worked together in attempts to cultivate Republican politicians and eventually Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Under Torshin’s direction, “the covert influence campaign involved substantial planning, international coordination, and preparation,” according to court documents, which detail some of the evidence gathered by the FBI on Butina’s connections to a Russian intelligence agency and Russian oligarchs. Torshin is referred to only as a “Russian official” in the court documents, but his identity has since been confirmed in multiple news reports, and he appears with Butina in both the United States and Russia throughout several years’ worth of social-media posts previously documented by Mother Jones.
The pair of Russians spent years building ties with the NRA, as we reported in our recent investigation. And according to a New York Times report this week, the NRA “repeatedly brought Butina from her native Russia to the United States for events until she obtained a student visa in August 2016.”
Beginning back in 2013, Butina developed a relationship with an unnamed “American political operative” described in the court documents, who has been identified in media reports as GOP activist andNRA member Paul Erickson. In her private communications with Erickson, Butina spoke of the key influence of the NRA on the Republican Party, noting that the gun group is “the largest sponsor of the elections to the US congress.” Through Erickson and her connections with the NRA, Butina sought to establish “‘back channel’ lines of communication” to influential political figures. In photos that she posted to her Facebook page, she posed with Republican politicians, including former presidential candidates Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal, and former US Sen. Rick Santorum.
:{Butina at an NRA shooting range in Fairfax, Virginia, posted to her VK page in May 2014
}:
As the putative founder of a Russian group called The Right to Bear Arms, Butina forged connections with NRA executives, including former NRA President David Keene, whom she was in extensive contact with over several years. Keene traveled to Moscow in November 2013 at the invitation of Butina and Torshin to attend a Right to Bear Arms event. That same month, future Trump national security adviser John Bolton—then a member of the NRA’s “international affairs subcommittee”—recorded a video address talking up gun rights at Keene’s request, which Right to Bear Arms purportedly used to lobby the Russian legislature. (Private gun ownership is relatively minimal in Russia.)
The following January, Torshin published a gun appreciation piece in the Washington Times, where Keene was the op-ed editor at the time. That April, Torshin and Butina attended the NRA convention in Indianapolis, where Butina joined Keene for meetings. In the fall of 2014, Erickson traveled to Moscow to attend a Right to Bear Arms meeting with Butina.
Then in late March 2015—two days before Butina emailed Erickson a plan for further building political connections—she posted on Facebook that she was again headed for the NRA annual convention. Butina and Torshin both traveled to Nashville for the event that April, one of multiple NRA annual conventions that the pair of Russians attended between 2012 and 2016. There, Butina and Torshin met Scott Walker. According to a report in Bloomberg, Torshin also met and had a “jovial exchange” with Trump.
Butina’s American contact noted that the “international reach of the NRA placed me in a position a couple of years ago to slowly begin cultivating a back-channel to President Putin’s Kremlin.”
Three months later, in July 2015,Butina went to Wisconsin to attend Walker’s presidential campaign launch. The Wisconsin trip came just two days after Butina had traveled to Las Vegas for FreedomFest, an annual conservative event where Trump was speaking. Trump, who had announced his White House run in June, fielded questions from the audience. Butina took a turn at the microphone: “I am visiting from Russia,” she said.
“Ahhhhh, Putin!” Trump interjected, prompting laughter from the crowd as he added a mocking riff about the current president: “Good friend of Obama, Putin. He likes Obama a lot. Go ahead.”
“My question will be about foreign politics,” Butina said, and then asked Trump if he would continue “damaging” economic sanctions against Russia as president. Trump appeared not to know who Butina was. After going off on Obama and digressing into trade talk, he responded that he would “get along very nicely” with Putin. “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions,” Trump said.
When senior Trump campaign aides later saw video of the exchange (first highlighted in the national media by our investigation published in March), they found it strange and disconcerting.
The NRA junket to Moscow
In December 2015, an NRA delegation including Erickson, Keene, NRA Vice President Pete Brownell, major NRA donor Joe Gregory, and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke traveled to Moscow, where they met with Kremlin officials—including Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, one of the first Russians sanctioned by the Obama administration after Putin annexed Crimea in 2014. The delegation dined on lavish meals and visited a Russian gun manufacturer. Butina and Torshin participated in and helped host the gathering.
Sheriff Clarke, who has served on NRA subcommittees and spoken at NRA political events dating back to 2014, filed an ethics report showing that The Right to Bear Arms, Butina’s group, had paid $6,000 for his trip expenses. The report also noted that Brownell, who became NRA president in 2017, personally paid nearly $14,000 for Clarke’s airfare and visa expenses for the Russia trip.
The NRA has tried to downplay the junket. This May, NRA national spokeswoman Dana Loesch, who speaks directly for the NRA leadership, commented on a story from my colleague David Corn about a Russian sniper rifle that the NRA helped promote by participating in a video recorded at the gun manufacturer during the Moscow trip. Loesch asserted in a tweet that “there was no NRA trip.” But when I raised that exchange again after the news of Butina’s arrest this week, Loesch confirmed the NRA delegation’s visit to Moscow—though she now claimed it was an unofficial one. “I said it wasn’t an official trip,” she tweeted at me.
The gun manufacturer’s promotional
opens with a title card reading, “The delegation of National Rifle Association of America (NRA), headed by the first vice-president of the association Pete Brownell, visited the Moscow firearms factory ORSIS on December 11, 2015.” The video shows the NRA leaders and representatives in talks with the Russians, touring the premises, and enthusiastically firing various weapons. In one segment, Butina can be seen sitting just behind Clarke.
Butina and Clarke (right); screen shot from video recorded at the December 2015 gathering in Moscow
The NRA has not commented publicly so far about the federal case against Butina. Two NRA spokespersons declined to respond to a detailed inquiry from Mother Jones. David Keene and Paul Erickson also did not respond to multiple separate requests for comment.
Targeting the 2016 election
When the NRA annual convention kicked off in May 2016 in Louisville, Kentucky, Torshin met Donald Trump Jr. during a private dinner the night before his father gave a much anticipated speech. (“The only way to save our Second Amendment,” his father told the crowd the next day, “is to vote for a person that you all know named Donald Trump.”) A lawyer for Don Jr. later said the exchange between his client and Torshin at the dinner “was all gun-related small talk.” The Washington Post reported this week that Butina also met Don Jr. briefly at the convention.
Butina and Torshin are both “lifetime members” of the NRA, according to Torshin, who posed for photos in Louisville armed with a large rifle, an NRA “Ring of Freedom” donor ID badge hanging around his neck.
Torshin at the 2016 NRA annual convention in Louisville
That same month, as the New York Times previously reported, Erickson emailed a high-level Trump campaign official with the message that “Russia is quietly but actively seeking a dialogue.” He noted that the “international reach of the NRA placed me in a position a couple of years ago to slowly begin cultivating a back-channel to President Putin’s Kremlin.”
Three months earlier, Erickson and Butina had formed Bridges LLC; Erickson later told *McClatchy* that they created the South Dakota-based company for Butina to get financial assistance for her graduate studies—“an unusual way to use a LLC,” as McClatchy dryly noted.
After Trump won, Butina contacted Torshin. “I am ready for further orders,” she told him.
After Trump won the presidential election, according to the court documents made public this week, Butina contacted Torshin. “I am ready for further orders,” she told him.
A lawyer for Butina has denied the federal charges, calling them “overblown.” Butina appeared at a hearing in federal court on Wednesday in Washington, where her lawyer said she had cooperated with an FEC inquiry in March regarding contributions to a political committee (no further details of which were specified at the hearing). The latest court filing from prosecutors on Wednesday alleged that Butina offered sex to another American, whose identity is unknown, in “exchange for a position within a special interest organization.”
According to a report earlier this year from McClatchy, the FBI has been investigating whether Torshin illegally funneled money to the Trump campaign through the NRA. (The FBI would “neither confirm nor deny” the investigation to Mother Jones.)
The Butina case is being prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the National Security Division of the Justice Department; it is unclear to what degree the case may relate to the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. But a near certainty is that additional significant details from the case will emerge.
Butina in Moscow with former NRA President David Keene; posted November 2013
The NRA seemed emboldened by the 2016 election. Sheriff Clarke gave
for the political arm of the organization at the 2017 annual convention in Atlanta, where he boasted, “You know I worked hard to get Donald Trump elected president of the United States.” As the crowd applauded, he added, “You see, these rat bastards on the left never give up. For them, election defeats don’t matter. It’s simply a time to regroup and continue their assault on our constitution, the rule of law, liberty, and American exceptionalism.”
Two weeks after the high school massacre this February in Parkland, Florida, NRA Executive Director Chris Cox met privately in the Oval Office with Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and then announced, “POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control. #NRA #MAGA.”
Yet, as the federal government prosecutes an alleged Russian spy whose mission flourished thanks to her deep ties with the NRA, the gun group may no longer be able to so easily declare itself a patriotic defender of America.
==
April 6, 2018. Torshin is one of more than 20 Russians sanctioned by the American government in response to Russian interference in 2016, among other incidents.
==
nyt no lnx
...
Ms. Butina viewed the N.R.A. as a powerful force for shifting Republican policies, court records show. She described the group as “the largest sponsor of the elections to the U.S. Congress” and as a sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference. The N.R.A. is not named in court records, but its ties to Ms. Butina and Mr. Torshin have been previously reported. The N.R.A. did not respond to a message seeking comment.
In May 2016, Mr. Torshin and Ms. Butina proposed a meeting between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin during the annual N.R.A. convention in Louisville, Ky. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, shot down the proposal. But Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, did meet Mr. Torshin and Ms. Butina at an N.R.A.-sponsored dinner, although Mr. Trump’s lawyer has called the encounter brief. Congressional investigators have obtained a photograph of the three at the event, people familiar with the inquiry said.
Prosecutors said that an American political operative helped Ms. Butina identify political, news media and business officials to target. Ms. Butina met the operative in Moscow, prosecutors said. Quoting from emails, prosecutors laid out the most explicit evidence to date that Americans knowingly aided the Russian influence effort.
In one email, the American said he had given Ms. Butina a map for how to proceed. “I and your friends in America can’t make it any easier for you than that,” the political operative wrote.
Ms. Butina and Mr. Torshin attended several events hosted by groups affiliated with Republicans, including two National Prayer Breakfasts in 2016 and 2017. In one email, Ms. Butina wrote that Mr. Torshin had suggested that Mr. Putin attend the February 2017 breakfast, at which Mr. Trump spoke.
“Pres. Putin did not say ‘no’!” Ms. Butina wrote in the email.
Though the American operative is not identified, The New York Times has previously reported that Ms. Butina developed a close relationship with Paul Erickson, an N.R.A. member and a longtime conservative activist who was part of the effort to arrange a meeting between Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump. Ms. Butina has publicly described hosting Mr. Erickson at an event in Moscow. Mr. Erickson and his lawyer did not respond to messages seeking comment. He is not identified in court records and has not been charged.
Ms. Butina also worked with a second unidentified American, prosecutors said.
After the November 2016 election, Ms. Butina wrote to Mr. Torshin on Twitter, prosecutors said: “I am ready for further orders.”
...
wapo no lnx
Public Safety
Maria Butina, Russian gun-rights advocate who sought to build ties with NRA, charged with acting as a covert Russian agent
By Rosalind S. Helderman, Tom Jackman and Devlin Barrett
July 16 at 8:46 PM
A Russian woman with ties to a senior Russian government official was charged in Washington on Monday with conspiracy to act as an agent of the Russian Federation, including by building ties to the leadership of the National Rifle Association and other conservative political organizations.
Maria Butina, 29, who recently received a graduate degree from American University, was arrested Sunday in the District and made her first appearance in U.S. District Court before Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson, where she was ordered held without bond.
Butina is accused of trying to cultivate relationships with American politicians to establish “back channel” lines of communication and seeking to infiltrate U.S. political groups, including an unnamed “gun rights organization,” to advance Russia’s agenda. Descriptions in court papers match published reports about Butina’s interactions with the NRA.
The case, which is not part of the special counsel investigation into Russian interference, lays out the strongest allegations to date of American involvement in Russia’s influence operations.
Butina was allegedly assisted in her efforts by a U.S. political operative who helped introduce her to influential political figures. That person was not charged and is not named in court papers, but the description matches that ofPaul Erickson, a GOP consultant who sought to organize a meeting between then-candidate Donald Trump and Alexander Torshin, Butina’s Russian colleague and a former Russian senator, at a May 2016 NRA convention.
NRA officials and Erickson did not respond to requests for comment.
Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina at a Las Vegas conservative political event in July 2015. (FreedomFest/FreedomFest)
[Trump hands Putin a diplomatic triumph by casting doubt on U.S. intelligence agencies]
Butina’s attorney, Robert Neil Driscoll, denied that she is a Russian agent and said she was merely networking to develop relationships with Americans.
He told the judge that she had testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in a closed session several months ago and had offered before her arrest to cooperate with the government.
Butina did not speak during the brief hearing, other than to state her name. A detention hearing and preliminary hearing were set for Wednesday.
The Russian Embassy said in a statement to the Interfax News Agency that it is “seeking consular access” to Butina “with the aim of defending her legal rights.”
A former furniture store owner from Siberia and gun-rights activist, Butina was the first to publicly quiz President Trump about his views on Russia when she asked him a question at a town hall in July 2015.
She also briefly met Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son, at the NRA convention in May 2016, according to a person familiar with the encounter.
Court filings do not mention her interactions with Trump and his son, but do recount Butina’s other contacts regarding the NRA convention and the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual event attended by government and political leaders in Washington. Erickson sought to arrange a meeting for Torshin with Trump at the February 2017 breakfast, according to a person familiar with the event.
After attending the event with a large Russian delegation, Butina wrote to an organizer to offer “important information for you to further this new relationship” with Russia, according to court filings. The nature of the information is not described.
[Read the affidavit about Maria Butina]
The charges against Butina were announced days after the Justice Department unveiled an indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers for allegedly conspiring to hack Democrats in 2016 and just hours after Trump cast doubt on Russia’s involvement in an extraordinary joint news conference with President Vladimir Putin.
Over the weekend, law enforcement officials became increasingly concerned that Butina appeared to be planning to leave the Washington area, according to people familiar with the matter. Investigators were concerned such a trip could pose operational challenges for their work and decided to make an arrest, these people said.
Although special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is aware of the details of the Butina case, the investigative work began before he was appointed to that job, and it has continued to be handled by federal agents and prosecutors outside of his office, these people said.
In an affidavit filed with the court, FBI Special Agent Kevin Helson outlined a two-year alleged effort by Butina to penetrate and influence the U.S. political system for Russia’s benefit by building ties to the American conservative movement.
Butina’s efforts in the United States came as a number of Republicans began rethinking the party’s traditional hostility to Russia, forming new bonds with Putin’s government around conservative social views on religion and same-sex marriage. That shift culminated with the November 2016 election of Trump, who had argued throughout his campaign that the United States should seek warmer relations with Russia.
[Guns and religion: How American conservatives grew closer to Putin’s Russia]
As early as March 2015, Butina emailed the American political operative about her belief that the Republican Party would likely win the White House in 2016, according to court papers. She proposed a special project to use the NRA to build relations with the GOP.
She wrote that “the resulting status needs to be strengthened” before the 2016 election and asked for a $125,000 budget to help her attend “all upcoming major conferences” of the Republican Party.
According to the affidavit, the FBI found evidence on Butina’s computer that she kept an unnamed Russian official closely apprised of her activities. Descriptions of the official in the complaint match Torshin, a Russian central banker who has also built ties with the NRA.
In one March 2016 email to anunnamed American, Butina described Torshin’s “desire in our Russian-American project” and indicated that a Putin representative had expressed support “for building this communication channel.”
Butina began reaching out to NRA members and other American gun enthusiasts in 2013 and hosted delegations of NRA executives and gun activists in Moscow. She and Torshin also attended a series of NRA events in the United States starting in 2014.
In June 2015, as Trump announced his candidacy, Butina wrote a column in the National Interest, a conservative U.S. magazine, suggesting that only by electing a Republican could the United States and Russia hope to improve relations.
The next month at FreedomFest, a libertarian political event in Las Vegas, she asked Trump at a public event: “What will be your foreign politics, especially in the relations with my country?”
“I know Putin and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin,” Trump responded, in the first of his many campaign statements about his desire to build better ties with Russia.
Butina told The Washington Post in April 2017 that her question to Trump was “happenstance” and that she has never been an employee of the Russian government.
Butina also attended an NRA convention in May 2016, where Erickson worked to get Torshin a meeting with Trump. In an email to the campaign, Erickson referred to Torshin as “Putin’s emissary” in an effort to improve relations with the United States, The Post and other media organizations previously reported.
The meeting did not happen, but Torshin had an interaction at the event with Trump Jr., who has said it was brief and not memorable. Trump Jr. also interacted with a woman described as Torshin’s assistant who he later came to believe was Butina, according to a person with knowledge of the episode.
Butina also accompanied Erickson to Trump’s inauguration, one of a number of Russians who attended the festivities and toasted to better relations between Russia and the United States.
Tom Hamburger, Shane Harris and Carol D. Leonnig in Washington and Anton Troianovski in Helsinki contributed to this report.
==
no lnx
Timeline: The odd overlap of Maria Butina, the gun-rights movement and the 2016 election
By Philip Bump
July 16 at 7:06 PM
Email the author
An attendee holds a Smith & Wesson revolver at the company’s booth during the National Rifle Association annual meeting in Dallas on May 5. (Daniel Acker/Bloomberg News)
Another criminal allegation against another Russian national who was involved in the 2016 election was announced by the Department of Justice on Monday — but the circumstances are far different from what we’ve seen in the past.
To date, the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian interference in the 2016 election has resulted in indictments against 25 Russian nationals and three Russian businesses. The criminal complaint filed against Maria Butina, the founder of a pro-gun group in Russia, comes not from Mueller but from the Justice Department directly. Butina is accused not of trying to influence the 2016 election or having colluded with the campaign of President Trump but, instead, of having conspired to act as an agent of the Russian government.
This doesn’t mean, though, that Butina had no connection to the campaign. In fact, she worked closely with a former Russian politician named Alexander Torshin, who was sanctioned by the U.S. government earlier this year. Torshin actively sought to build a connection with the Trump campaign in 2016, according to various reports that have emerged over the past year, including leveraging his lifetime membership with the National Rifle Association to build a relationship with Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son.
It’s not clear how significant the criminal complaint against Butina might be. But it’s worth fleshing out the timeline presented in that case in order to show where Butina, Torshin and 2016 politics overlapped. This timeline includes several points first presented in a very good report from Mother Jones.
Maria Butina attends a rally at Krasnopresnenskaya Zastava Square in support of legalising the possession of handguns. (ITAR-TASS/ZUMAPRESS.com)
- Maria Butina forms “Right to Bear Arms” in Russia. The aim of the organization mirrors that of the NRA: Broadening Russians’ access to firearms.
April 15, 2012. Alexander Torshin, a former Russian senator and lifetime member of the NRA, tweets about Butina’s group, comparing it to the NRA.
His longstanding relationship with Butina and biographical descriptions including in the complaint make clear that the “RUSSIAN OFFICIAL” identified in the document is Torshin.
- Per the complaint, Butina allegedly makes contact with an American political operative (“U.S. Person 1” in the complaint), who agrees to introduce her to influential figures in American politics. That includes a “gun rights organization,” identified contextually within the complaint as the NRA.
November 2013. White House national security adviser John Bolton, then a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, records a video promoting an expansion of gun rights in Russia that’s later used by Right to Bear Arms for promotion.
April 2014. Butina and Torshin attend the national NRA convention.
March 24, 2015. Butina allegedly emails Person 1 to propose a project titled “Diplomacy.” (The email subject line apparently makes reference to a former KGB propagandist.) She writes that the Republican Party (identified only as [POLITICAL PARTY 1] in the complaint) will likely gain power in 2016 but is “traditionally associated with negative and aggressive foreign policy, particularly with regards to Russia.”The time was right, she wrote, to build a relationship with the party, using the “[c]entral place and influence” in the Republican Party of the NRA.
She noted her relationship with the NRA and past interactions with Republican officials in the email, anticipating a $125,000 budget to be spent on major political conferences. Person 1 responded with suggestions about people with whom she should meet and some strategic recommendations.
April 24, 2015. Butina attends the NRA convention in Nashville. There she and Torshin meet Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.), who reportedly greets her in Russian.
June 12, 2015. Writing for National Interest, Butina argues that a Republican president might be the only way to improve relationships with Russia. After the article published, she sent it to Torshin, who approved.
July 11, 2015. Butina asks Trump a question at FreedomFest, a libertarian event held that year in Las Vegas. As president, she asked, would Trump continue the sanctions imposed against Russia in 2014?
“I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin,” Trump replied. “Putin has no respect for President Obama. Big problem. Big problem. And Russia has been driven — you know I’ve always heard, for years I’ve heard, one of the worst things that can happen is if Russia ever gets driven to China. We have driven them together, with the big oil deals that are being made. We’ve driven them together. That’s a horrible thing for this country. We have made them friends because of incompetent leadership. I believe I would get along very nicely with Putin, okay? And I mean where we have the strength. I don’t think you’d need the sanctions.”
July 13, 2015. Butina attends Walker’s presidential campaign launch event.
August 2015. Butina allegedly assists Torshin in preparing for a congressional delegation to Moscow. It’s not clear who participated in this trip.
Dec. 8, 2015. An NRA delegation arrives in Moscow to meet with Butina’s group. Right to Bear Arms covers some of the trip’s costs. Included in the group is former Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke.
2015 and 2016. Butina allegedly exchanges emails with another American (“U.S. Person 2”) in an effort to arrange a series of dinners in New York and Washington to introduce Russians to people influential in American politics.
Jan. 19, 2016. Butina allegedly contacts Torshin about logistics for the upcoming National Prayer Breakfast.
Feb. 4, 2016. The National Prayer Breakfast is held with Torshin in attendance. He regularly attended the event.
Feb. 14, 2016. Torshin tweets that Butina is in the United States where she reports that Trump is “for cooperation with Russia,” according to Mother Jones.
March 14, 2016. Butina allegedly emails Person 2 and indicates that Torshin had informed her that “Putin’s side” had approved of her outreach plan to high-profile political figures.
March 30, 2016. Butina allegedly emails an organizer of the prayer breakfast to suggest that Putin might attend in 2017, given certain conditions. He did not, but the organizer offered 10 spots at the 2017 event for Putin.
May 2016. Through two different individuals close to the Trump campaign, Torshin tries to set up a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. when the two are at the NRA convention in Kentucky later that month. In one of the emails, adviser Rick Dearborn explained that Russia was “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.”
May 10 and 11, 2016. Butina allegedly contacts Persons 1 and 2 to set up a series of dinners with influential political figures later that month.
At some point this month, Butina is allegedly part of a group seeking a meeting with the campaign to discuss persecutions against Christians, according to Post reporting.
May 20, 2016. At a dinner on the sideline of the NRA convention, Torshin and Trump Jr. are seated near each other and meet each other briefly.
August 2016. Butina allegedly arrives in the United States on an F-1 student visa.
Sept. 16, 2016. Butina allegedly emails Persons 1 and 2 to express an urgent need for another dinner with prominent figures in Washington out of concern that those urgently looking for Russia expertise would turn to the “currently popular radically oppositional to Russia crowd of experts.”
Oct. 4, 2016. Person 1 allegedly emails an acquaintance.
“Unrelated to specific presidential campaigns,” he writes, “I’ve been involved in securing a VERY private line of communication between the Kremlin and key POLITICAL PARTY I leaders through, of all conduits, the [NRA].”
Oct. 5, 2016. Over Twitter, Butina allegedly messages Torshin, who is in the hospital receiving treatment.
“We made our bet. I am following our game. I will be connecting the people from the prayer breakfast to this group. … Yesterday’s dinner showed that American society is broken in relation to Russia,” she allegedly writes. “This is now the dividing line of opinions, the crucial one in the election race. [The Republicans] are for us, [Democrats] — against- 50/50. Our move here is very important.” (The complaint obscures the identity of the parties.)
They also allegedly discussed whether or not Butina should serve as an election observer, but decide against it. “Right now everything has to be quiet and careful,” Butina writes. Torshin had served in that capacity in 2012, according to Mother Jones.
Oct. 17, 2016. Butina allegedly asks Torshin if he has recommendations for the prayer breakfast seats.
Nov. 8, 2016. Trump wins the presidency. The NRA spends more than $30 million on supporting his campaign.
Nov. 8 and 9, 2016. Butina and Torshin allegedly discuss the election results.
“Think about in which areas of life we could go towards bringing us closer. ISIS- understandably, what else we need to look at the American agenda,” Torshin allegedly writes. She suggests a phone call, but he worries that their phones are tapped. In May, Yahoo reported that Torshin’s phones were tapped — by Spanish authorities.
Nov. 11, 2016. Butina allegedly sends Torshin a proposal for a conference including a number of members of Congress focused on Russia.
Nov. 12, 2016. Torshin allegedly rejects the plan, saying that “they” won’t go for it — a message that prosecutors allege signal instruction from the Russian government to Butina.
Nov. 30, 2016. Butina allegedly emails Person 1 about the prayer breakfast, assuring Person 1 that the people included in the Russian delegation, handpicked by Torshin and herself, were “coming to establish a back channel of communication.”
Dec. 1, 2016. Person 1 allegedly explains to Butina how to book the hotel for the Russian delegation to the breakfast and suggests that Torshin cover the cost.
Dec. 26, 2016. Torshin allegedly explains who will and won’t be attending, as per the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Jan. 20, 2017. President Trump is inaugurated.
Butina attends one of the inaugural balls, according to Post reporting.
Feb. 2, 2017. Butina and Torshin attend the prayer breakfast.
Feb. 6, 2017. Butina allegedly thanks a prayer breakfast organizer for meeting with her and suggests she has “important information” for the organizer. She asks for a follow-up meeting.
Feb. 8, 2017. Butina allegedly emails Person 2 to thank him.
“My dearest President has received ‘the message’ about your group initiatives and your constructive and kind attention to the Russians,” she writes.
Jan. 18, 2018. McClatchy reports that Mueller’s team is investigating the NRA’s role in the 2016 election. In a letter released several months later, the group indicates having received only about $2,500 from “people associated with Russian addresses.”
April 6, 2018. Torshin is one of more than 20 Russians sanctioned by the American government in response to Russian interference in 2016, among other incidents.
==
==
https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/nra-insiders-are-bracing-themselves-potential-investigation-their-russian-ties
... NRA's precautions could be little more than due diligence as the group faces inquiries from congressional investigators and the media about its relationship with Torshin. But the feeling among some officials internally is that the group appears to be readying for an investigation.
"True believers to the cause are getting very antsy," said a person privy to the NRA's internal deliberations. "They were definitely preparing, they were bracing themselves."
The gun advocacy group has admitted previously that some of its funding in recent years has come from numerous Russians or people living in Russia, but it described these as "routine payments." But McClatchy has reported that the FBI is investigating whether Kremlin-linked sources used the NRA to financially support President Donald Trump's campaign, which would likely violate federal election law.
...
==
ref april 11
https://www.npr.org/2018/04/11/601534305/nra-in-new-document-acknowledges-more-than-20-russian-linked-contributors
...One high-profile Russian NRA supporter, state bank official Alexander Torshin, has cultivated a years-long relationship with the organization — but he was placed under sanction by the United States with other Russians last week.
The NRA acknowledged that Torshin, a Kremlin-linked politician, is a life member of the NRA, and has been since 2012. "He has paid membership dues, but has not made any contributions," NRA general counsel John Frazer wrote to Wyden.
Now, however: "Based on Mr. Torshin's listing as a specially designated national as of April 6, we are currently reviewing our responsibilities with respect to him," Frazer wrote.
NATIONAL SECURITY
The Russia Sanctions Saga: Weapons Dealers, Mobsters And Suitcases Full Of Cash
McClatchy has previously reported that theFBI is investigating whether Torshin may have funneled money to the NRA
Frazer told Wyden in his letter that he believed the NRA has been more than cooperative with Wyden's questions and that this would be the last response he'll send to the senator's office.
"Given the extraordinarily time-consuming and burdensome nature of your requests, we must respectfully decline to engage in this beyond the clear answers we have already provided," Frazer wrote.
The NRA has been revising its statements on the question of foreign donations. StevenHart, an outside counsel for the NRA, had said previously in an interview with ABC News that the NRA had received just one contribution from a Russian individual between 2012 and 2018.POLITICS
NRA Says It Receives Foreign Funds, But None Goes To Election Work
Since then, it has emerged there have been more. A Wyden aide, who asked not to be identified discussing the office's investigation, said the NRA's shifting statements would prompt Wyden to consider how he might continue his questioning.
"After three letters, the NRA continually, and specifically avoided detailing what measures it takes to vet donations, including from shell companies, a known means for Russians to funnel money into the United States," the aide said.
"Sen. Wyden will be referring his correspondence with the NRA to the Federal Elections Commission to contribute to their inquiry ... As ranking member of the Finance Committee, he is considering additional oversight actions in light of this response."
==
ref mcclathy
...
Mueller’s office declined comment.
Disclosure of the Torshin investigation signals a new dimension in the 18-month-old FBI probe of Russia’s interference. McClatchy reported a year ago that a multi-agency U.S. law enforcement and counterintelligence investigation into Russia’s intervention, begun even before the start of the 2016 general election campaign, initially included a focus on whether the Kremlin secretly helped fund efforts to boost Trump, but little has been said about that possibility in recent months.
The extent to which the FBI has evidence of money flowing from Torshin to the NRA, or of the NRA’s participation in the transfer of funds, could not be learned.
However, the NRA reported spending a record $55 million on the 2016 elections, including $30 million to support Trump – triple what the group devoted to backing Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 presidential race. Most of that was money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.
Two people with close connections to the powerful gun lobby said its total election spending actually approached or exceeded $70 million. The reporting gap could be explained by the fact that independent groups are not required to reveal how much they spend on Internet ads or field operations, including get-out-the-vote efforts.
During the campaign, Trump was an outspoken advocate of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, at one point drawing a hail of criticism by suggesting that, if Clinton were elected, gun rights advocates could stop her from winning confirmation of liberal Supreme Court justices who support gun control laws.
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks,” Trump said at a rally in August 2016. “Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know.”
Spanish authorities tag Torshin for money laundering
Torshin, a leading figure in Putin’s party, has been implicated in money laundering by judicial authorities in Spain, as Bloomberg News first revealed in 2016. Spanish investigators alleged in an almost 500-page internal report that Torshin, who was then a senator, capitalized on his government role to assist mobsters laundering funds through Spanish properties and banks, Bloomberg reported
A summary obtained by McClatchy of the still-secret report links Torshin to Russian money laundering and describes him as a godfather in a major Russian criminal organization called Taganskaya.
Investigators for three congressional committees probing Russia’s 2016 operations also have shown interest in Torshin, a lifetime NRA member who has attended several of its annual conventions. At the group’s meeting in Kentucky in May 2016, Torshin spoke to Donald Trump Jr. during a gala event at the group’s national gathering in Kentucky in May 2016, when his father won an earlier-than-usual NRA presidential endorsement.
An FBI spokesman declined to comment on the investigation.
"We have not been contacted by the FBI about anything related to Russia," said Steven Hart, an outside attorney for the NRA, in a statement provided to McClatchy five days after publication of this story.
Torshin could not be reached for comment, and emails to the Russian central bank seeking comment from Torshin and the bank elicited no response.
Mueller’s investigation has been edging closer to Trump’s inner circle. This week, The New York Times reported that Mueller had negotiated an agreement under which Steve Bannon, who was recently ousted from his post as a senior White House adviser, would fully respond to questions about the Trump campaign. Bannon headed the campaign over its final weeks.
Since taking over the investigation last May, Mueller has secured guilty pleas from two former Trump aides, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, both of whom agreed to cooperate with prosecutors; and criminal charges against two other top campaign figures, former campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates.
...
year ago, three U.S. intelligence agencies signed off on a joint assessment that was the basis for the expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats and other sanctions against the Kremlin. The intelligence agencies concluded that what began as a sophisticated Russian operation to undermine Americans’ faith in democracy morphed into a drive to help Trump win.
Torshin is among a phalanx of Putin proxies to draw the close attention of U.S. investigators, who also have tracked the activities of several Russian billionaires and pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs that have come in contact with Trump or his surrogates.
Torshin was a senior member of the Russian Senate and in recent years helped set up a Moscow gun rights group called Right to Bear Arms.He not only spoke with Trump Jr. at the NRA convention, but he also tried unsuccessfully to broker a meeting between Putin and the presidential candidate in 2016, according to the Times. He further sought to meet privately with the candidate himself near the 2016 NRA convention.
Torshin’s ties with the NRA have flourished in recent years. In late 2015, he hosted two dinners for a high-level NRA delegation during its week-long visit to Moscow that included meetings with influential Russian government and business figures.
In their internal report, Spanish prosecutors revealed a web of covert financial and money-laundering dealings between Torshin and Alexander Romanov, a Russian who pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges in 2016 and was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.
The prosecutors’ evidence included 33 audio recordings of phone conversations from mid-2012 to mid-2013 between Torshin and Romanov, who allegedly laundered funds to buy a hotel on the ritzy island of Mallorca. Torshin had an 80 percent stake in the venture, the Spanish report said.
In the phone conversations, Romanov referred to Torshin as the “godfather” or “boss.” Torshin has denied any links to organized crime and said his dealings with Romanov were purely “social.”
The Madrid-based newspaper El Pais last year reported that Spanish police were on the verge of arresting Torshin in the summer of 2013, when he had planned to attend a birthday party for Romanov, but a Russian prosecutor tipped the banker to plans to nab him if he set foot in Spain, and Torshin canceled his trip.
Congress looking at Torshin, too
The House and Senate Intelligence Committees and Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee also have taken an interest in Torshin as part of their parallel inquiries into Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections.
In questioning Donald Trump Jr. at a closed-door hearing in mid-December, investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee asked about his encounter with Torshin at the NRA convention, according to a source familiar with the hearing.
Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump Jr., said his client and Torshin talked only briefly when they were introduced during a meal.
“It was all gun-related small talk,” Futerfas told McClatchy.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent letters in November to two senior Trump foreign policy aides, J.D. Gordon and Sam Clovis, seeking copies of any communications they had with or related to Torshin; the NRA; veteran conservative operative Paul Erickson; Maria Butina, a Torshin protege who ran the Russian pro-gun group he helped launch, and others linked to Torshin.
Erickson has raised funds for the NRA and is a friend of Butina’s. Shortly before the NRA’s May 2016 convention, he emailed Trump campaign aide Rick Dearbornabout the possibility of setting up a meeting between Putin and Trump during the campaign, according to the Times.
Erickson’s email to Dearborn bore the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” In it, Erickson solicited advice from Dearborn and his boss, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a top foreign policy adviser to Trump’s campaign, about the best way to connect Putin and Trump.
Both Dearborn and Butina, who has been enrolled as a graduate student at American University since mid 2016, have been asked to appear before the Judiciary Committee, but so far Erickson has not, sources familiar with the matter said.
Bridges LLC, a company that Erickson and Butina established in February 2016 in Erickson’s home state of South Dakota, also is expected to draw scrutiny. Public records don’t reveal any financial transactions involving Bridges. In a phone interview last year, Erickson said the firm was established in case Butina needed any monetary assistance for her graduate studies — an unusual way to use an LLC.
Erickson said he met Butina and Torshin when he and David Keene, a former NRA president, attended a meeting of Right to Bear Arms a few years ago in Moscow. Erickson described the links between Right to Bear Arms and the NRA as a “moral support operation both ways.”
Torshin’s contacts with the NRA and the Trump campaign last year also came to the attention of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and key adviser. When Torshin tried to arrange a personal meeting with Trump near the NRA convention site last May, Kushner scotched the idea, according to emails forwarded to Kushner.
On top of Torshin’s efforts to cozy up to the Trump campaign, the Moscow banker has forged ties with powerful conservatives, including Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, the Californian whom some have deemed Putin’s best friend in Washington. In a phone interview in 2016, Rohrabacher recalled meeting Torshin in Moscow a few years earlier and described him as “a mover and shaker.”
Last February when Torshin visited Washington, Rockefeller heir and conservative patron George O’Neill Jr. hosted a fancy four-hour dinner for the banker on Capitol Hill, an event that drew Rohrabacher, Erickson and other big names on the right. Rohrabacher has labeled Torshin as “conservatives’ favorite Russian,” Torshin was in Washington at the time to lead his country’s delegation to the National Prayer Breakfast, where Trump spoke. The banker also was slated to see the presidentat a meet-and-greet event prior to a White House breakfast, but Torshin’s invitation was canceled after the White House learned of his alleged mob connections, Yahoo News reported.
Torshin’s involvement with the NRA may have begun in 2013 when he attended the group’s convention in Houston. Keene, the ex-NRA leader and an avid hunter, was instrumental in building a relationship with the Russian, according to multiple conservative sources.
Keene also helped lead a high-level NRA delegation to Moscow in December 2015 for a week of lavish meals and meetings with Russian business and political leaders. The week’s festivities included a visit to a Russian gun company and a meeting with a senior Kremlin official and wealthy Russians, according to a member of the delegation, Arnold Goldschlager, a California doctor who has been active in NRA programs to raise large donations.
Others on the trip included Joe Gregory, who runs the NRA’s Ring of Freedom program for elite donors who chip in checks of $1 million and upwards, Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke and Pete Brownell, a chief executive of a gun company and longtime NRA board member.
In a phone interview, Goldschlager described the trip as a “people-to-people mission,” and said he was impressed with Torshin — who, he noted, hosted both a “welcoming” dinner for the NRA contingent and another one.
“They were killing us with vodka and the best Russian food,” Goldschlager said. “The trip exceeded my expectations by logarithmic levels.”
==
mojo
From right: Kolyadinand Torshin, with others including Rohrabacher, second from left Kolyadin’s Facebook
January 31, 2017: Torshin, Erickson,Rohrabacher(who has received at least $18,000 from the NRA over the past 20 years), and former Kremlin staffer Andrey Kolyadin attend a private event on Capitol Hill hosted by George O’Neill Jr., a longtime conservative activist.
February 2, 2017: Torshin and Butina accompany a delegation of more than a dozen Russian officials and academics to the National Prayer Breakfast, where Trump is the main attraction. Kolyadin posts a photo with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, commenting that he “treats Russia pretty well, by the way.” Kolyadin later brags about his “direct access to leadership,” noting, “we sat very close to each other and just smiled.”
Torshin was scheduled to meet with President Trump, but the meeting is canceled when a national security aide points out that Torshin reportedly is under investigation by Spanish authorities for an alleged “godfather” role in organized crime and money laundering. For his part,Rohrabachertells Yahoo News that Torshin is “sort of the conservatives’ favorite Russian.”
“Direct access to leadership” Kolyadin’s Facebook
February 24, 2017: “For years, the media couldn’t have cared less about Vladimir Putin or Russia,”NRA leader Wayne LaPierresays in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, giving early voice to a “deep state” conspiracy theory on Trump’s behalf: “But now, barely a month into Trump’s presidency, they’re ‘horrified’ and all a-fret over the ‘Russian-American equation.’ Even more alarming is that they’ve apparently found willing co-conspirators among some in the US intelligence community.”
....
:{
}:
:{
}:
Concealed-carry fashion Right to Bear Arms Facebook page
November 2013: Former UN ambassador and future Trump national security adviser John Bolton appears in a video in which he talks up gun rights in Russia.Bolton is a member of the NRA’s “international affairs subcommittee” at the time. NPR later reports that Bolton recorded the address at Keene’s request for the Russian legislature, and that Right to Bear Arms used the video in its lobbying.
“We would like to be friends with NRA”
January 2014: Following the death of Kalashnikov at age 94, theWashington Times publishes an appreciation written by Torshin. Former NRA President Keene is the op-ed editor at the time.
April 2014: Torshin and Butina attend the NRA convention in Indianapolis, where Butina joins Keene for meetings. Butina later explains the purpose: “We protect gun rights in Russia, and people who are gun owners and in a situation of self-defense.” She adds, “We would like to be friends with NRA.”
September 2014: Paul Erickson—an NRA member and longtime conservative Republican operative from South Dakota—attends a Right to Bear Arms meeting in Moscow with Butina. Erickson has known Butina at least since 2013.
Butina and Erickson in Russia, in a photo posted in November 2013 Facebook
November 18, 2014: Russia changes its laws to allow citizens to carry guns in public for self-defense.
Trump to Butina: “I don’t think you’d need the sanctions”
January 2015: Torshin is appointed deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia.
March 2015: Butina announces on Facebook that she will attend the NRA’s upcoming convention in Nashville. She notes the importance of “paying attention to the politicians that we have more similarities than differences.”
April 2015: Butina posts about 200 pictures from Nashville, including one with Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who she says greeted her in Russian. She notes he’s “one of the possible future nominees for the post of US President,” and ponders the “beginning of a new dialogue between Russia and the US.” Donald Trump also attends, telling the crowd, “I promise you one thing, if I run for president and if I win, the Second Amendment will be totally protected, that I can tell you.” Torshin, also present, later tells Bloomberg that he had a “jovial exchange” with the future president.
Butina at the NRA convention in Nashville VK
April 16, 2015: Butina gives a talk at the University of South Dakota; she says Right to Bear Arms now has 10,000 members and 76 offices “all over Russia.”
June 2015: Four days before Trump announces his campaign, Butina writes in the conservative National Interest urging friendship between “the bear and the elephant”: “It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States.”
:{
}:
July 11, 2015: At FreedomFest in Las Vegas, Butina asks Trump, “What will be your foreign politics…and do you want to continue the politics of sanctions that are damaging on both economy?” Trump responds, “I know Putin and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin…I don’t think you’d need the sanctions. I think that we would get along very, very well.”
Q&A with Trump at FreedomFest VK
July 13, 2015: Butina posts photos from the Wisconsin event where Gov. Scott Walker announces his presidential candidacy.
Butina attends Gov. Walker’s campaign launch VK
August 29, 2015: Preston tweets a picture of Trump speaking to the National Federation of Republican Assemblies, posting in Russian, “Donald Trump today in Nashville. He is a friend of Russia.”
September 25, 2015: A Right to Bear Arms post on Facebook features a Trump meme, attributing to him in Russian, “Nobody can encroach on the citizenry’s right to store and carry firearms. Period.”
Right to Bear Arms post
December 8-13, 2015: Erickson, Keene, future NRA President Pete Brownell, and Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke meet with Kremlin officials in Moscow, where they have lavish meals and visit a gun manufacturer. Clarke, an outspoken Trump supporter, later files an ethics report showing that Right to Bear Arms paid $6,000 for his expenses.
December 10, 2015: Future Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn is also in Moscow, attending a gala for the Kremlin-controlled RT media network. Flynn, who sits next to Putin and across fromfuture Green Party candidate Jill Stein, gives a speech for which he is paid $45,000—a sum he fails to report on his financial disclosure forms.
Campaign ammo
January 21, 2016: Trump speaks at the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s annual “SHOT Show” in Las Vegas; Don Jr. and Eric Trump also attend, posing with representatives fromSig Sauer, whose “Black Mamba” MCX assault rifle would soon be used in the Orlando nightclub massacre. Ten days later, at an event at an Iowa gun shop, Don Jr. and Eric Trump shoot assault rifles and brag about their concealed-carry permits. “I shoot all the time,” Don Jr. tells the Telegraph. “Every weekend.”
February 13, 2016: Torshin writes on Twitter, “Maria Butina is currently in the USA. She writes to me that D. Trump (an NRA member) really is for cooperation with Russia.”
February 2016: Butina and Erickson form Bridges LLC. Erickson later tells McClatchy that they created the South Dakota-based company for Butina to get financial assistance for her graduate studies—“an unusual way to use a LLC,” as McClatchy dryly notes.
:{
}:
February 23, 2016: After winning the Nevada primary, Trump gives a victory speech hailing his sons’ gun bona fides: “[Don Jr.] loves the rifle stuff. This is serious rifle. This is serious NRA, both of them, both of them. We love the Second Amendment folks. Nobody loves it more than us, so just remember that.”
March 3, 2016: In a primary debate, Trump is reminded that in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, he supported a ban on assault weapons. His response: “I don’t support it anymore.”
May 2016: In an email to Trump campaign aide Rick Dearborn, with the subject line “Kremlin Connection,”Erickson says Russia is “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” and proposes using the NRA convention to set up “first contact” with the Trump team. According to a New York Times report, Erickson writes that he’s in a position to “slowly begin cultivating a back-channel to President Putin’s Kremlin.” The email doesn’t name Torshin but appears to reference him as “President Putin’s emissary” who planned to attend a dinner hosted by conservative Christian activist Rick Clay. Meanwhile, Clay sends an email to Dearborn with the subject line “Russian backdoor overture and dinner invite,” seeking a meeting between Trump and Torshin. Dearborn forwards Clay’s email to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who reportedly nixes the proposal.
May 19-20, 2016: Torshin meets Don Jr. at a private dinner the night before his father speaks at the NRA convention in Louisville, Kentucky. Don Jr.’s lawyer later says the exchange “was all gun-related small talk.”
The NRA endorses Trump for president. Trump tells the crowd, “The only way to save our Second Amendment is to vote for a person that you all know named Donald Trump.”
Torshin poses for photos wearing an NRA “Ring of Freedom” donor ID badge.
June 15, 2016: House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy tells fellow GOP leaders in a private conversation, “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump. Swear to God.” House Speaker Paul Ryan immediately shuts down the conversation and swears those present to secrecy. When a recording of the conversation later becomes public, McCarthy says he was just joking.
August 2016: Hours after Trump appears to threaten Hillary Clinton during a campaign rally by invoking “Second Amendment people” who might “do something” to stop her, Politico reports that the NRA has bought its most expensive pro-Trump campaign ad yet: a $3 million spot attacking Clinton.
September 2016: Don Jr. appears in a promotional video for gun silencer manufacturer SilencerCo, whose CEO subsequently donates $50,000 to the Trump Victory fund. “That thing’s awesome,” Don Jr. says, firing guns in the opening segment. The 38-minute video closes with the CEO saying, “Your father is someone that we believe in very strongly.”
October 2016: A wave of NRA-sponsoredTV political ads targets voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina. Since the end of June, the NRA has aired more than 10,000 ads criticizing Clinton or extolling Trump—about 16 percent of all TV ads produced by Trump and his allies. Trump goes on to win all three states.
Early November 2016: Pro-gun messages feature prominently in “junk news” spread by Russian trolls and others on Twitter, particularly in key battleground states, according to a later analysis by Oxford University researchers.
November 8, 2016: Donald Trump is elected the 45th president of the United States.
November 12, 2016: Butina hosts a costume party in DC for her 28th birthday, attended by Erickson and Trump campaign aides. Erickson dresses as Russian mystic Rasputin, and Butina dresses as the Russian empress Alexandra. Two unnamed guests tell the Daily Beast that Butina bragged about being part of the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia.
“You came through for me”
Jan. 20, 2017: Butina and Erickson attend the Freedom Ball, one of the three official inaugural balls Trump attends.
From right: Kolyadinand Torshin, with others including Rohrabacher, second from left Kolyadin’s Facebook
January 31, 2017: Torshin, Erickson,Rohrabacher(who has received at least $18,000 from the NRA over the past 20 years), and former Kremlin staffer Andrey Kolyadin attend a private event on Capitol Hill hosted by George O’Neill Jr., a longtime conservative activist.
February 2, 2017: Torshin and Butina accompany a delegation of more than a dozen Russian officials and academics to the National Prayer Breakfast, where Trump is the main attraction. Kolyadin posts a photo with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, commenting that he “treats Russia pretty well, by the way.” Kolyadin later brags about his “direct access to leadership,” noting, “we sat very close to each other and just smiled.”
Torshin was scheduled to meet with President Trump, but the meeting is canceled when a national security aide points out that Torshin reportedly is under investigation by Spanish authorities for an alleged “godfather” role in organized crime and money laundering. For his part,Rohrabachertells Yahoo News that Torshin is “sort of the conservatives’ favorite Russian.”
“Direct access to leadership” Kolyadin’s Facebook
February 24, 2017: “For years, the media couldn’t have cared less about Vladimir Putin or Russia,”NRA leader Wayne LaPierresays in a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, giving early voice to a “deep state” conspiracy theory on Trump’s behalf: “But now, barely a month into Trump’s presidency, they’re ‘horrified’ and all a-fret over the ‘Russian-American equation.’ Even more alarming is that they’ve apparently found willing co-conspirators among some in the US intelligence community.”
April 28, 2017: Having recently reversed an Obama-era law making it more difficult for mentally ill people to buy guns, Trump addresses the NRA annual convention: “You came through for me,” he says, “and I am going to come through for you.”
August 15, 2017: After Rohrabacher meets with WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, he claims he has evidence to share with the White House that the Russians did not hack the Democratic National Committee. But White House chief of staff John Kelly rebuffs him. Rohrabacher later tells the Intercept, “What is preventing me from talking to Trump about this is the existence of a special prosecutor. Not only Kelly, but others are worried if I say one word to Trump about Russia, that it would appear to out-of-control prosecutors that that is where the collusion is.”
October to November 2017: Russian-linked trolls spread conspiracy theories following mass shootings on the Las Vegas Strip and at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
November 14, 2017: “It appears the Russians…infiltrated the NRA,” Glenn Simpson, founder of the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, testifies to the House Intelligence Committee. “They targeted various conservative organizations, religious and otherwise, and they seem to have made a very concerted effort to get in with the NRA.” Referencing Torshin and Butina, he adds, “The most absurd [thing] about this is that, you know, Vladimir Putin is not in favor of universal gun ownership for Russians. And so it’s all a big charade, basically.”
Investigations and a politicized school massacre
January 18, 2018: McClatchy reports the FBI is investigating whether Torshin illegally funneled money to the Trump campaign through the NRA. (The FBI would “neither confirm nor deny” the investigation to Mother Jones.)
January 29, 2018: Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, tells NPR that the committee’s probe of the NRA-Russia angle has been stymied by the Republican majority.
“I am specifically troubled by the possibility that Russian-backed shell companies or intermediaries may have circumvented laws designed to prohibit foreign meddling in our elections.”
:{
}:
February 2, 2018: Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden sends separate letters to the NRA and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin demanding they provide any documents showing financial ties between the NRA and Russia. “I am specifically troubled by the possibility that Russian-backed shell companies or intermediaries may have circumvented laws designed to prohibit foreign meddling in our elections,” Wyden writes. NRA General Counsel John Frazer responds, “The NRA and its related entities do not accept funds from foreign persons or entities in connection with United States.”
February 14, 2018: Following the school massacre in Parkland, Florida, Kremlin-linked trolls and Russian state media jump into action on Twitter, stirring both sides of the gun debate.
February 21, 2018: During a live-televised “listening session” with Parkland survivors at the White House, Trump endorses NRA talking points to end “gun-free zones” and arm teachers to “harden” America’s schools.
:{
}:
February 22, 2018: Trump hails the leaders of the NRA: “Great People and Great American Patriots. They love our Country and will do the right thing. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch echoes Trump’s blame on the FBI’s Russia investigation for the failure to prevent the Parkland massacre: “Maybe if you politicized your agency less and did your job more, we wouldn’t have these problems.”
March 2018: In an NRA magazine, LaPierre blasts media bias against Trump, specifically calling out coverage of “the bogus Russia investigation.”
March 1, 2018: Trump and Vice President Mike Pence meet privately in the Oval Office with NRA Executive Director Chris Cox. Trump calls the meeting “great.” Cox announces: “POTUS & VPOTUS support the Second Amendment, support strong due process and don’t want gun control. #NRA #MAGA.”
==
https://thegrio.com/2018/01/29/nra-russia-ties/