New information is continuing to trickle out about the National Rifle Association's curious new Russian ties. (Is there anyone in the nation who thought they'd be reading that sentence in their lifetimes?) Notably, none of that information does the NRA any favors; though they have attempted to stonewall queries into how much Russian funding they accepted and under what arrangement, the plain fact is that the domestic terrorism advocacy group—sorry, the "gun" group—both took unknown sums of money from Russian sources and, coincidentally, boosted its campaign spending by a gargantuan amount in 2016, pouring $30 million into advertisements and other efforts to support Donald Trump in his race.
Now the American Democracy Legal Fund has submitted a new complaint to the Federal Election Commission asking them to step up their investigation into whether the NRA was being used as a cutout by Russian actors seeking to funnel campaign help to the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump; it is flatly illegal for campaigns to receive foreign assistance, and for obvious reasons. From the ADLF complaint:
While the January Complaint focused on the connection between the NRA, Alexander Torshin, and Maria Butina, news sources now report that the “Justice Department investigation… has uncovered a web of contacts between the gun group and allies of Vladimir Putin.” [...]
To quote the Senate Judiciary Committee directly, the Committee “obtained a number of documents that suggest the Kremlin used the National Rifle Association as a means of accessing and assisting Mr. Trump and his campaign” concluding that “[t]he extent of Russia’s use of the NRA as an avenue for connecting with and potentially supporting the Trump campaign needs examination.”
The group also notes that $33 million worth of the NRA's campaign spending in 2016 come from sources that remain undisclosed. In other words, there's $33 million worth of mysterious money that got doled out as campaign spending in 2016–and $30 million of it went to Trump. Senators and federal investigators alike aren't fully sold on the notion that that's just a hell of a coincidence.
The FEC is not the only avenue for investigating these charges; the potential collaboration between the National Rifle Association and Russian backers is currently being investigated by the FBI and is likely to be an area of no small interest in the special counsel's own Russia probe. ADLF is asking the FEC to do their own inquiry as to whether U.S. election laws have been violated because the FEC can, in theory, impose their own penalties for those crimes. That's probably unlikely; The FEC has, like many other government commissions, had much of their regulatory power stripped by Republican hyper-partisans. But the NRA's role in all this is becoming much too conspicuous to ignore.