In May 2016, longtime Republican campaign adviser Paul Erickson wrote to the Trump campaign offering to connect Donald Trump and Putin’s government, with the NRA providing cover.
Russia, he wrote, was “quietly but actively seeking a dialogue with the U.S.” and would attempt to use the N.R.A.’s annual convention in Louisville, Ky., to make “ ‘first contact.’ ”
The letter went to Trump campaign adviser Rick Dearborn, but was addressed to both Dearborn and Jefferson Sessions, who was Trump’s foreign policy adviser and Dearborn’s boss. When questioned about the letter, Sessions responded with the statement that has become his theme song: He does not recall. But Sessions and Dearborn may not be the only ones to have handled the letter. Dearborn passed a similar proposal for Russia talks along to Trump son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.
While Paul Erickson’s name might not be a mainstay of Trump–Russia articles, the knowledge that he contacted Trump’s campaign early in 2016 connects to his later claims that he was an adviser to Trump’s transition team. And it connects Trump’s campaign to Erickson’s partner, Maria Butina, whose claims, according to The Daily Beast, are even more interesting.
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.
Butina has made multiple claims that she acted as a conduit between Trump’s team and the Russian government. And she’s the bridge between the the American gun-manufacturer cartel represented by the NRA and the Russian gun-manufacturer cartel represented by her group, The Right to Bear Arms.
The claims from Butina and Erickson are among the most colorful in the whole Trump–Russia saga.
"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."
Maria Butina has tight connections to the NRA and presents herself as the “public face of gun rights in the Russian Federation.” Not only is Butina partners with Republican consultant Erickson, but she was the former assistant to Russia United leader Alexander Torshin.
So, Butina’s partner Erickson sent the Trump campaign a note offering to broker a meeting with Russian officials under the cover of the annual NRA meeting. How did that work out?
Torshin attended the May 2016 convention in Louisville, Kentucky, meeting with Trump and even sharing a table with Donald Trump Jr. at one of the dinners.
Toshin is the Russia end of Butina’s The Right to Bear Arms organization. According to the New York Times, Torshin is exactly who Erickson was arranging a hush-hush meeting with Trump behind the scenes at the NRA’s annual convention.
A group of pro-gun Russians may seem like the most unlikely intrusion into the U.S. campaign. But they haven’t exactly been low-profile.
[Sheriff David Clarke] has served as a virtual Bering Land Bridge between the NRA and its counterpart in Russia, The Right to Bear Arms, taking a trip to the country almost exactly a year ago with a who’s who of NRA brass. Present on this bizarre excursion were ex-NRA President David Keene, NRA First Vice President Pete Brownell—who also just happens to run an enormous firearm accessory empire—and NRA Women’s Leadership Forum executive committee member Hilary Goldschlager.
That joint visit from Clarke and and an NRA delegation funded by The Right to Bear Arms put them in Moscow at the same time that Michael Flynn and Jill Stein were sharing a table with Vladimir Putin.
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.
The meeting, which hasn’t been previously reported in the American press, is one strand in a web of connections between the Russian government and Team Trump ...
All of that international shoot-em-up-accord was funded by The Right to Bear Arms. Butina’s group has also been a reliable second-course for NRA talking points.
After the Sandy Hook mass shooting in 2012, her group criticized gun-free school zones as ineffective prohibitionist policies.
The connections between the NRA, the Republican Party, and Russia run deep.
One more little tidbit: In February 2016, just a few weeks before Paul Manafort joined the Trump campaign, before George Papadopoulos had his first meeting with “the professor,” and before the Trump campaign would get its first signals that Russia was standing by with “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, Paul Erickson and Maria Butina formed a new company. The purpose of this LLC, incorporated in South Dakota, is obscure. But its name is clear enough.
They named it “Bridges.”
