The NRA’s involvement with Russia goes far beyond the single connection currently under investigation by the FBI. NRA leadership has been instrumental in connecting Republicans to associates of Vladimir Putin, including arranging paid speaking gigs and visits. And they were not shy in their attempts to bring Trump and Putin together.
A conservative operative trumpeting his close ties to the National Rifle Association and Russia told a Trump campaign adviser last year that he could arrange a back-channel meeting between Donald J. Trump and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, according to an email sent to the Trump campaign.
The email header on that note, which went to Jeff Sessions along with other Trump advisors, was “Kremlin Connecton.” That outreach to Trump came within days of another attempted contact, both of which lead back to Alexander Torshin, a deputy of the Russian central bank and leader in Putin’s United Russia Party.
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.
News that investigators are looking into connections between the Trump campaign and Russian officials that involved NRA as a middleman was far from new. The idea that Torshin might have directly used the NRA as a proxy for the Trump campaign would make for a shockingly direct and obvious violation of U.S. law, but it’s far from the limit of the NRA’s connections to Russia.
The NRA hasn’t been particularly shy about their fondness for Vladimir Putin. 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.’ ”
If Erickson is on the Republican-NRA end of the connection, his partner, Maria Butina, holds up the other end of the NRA-Russia pipeline.
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.
Based on what’s now know, all of those things could be true. The NRA is an integral support of the Republican Party, and it’s also deeply connected to pro-gun organizations in Russia, as well as to supporters like Torshin. In fact, the NRA has become so close to Russia, that it hasn’t shied away from doing just what Russian operatives wanted the Trump campaign to do in that famous Trump Tower meeting—attack sanctions. And work directly with those under sanction to change American policies toward Russia.
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.
Dmitry Rogozin is the former head of Rodina—the original post-Soviet Russian nationalist party. He’s also the head of defense technology for Russia, including developing systems to knock out US defenses and for taking war into space. He’s also a prolific Twitter user. Trump may get away with comments about the size of “his button,” but Rogozin was actually banned from travel to much of Europe after tweeting that on his next visit he would be flying in a nuclear bomber. So … a charming guy. Who did the NRA send for this chat?
Rogozin’s inclusion in U.S. sanctions, prior to his meeting with the NRA delegation, marks him as an American adversary. But if that designation raised red flags to Keene and his compatriots—including board member Pete Brownell, top NRA donor Joe Gregory, and Trump supporter Sheriff David A. Clarke—they didn’t mention them, before or since.
The timing of this means that Clarke was in Russia to meet Rogozin just after Michael Flynn dropped by to give Putin a standing O.
It seems incredible that any organization that claims to be devoted to “rights” and “freedom” would be deliberately fostering connections to an autocratic dictator and a regime of bullying oligarchs who were launching both overt and covert attacks. Why did they do it? Because they saw in Putin exactly what they wanted from Trump:
… deep ties between Mr. Erickson, the N.R.A. and the Russian gun rights community that were formed in the years when many American conservatives, put off by the Obama administration’s policies, were increasingly looking to Mr. Putin as an example of a strong leader opposing immigration, terrorism and gay rights.
The NRA was looking for a “strong leader” willing to elevate the second amendment over all others and set up a white nationalist autocracy. The anti-immigrant, anti-gay message was a good thing for them. They knew where they could find support, and they knew who they could trust to follow through on that vision. So all that was left to do in 2016 was take the resources and experience offered by Russia, and put them to work for Trump.
It may turn out that no money found its way from Russia to the campaign to elect Trump. But there are certainly a lot of suggestive things going on, including the fact that Torshin is a sketchy character with deep ties to the NRA, and the fact that the group dramatically increased its election spending in 2016. After spending $12.5 million to help Mitt Romney in 2012, it poured over $30 million into the effort to get Donald Trump elected, and perhaps much more, since certain kinds of campaign spending don’t need to be reported.
But this is significant because it highlights a potential path of foreign influence that we haven’t much talked about. And it was available to Russia because of the relentless GOP effort in recent years to make American campaign finance law simultaneously more open to the influence of big money and more opaque.
That Citizens United decision didn’t just make it easier for American corporations to secretly boost candidates through an influx of limitless funds. It made it easier for anyone.