McClatchy is reporting that now the FBI is investigating whether or not Russia funneled money through the NRA in an effort to help POTUS45’s election bid.
The FBI is investigating whether a top Russian banker with ties to the Kremlin illegally funneled money to the National Rifle Association to help Donald Trump win the presidency, two sources familiar with the matter have told McClatchy.
FBI counterintelligence investigators have focused on the activities of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank who is known for his close relationships with both Russian President Vladimir Putin and the NRA, the sources said.
It is illegal to use foreign money to influence federal elections.
It’s unclear how long the Torshin inquiry has been ongoing, but the news comes as Justice Department Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sweeping investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, including whether the Kremlin colluded with Trump’s campaign, has been heating up.
So who is Alexander Torshin? According to Spanish intelligence in 2016, he is a ‘boss’ in the Russian state-mafia, although he himself vehemently denies this.
A former senator in Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party directed dirty-money flows for mobsters in Moscow before he was named a deputy head of the central bank last year, according to investigators in Spain.
Last year, Yahoo! news reported that a Russian banker linked with Vladimir Putin talked with Donald Trump Jr. at a 2016 NRA dinner in Kentucky. That Russian banker is Alexander Torshin, the depudy head of Russia’s central bank, Банк России Bank Rossii.
However, Trump Jr. denies ever having sat down with Torshin at the NRA. This was quickly refuted by Trump Jr.’s very own attorney named Alan Futerfas, who told NBC News:
"Donald J. Trump Jr. was attending an NRA convention and having dinner when an acquaintance asked him to say hello to Torshin and made an introduction," attorney Alan Futerfas told NBC News. "They made small talk for a few minutes and went back to their separate meals. That is the extent of their communication or contact."
What was the nature of this conversation? Yahoo! News claims that the chat was an attempt to
set up a covert meeting with the campaign.
The Trump inner circle vehemently denies any communication with Alexander Torshin. But there’s just one MAJOR problem: Torshin has corroborated the account of events.
Torshin was seated with the candidate's son, Donald Trump Jr., during a private dinner on the sidelines of a May 2016 NRA event during the convention in Louisville, according to an account Torshin gave to Bloomberg. Congressional investigators have no clear explanation for how that came to be, according to sources familiar with the matter.
And the reason this is so important is because it follows a pattern: the attempts to setup a direct backchannel to the Kremlin through non-campaign intermediaries in an effort to stymie domestic surveillance.
The encounter matters because Torshin was involved, through an intermediary, in what was described in an email sent to Trump campaign aides as a "Russian backdoor overture." Jared Kushner, Donald Trump's son-in-law, denied his request for a meeting with the candidate on an email chain that allegedly also included aides Rick Dearborn, Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. The Timesreported that Kushner wrote that the campaign should "pass on this."
Just one more tangle in the KremlinGate web of lies coming from #TrumpRussia