Before the NRA spent millions getting Trump elected it already had forged close ties to Putin allies. Russia has a fairly new guns rights group called “The Right To Bear Arms” founded by Marina Butina who uses rhetoric remarkably similar to the NRA’s.
In a previous diary I posted about Sheriff Clarke being in Moscow at the same time the photo was taken of Flynn/Stein eating dinner with Putin. That trip was partially paid for by Butina’s Russian Gun Rights group. Looking at Marina Butina’s biography, the wide variety of jobs in her resume is unusual and include being special assistant to a Russian mobster tied to Putin, Alexander Torshin. Recently, after Trump’s election she has boasted several times of helping communications between Trump and Russia.
It sounds as if ‘The Right To Bear Arms’ group may have been created specifically to reach out to the NRA and provide a channel at the very least to groom American Conservatives and possibly to channel information to Putin. There aren’t many guns in Russia except for hunting rifles, those who own handguns are wealthy and Butina’s group isn’t very large.
Doing a web search on NRA, Russia turns up a lot of very good journalism and information. This diary is an excerpt to give some idea of what’s out there. I hope someone with some serious chops can help digest all of it and do more digging
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Top Trump Ally Met With Putin’s Deputy in Moscow
In March 2014, the U.S. government sanctioned Dmitry Rogozin—a hardline deputy to Vladimir Putin, the head of Russia’s defense industry and longtime opponent of American power—in retaliation for the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Eighteen months later, the National Rifle Association, Donald Trump’s most powerful outside ally during the 2016 election, sent a delegation to Moscow that met with him.
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Why was the NRA meeting with Putin’s deputy in the first place?
“Rogozin is chairman of the Russian Shooting Federation and his Board hosted a tour of Federation HQ for us while we were there,” Keene told The Daily Beast. “It was non-political. There were at least 30 in attendance and our interaction consisted of thanking him and his Board for the tour.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/top-trump-ally-met-with-putins-deputy-in-moscow
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Guns and religion: How American conservatives grew closer to Putin’s Russia
The burgeoning alliance between Russians and U.S. conservatives was apparent in several events in late 2015, as the Republican nomination battle intensified.
Top officials from the National Rifle Association, whose annual meeting Friday featured an address by Trump for the third time in three years, traveled to Moscow to visit a Russian gun manufacturer and meet government officials.
At least one connection came about thanks to a conservative Nashville lawyer named G. Kline Preston IV, who had done business in Russia for years.
Preston said that in 2011 he introduced David Keene, then the NRA’s president, to a Russian senator, Alexander Torshin, a member of Putin’s party who later became a top official at the Russian central bank. Keene had been a stalwart on the right, a past chairman of the American Conservative Union who was the NRA’s president from 2011 to 2013.
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Torshin was also a leader in a Russian movement to align government more closely with the Orthodox church. “The value system of Southern Christians and the value system of Russians are very much in line,” Preston said. “The so-called conflict between our two nations is a tragedy because we’re very similar people, in a lot of our values, our interests and that sort of thing.”
Preston, an expert on Russian law whose office features a white porcelain bust of Putin, said he had told Tennessee friends for years not to believe television reports about the Russian leader having journalists or dissidents killed.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-republican-right-found-allies-in-russia/2017/04/30/e2d83ff6-29d3-11e7-a616-d7c8a68c1a66_story.html?utm_term=.cf4121b02e33
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Moscow Cozies Up to the Right
Russia is equally keen on cultivating links to Republicans. Some of the officials who attended the dinner--including a deputy central banker and former Russian senator named Alexander Torshin, and his protégée, a young gun-rights activist named Maria Butina--have been part of a years-long campaign to build connections between Russia's leaders and American conservatives. The crusade, which predates the rise of Trump, has garnered scant attention but achieved significant success, sparking new alliances with leading U.S. evangelicals, lawmakers and powerful interest groups like the NRA.
http://time.com/4696424/moscow-right-kremlin-republicans/
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The Rise of Russia’s Gun Nuts
It must feel especially nice because she is their leader. About a year ago, Butina founded an organization called Right to Bear Arms, in the process almost single-handedly inventing Russia’s gun-rights movement. The guys at the shooting gallery were her dues-paying members, all of whom believe the legal code should be amended to allow Russians to carry concealed handguns.
This is not a popular idea in Russia, where there is no constitutional right to bear arms, in a well-regulated militia or otherwise. Instead, Russians are allowed to own smoothbore hunting rifles, as well as “compliance weapons”—that is, guns that shoot rubber bullets or are powered by gas.
newrepublic.com/…
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The Kremlin and GOP Have a New Friend—and Boy, Does She Love Guns
Just a few years ago, Maria Butina owned a furniture store in Siberia. Now she’s wheeling and dealing with D.C. think-tankers, Republican strategists, and a Russian bank chief with alleged mob connections.
Depending on the audience, Butina has presented herself as a Russian central bank staffer, a leading gun rights advocate, a “representative of the Russian Federation,” a Washington, D.C., graduate student, a journalist, and a connection between Team Trump and Russia. She used each role to help her gain more high-level contacts in the nation’s capital.
It’s another chapter in what’s becoming a familiar story in Washington: Kremlin-connected operators building bridges to the GOP.
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Two of Butina’s friendships in particular have raised eyebrows. She started a business with Paul Erickson, a decades-long Republican Party activist. And she served as a special assistant to the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank, Alexander Torshin, a former Russian senator belonging to Vladimir Putin’s political party with alleged ties to the Russian mob world.
On Nov. 12, 2016, shortly after the election of President Donald Trump, Butina held a birthday party at Cafe Deluxe near American University, where she attends graduate school classes. snip As chilled vodka flowed through an ice sculpture—a bottle imprinted with the Soviet hammer and sickle—she took some time to brag. She brazenly claimed that she had been part of the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia, two individuals who were present said. On other occasions, in one of her graduate classes, she repeated this claim.
www.thedailybeast.com/...
Why has the NRA been cozying up to Russia?
Why does an American gun group that promotes gun rights as a defense against tyranny align itself with a group with close ties to an authoritarian regime? Why would Putin allies build a grassroots non-profit to loosen Russia’s gun laws, rather than just enact them? Experts who spoke to ThinkProgress say they are not sure, but they discussed whether the whole arrangement is a cover for a larger effort to undermine American sanctions against Russia.
On December 11, 2015, in the depths of a biting Moscow winter, The Right to Bear Arms hosted a delegation from its American counterpart, the NRA. David Keene, an NRA and former national president of the organization, flew to Russia to attend the event. Also at that meeting were NRA First Vice President Pete Brownell, CEO of the world’s largest firearm accessories supplier; NRA funder Dr Arnold Goldschlager and his daughter, NRA Women’s Leadership Forum executive committee member Hilary Goldschalger; and Outdoor Life channel head Jim Liberatore. Perhaps the most famous guest at the gathering, trading his customary uniform for a black leather vest over a button-down shirt, was Milwaukee County Sheriff and Fox News regular David A. Clarke.
Clarke said little publicly about the event.... snip
But the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Daniel Bice noticed that Clarke’s January 2016 ethics disclosure filing shed some light on the trip. Part one was $20,155 trip to Israel, paid for by the NRA Ring of Freedom... The remaining days were spent in Russia. His airfare to Moscow and visas, totaling $13,785.10, were paid for by Brownell; his $6000 worth of meals, hotel, transportation, and excursions were provided by the “All-Russia Public Organization ‘The Right to Bear Arms.’”
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At that conference, according to a post on the Right to Bear Arms’ Facebook page, in addition to group’s chairman and founder Maria Butina, a welcoming speech was delivered by honorary member of The Right to Bear Arms Alexander Torshin.
Maria Butina... gained notice as the founder and chair of Russia’s gun-rights movement. snip Though Russia’s constitution does not contain Second Amendment-like gun rights, her rhetoric is remarkably similar to the NRA’s. “More legal guns equal less crime,” she told the Moscow Times this year, “If a country bans guns, only criminals have access to them.”
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.....early on, Butina “gained a powerful ally”—Alexander Torshin, who is an NRA Life Member, a “high-ranking member” of Putin’s United Russia and, at the time, the first deputy speaker of the Russian senate.
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After years serving in the upper house of parliament, in 2015 he was appointed deputy governor for Russia’s central bank. Butina was appointed “special assistant” to Torshin at the bank.
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https://thinkprogress.org/nra-and-russian-cousin-18f607d40240/
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