torshin bak

see butina, not all logged here

no direct to dearborn?

sessions

do we know what russians gave $ to am pols?

tenn free press

https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/opinion/times/story/2018/jul/30/sohn-nras-russilink-hties-blackburn/475893/

Tennesseans know the old truism: If you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

The universal meaning is simple: Be careful of the company you keep.

Ask Republican U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn.

Since March, she has been reading more and more headlines and stories that link her longtime friend and former campaign president, attorney G. Kline Preston IV, to the NRA/Maria Butina Russian money and election meddling questions.

The Tennessean has reported that in addition to representing Blackburn on campaign finance questions, Preston has claimed Alexander Torshin as a Russian client and longtime friend. Torshin is the prominent Russian politician with close ties to President Vladimir Putin who is now under scrutiny for illegally channeling Russian funds through the National Rifle Association in an effort to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. According to the Tennessean, Preston first introduced Torshin to then-president of the NRA David Keene in 2011, and the pair attended the NRA's annual convention in Nashville in 2015.

Blackburn, a U.S. House of Representatives member since 2002 and now a Tennessee Senate candidate seeking Bob Corker's open seat, is a longtime NRA supporter and recipient of at least $34,700 in NRA donations, according to opensecrets.com, which tracks campaign donations. According to the Washington Post, Blackburn received the most NRA money since 2002 of any Tennessee Congress member. As in most campaign finance snapshots, that total listed for her includes only donations, not any possible expenditures by the NRA to oppose her challengers.

But by widening the lens, the NRA money picture gets a bit darker. The NRA spent $30 million on Trump's campaign in 2016 and another $40 million in various efforts to lobby and help elect Republicans, according to a recent New Republic report.

Now the arrest of Maria Butina, an alleged Russia spy who is said to have infiltrated the National Rifle Association, has turned up the heat on the NRA, Preston and Blackburn. Butina's indictment charging her with conspiring to influence American politics means further scrutiny into the NRA and its money trail. Although that investigation seems now primarily to be focused on the 2016 presidential election, the probe's fallout already is complicating the campaigns of Trump-clinging Republicans such as Blackburn, who also took NRA money and continues to court the NRA's support.

A spokeswoman for Blackburn in March declined to answer specific Tennessean questions about Preston's work for the campaign or his relationship with Blackburn or her family members. The Tennessean, however, quoted a very general statement from the campaign: "Congressman Blackburn believes Russia is not our friend — and thinks we need to treat Russia like any bully: we need to be strong enough to prevent them from pushing the United States and our allies around, and we need to draw firm lines and show them that America is not to be trifled with."[vote 3x ~ cyber security for elections?!]

After Vice President Mike Pence appeared at a Chattanooga fundraiser for Blackburn last weekend, the Tennessee Democratic Party raised new questions, as reported by WRCB:

"Going back to her 2007 meeting with Russian diplomat Igor Matveev, Marsha Blackburn has a more than decade-long history of meeting with Russian nationals on Tennessee soil. In 2012, she met with accused spy master Alexander Torshin when he visited Williamson County — her home county — as an election observer, squired by her former campaign president, attorney, and friend G. Kline Preston IV. Blackburn's actions speak much louder than her words," said Democratic Party spokesman Mark Brown.

Blackburn spokeswoman Abbi Sigler responded to WRCB: "Marsha never had a meeting with the second individual," according to WRCB.

On Monday, Washington Post conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin, who avidly opposes Donald Trump, quoted from the Tennessean story and wrote that "Republicans who were chummy with Russia-connected figures" are about to become an issue in Tennessee's U.S. Senate race.

"Blackburn spent last week furiously trying to distance herself from Trump's Helsinki comments," Rubin wrote. "But if the issue comes down to who will hold Trump accountable on Russia and take oversight of Russia's far-flung influence racket seriously, Blackburn will find herself playing defense."

Rubin noted that recurrent mass shootings and NRA rants have reminded Americans that the organization "has become a refuge for conspiracy theories and far-right extremism. Now the Russia story and the Butina indictment raise the question of why the GOP is in bed with a group the Russians allegedly used to meddle with our elections — and whether money Republicans took is tainted by the NRA's Russia connection."

Blackburn's campaign did not respond Friday to a Times editorial page editor's request for a more timely and specific comment. However, on Sunday, the campaign sent us the same statement we noted here earlier — the one she gave to the Tennessean last March.

Sohn: Trump broke it with tariffs; now he's making us fix it

Sohn: Will 3D-printed guns shoot the NRA in the foot?

mcclatchy

no lnx

Russia investigators likely got access to NRA's tax filings, secret donors

BY GREG GORDON AND PETER STONE

JULY 02, 2018 05:00 AM

WASHINGTON

For months, the National Rifle Association has had a stock answer to queries about an investigation into whether Russian money was funneled to the gun rights group to aid Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

The NRA, which spent $30 million-plus backing Trump’s bid, has heard nothing from the FBI or any other law enforcement agency, spokesman Andrew Arulanandam reiterated in an email the other day.

Legal experts, though, say there’s an easy explanation for that. They say it would be routine for Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, who are looking at the NRA’s funding as part of a broader inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections, to secretly gain access to the NRA’s tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service.

On the returns, the group was required to identify its so-called “dark money” donors -- companies and wealthy individuals who financed $21 million of the group’s publicly disclosed pro-Trump spending, as well as its multimillion-dollar efforts to heighten voter turnout. The NRA’s nonprofit status allows it to shield those donors’ names from the public, but not the IRS.

A central question for Mueller’s office is whether any of the confidential donors’ names hold clues that could enable investigators to trace a donation camouflaged to hide its Russian origins – such as a shell company that might be the end point in a chain of offshore transactions.

It is illegal for foreign funds to be spent to influence U.S. elections.

Prosecutors’ requests to federal magistrates or judges for access to tax information are usually made “entirely in the background, with no notice to the subject of the investigation,” said David Axelrod, a Columbus, Ohio lawyer who previously prosecuted cases for the Justice Department’s Tax Division.

The main focus of Mueller’s inquiry, as McClatchy reported in January, has been whether Alexander Torshin, deputy governor of Russia’s central bank and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, arranged for Russian money to flow through the gun rights group to aid Trump, people familiar with the inquiry say.

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Duration 4:22The Mueller investigation into possible Russia - Trump campaign connection

Robert Mueller is special counsel for the Department of Justice. He oversees the investigation into Russia's possible connections to the 2016 election and Trump campaign. BY ALEXA ARD, MAUREEN CHOWDHURY, PATRICK GLEASON

Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon said in a statement to McClatchy that if investigators haven’t yet obtained a list of the NRA’s secret donors, it’s a vital step for determining if Russians “used shell companies as part of a scheme to influence the 2016 election.”

“Investigators must follow the money wherever it leads to understand the full story of Russia’s attack on our democracy,” said Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee that is examining Russia’s election interference.

U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded Russia’s intervention was aimed at helping Trump defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton, whose outspoken advocacy for stricter gun control laws won the enmity of the NRA even as her criticism of Putin estranged the Kremlin.

The NRA’s general counsel, John Frazer, said in a flurry of letters with Wyden earlier this year that the group’s donations from Russia during the 2016 election cycle totaled $2,500, but did not reveal the extent to which the group traces the true origins of its $350 million in annual funding.

A spokesman for Mueller’s office has declined to comment on the NRA inquiry, which the sources described on condition of anonymity because it is confidential.

Still unclear is just how and why the nation’s leading gun rights lobby became entangled in Mueller’s sweeping investigation that has preoccupied the president and gripped the nation. The question is, did substantial Russian money find its way into the group’s coffers – and if so, to what extent were NRA officials or the group’s allies aware of it?

Steve Hall, a former chief of the CIA’s Russia operations, suspects that NRA board members and current and former officers may have been duped over several years into playing a role in a Kremlin-directed intelligence operation that eventually offered the potential for both a communication line to Trump's team and a way to put money behind his campaign.

He said he suspects that current and former NRA leaders failed to recognize that the Kremlin saw their group as a tool for its “dangerous propaganda machine. … That’s the most innocent explanation: The NRA got snookered.”

Still, said Hall, who retired from the agency in 2015, the NRA-Russian connection bears close examination by Mueller.

“It’s just so insidious, and it sort of ticks all the boxes: connections to the current administration, major backer of then-candidate Trump, the Russians wanting to get in and manipulate our own political system.”

Torshin has drawn scrutiny in part because Spanish prosecutors accused him of money-laundering and also because he cultivated relationships with the NRA that nearly earned him a meeting with Trump.

He befriended then-NRA President David Keene beginning in 2011, became a lifetime member of the group and attended a string of NRA national conventions in the ensuing years. That led to Moscow visits by Keene and other NRA heavyweights in 2013 and 2015 to meet with a Russian gun rights group that Torshin was instrumental in forming and later with a deputy prime minister.

The Spanish prosecutors, who have cooperated with the FBI for years, say Torshin has a dark side. They have accused him of laundering money for the Russian mob, an allegation Torshin has denied.

Last month during a visit to Washington, chief Spanish prosecutor Jose Grinda spent several hours meeting with FBI officials, according to two people familiar with his itinerary. Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Grinda also met with journalists at the Hudson Institute, where he revealed that a few months ago he provided the FBI with 33 audio recordings of Torshin, including one in which a since-convicted Russian money launderer called him “godfather,” according to Yahoo News.

On April 6, the Treasury Department included Torshin on a list of Russians sanctioned in response to the Kremlin-ordered invasion of Eastern Ukraine, Moscow’s meddling in the 2016 elections and other aggressive actions. In light of all of the revelations about Torshin, the NRA reevaluated its relationship with him. His NRA membership is now “frozen,” spokesman Arulanandam said.

Hall, who worked earlier as the CIA’s Moscow station chief, believes that Torshin’s involvement with the NRA was no accident. Nor were meetings between NRA representatives and Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and even Sergei Rudov, manager of a far-right Russian religious foundation, he said.

It looks like the Kremlin was pulling the strings at every turn, in a country where that happens “to a degree that cannot even be dreamed of here,” Hall said. “Everybody knows the consequences of not doing what the Kremlin wants you to do.”

John Aquilino, a former NRA spokesman, also is baffled by the NRA’s outreach to Torshin and Moscow.

"The NRA has fallen into a public relations trap, and the Russians knew damn well what they were doing," Aquilino said in a phone interview. “The NRA was naive and got hoodwinked."

"The NRA and the gun control issue is a perfect example of an issue that would fire up the populace and sow discord,” Aquilino said. He pointed to the fact that a Russian troll farm bought dozens of Facebook ads on gun rights as part of a 2016 social media blitz aimed at dividing Americans and helping Trump.

But Michael Carpenter, a senior Pentagon and National Security Council official specializing in Russia issues during the Obama administration, said a relationship between Russia and the NRA would be "mutually beneficial."

Carpenter tweeted Monday that "NRA lawyers know how to use Google and were no doubt familiar with their contacts' links to the Kremlin and to organized crime."

Michael Carpenter

@mikercarpenter

I don't buy the theory that the NRA good hoodwinked by Russian intelligence. This was a mutually beneficial relationship. NRA lawyers know how to use Google and were no doubt familiar with their contacts' links to the Kremlin and to organized crime. https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article214075459.html …

Russia investigators likely got access to NRA's tax filings, secret donors

The National Rifle Association says it's had no contact from the FBI about an investigation into whether Russia funneled money to the gun group. Legal experts say it's likely that Special Counsel...

mcclatchydc.com

464

6:30 AM - Jul 2, 2018

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The NRA, a flashpoint for controversy given its opposition to gun control legislation, has been resolute about protecting the anonymity of most of its donors to its lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action. However, the institute has trumpeted pledges by some gun makers, such as Sturm, Ruger and Co.'s August 2016 commitment of $2 from each gun sale, with a goal to raise $4 million.

Where potential financial crimes are involved, neither the NRA nor any other group can protect the identities of large dark-money donors from investigators, even if the fortress-like IRS holds the records. Investigators need only show “a reasonable cause to believe” that the information sought is relevant to a federal crime – a lower threshold than that required for a search warrant.

FBI and IRS agents collaborating on follow-the-money investigations commonly use “secret subpoenas, tax orders and other investigative techniques to collect an extraordinary amount of financial information without their target even knowing that the investigation exists,” said one former senior federal prosecutor, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to sensitive relationships with investigators.

Michael Zeldin, a former senior Justice Department official who oversaw money-laundering investigations, said that “it would be basic blocking and tackling for the prosecutors to seek all relevant tax returns."

If the tax filings identified a donor as a shell company, he said, the next step would be to “determine how difficult it will be to trace” the true source of the money.

Torshin’s enthusiastic overtures to the NRA energized a number of the group's leaders to visit Russia. During a

2013 trip, Torshin introduced Keene and conservative operative Paul Erickson to his group, the Right to Bear Arms, and Maria Butina, a protégé who headed the group. Butina soon enrolled a graduate student in the United States, where she was awarded lifetime membership in the NRA and became a fixture at the group's meetings.

In 2015, the Russians lavishly wined and dined a second NRA delegation that included high-dollar NRA fundraiser, Joe Gregory, and Pete Brownell, the head of a major U.S. firearms firm who later became the NRA’s president.

A meeting between the second delegation and Deputy Prime Minister Rogozin, who oversaw Russia’s defense and firearms industries, has drawn sharp criticism from Kremlin analysts because Rogozin had been placed under U.S. sanctions.

Ex-CIA Russia specialist Hall said he cannot fathom what the NRA officials hoped to obtain from Russia; Putin opposes arming his citizenry with more than hunting rifles.

Russia, though, may have had an agenda for its gun makers.

The NRA visit included a tour of the Russian firearms manufacturer Orsis, which also was placed under U.S. sanctions in 2014, perhaps to highlight Moscow’s hopes that victory by the right candidate could bring those curbs to an end.

Carpenter, the former Obama administration official, said Moscow had also sought to lift earlier limits on Russian gun imports from companies including the iconic Kalashnikov. But easing the restrictions “obviously wasn't in the interest of U.S. gun manufacturers,” he said.

“So Russia turned to the NRA and other gun enthusiasts to try to promote the issue,” he said. “At the time, Dmitry Rogozin was overseeing this effort.”

The Torshin-led mating dance between Moscow and the NRA culminated at the NRA’s convention in Louisville in late May 2016, when Trump received an early endorsement from the pro-gun goliath.

Torshin tried unsuccessfully that week to arrange a personal meeting with Trump, but he did cadge a short chat with Donald Trump Jr., an avid hunter. Trump Jr.’s lawyer told McClatchy it was mostly just “small talk” about guns.

During that same time span, Erickson and Torshin each floated proposals with Trump campaign officials for a pre-election meeting between Putin and Trump, an idea that did not gain traction.

After the election, Torshin came to Washington in February 2017 to attend the annual National Prayer Breakfast, an event where he’d been a regular for more than a half dozen years, Erickson said.

Torshin also was feted at a four-hour Capitol Hill dinner organized by George O’Neill Jr. a Rockefeller heir. Attendees included Erickson and Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California, considered by some analysts to be Putin’s best friend in Washington.

Rohrabacher, in a phone interview last year, said that conservative American gun rights groups no longer look at Russia with Cold War angst, but rather “in friendly terms.” He remembered meeting Torshin in Moscow a few years earlier, calling him a “mover and shaker.”

Torshin’s 2017 visit to the U.S. would be his last for awhile. The sanctions bar him from entering the United States.

Peter Stone is a McClatchy special correspondent

Michael Woodel contributed to this report

Greg Gordon: 202-383-6152; @GregGordon2

7/26 fresh air; careful gifts russ trip eg wife stamps; trad xian on women role, homophobe (us legislators spoke duma?), ortho church back by putin; russian mirror prayer brekfast; wapo

April 6, 2018. Torshin is one of more than 20 Russianssanctioned by the American government in response to Russian interference in 2016,among other incidents.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/inside-the-decade-long-russian-campaign-to-infiltrate-the-nra-and-help-elect-trump-630054/

November 2013, the president of the National Rifle Association, David Keene, was introduced as an honored guest at the, a gun lobby 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.” Keene underscored his friendship with Alexander Torshin, a top politician in the ruling party of Vladimir Putin; for the past three years, Keene said, “I’ve hosted your senator Alexander Torshin at the National Rifle Association’s annual meetings.” In words that now carry a darker connotation, Keene insisted, “We need to work together.” . now 64, is a roly-poly politician, perhaps five feet six, with thick glasses and a passion for borscht – “like medicine!” he once tweeted. A member of Putin’s right-wing United Russia party, he served in the Russian senate for more than a decade, forging close ties to Russia’s internal security service, the FSB, which awarded him a medal in 2016. His embrace of Keene, says Steven Hall, who served as chief of Russian operations for the CIA until 2015, was about more than forging “an international brotherhood of the NRA.”

As part of Putin’s “active measures,” Hall says, Russia has attempted to influence right-wing and populist factions abroad, preaching unity around social conservatism: “‘We’re both religious-based countries – we have the Orthodox Church that’s a big deal for us.’ ” The Russians, Hall believes, “made a natural transition in the United States to the NRA”; over time Putin became determined to exploit the American gun lobby “and decided Mr. Torshin is going to be the guy to do it for him.”

Keene proved an easy mark.A career lobbyist who advised presidential candidates from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney, he was a longtime chair of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the annual CPAC convention. NRA board member Grover Norquist has praised Keene as “a conservative Forrest Gump” who’s been at “the center of all things conservative for decades.” Keene, with a sweep of white hair, owlish glasses and a patrician bearing, might move in cutthroat political circles, but friends say his personality runs against type. “He’s like a teddy bear,” says Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, who has known Keene for decades. “He’s not hard-edged at all. He’s a gentleman.” (Keene did not respond to multiple interview requests.)