Today, the US Government arrested Russian citizen Maria Butina. She is charged with being a foreign agent and attempting to influence a US election.
WASHINGTON — A Russian woman who tried to broker a secret meeting between Donald J. Trump and the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, during the 2016 presidential campaign was charged Monday and accused of working with Americans to carry out a secret Russian effort to influence American politics.
At the behest of a senior Russian government official, the woman, Mariia Butina, made connections through the National Rifle Association, religious organizations and the National Prayer Breakfast to try to steer the Republican Party toward more pro-Russia policies, court records show. Privately comparing herself to a Soviet Cold War propagandist, she worked to infiltrate American organizations and establish “back channel” lines of communication with American politicians.
The diary below was first published on May 16, 2018. Given the events of today it seems like a good time to republish…
How Maria Butina Young Gun Advocate From Siberia Helped Russia Penetrate the NRA and Elect Trump
So just who is Maria Butina, and how did she infiltrate the NRA to help get Trump elected?
Maria Butina was born in Siberia in 1987. She developed a love for guns from a young age hunting with her father. As a 19 year old student in 2007 she participated in a joint U.S./Russian Federation diplomatic legislative seminar entitled “Project Harmony,” and also became the executive director of her local International Rotary Club. Upon graduation from the local college at 21 she launched a small chain of furniture stores in her hometown, but small town life in Siberia was not for her. Within a year Maria Butina moved to Moscow and became an aide to the First Vice-chairman of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Alexander Porfirievich Torshin, a notorious Russian Mafia figure with strong ties to the FSB.
At 23 years old in 2011, this dynamic young woman was named the founding Chairman of “The Right to Bear Arms,” a fledgling Russian version of the NRA. The organization had been created by in 2010 as one of the last wishes of Torshin’s good friend Gen. Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47. The Right To Bear Arm’s honorary members included Torshin and an impressive list of other members of the Russian Parliament including top brass from the right-wing nationalist LDPR and Rodina parties.
In 2011 Torshin also began his relationship with the NRA. Torshin had cultivated a friendship with a conservative gun loving Nashville lawyer G. Kline Preston IV. The two had met in 2009 when Preston, who specialized in Russian legal work, had briefed Russian legislators in Russia on implementation of immunity agreements, also known as ‘plea deals’. Preston then served as an international election observer in the 2011 legislative elections in Russia, “which sparked mass street protests in Moscow charging electoral irregularities, but Preston said he concluded that the elections were free and fair. By contrast, Preston brought Torshin to the US to observe the 2012 US election and said he and Torshin saw violations of U.S. law — pro-Obama signs posted too close to a polling place.” In 2011 Preston introduced Torshin to David Keen, then the NRA President.
In May of 2013 Torshin, at Keene’s invitation, traveled to Houston Texas to attend the NRA annual meeting. During the meeting, Keene was replaced by Jim Porter as president, but retained his seat on the NRA board of directors.
A few months later, in November of 2013, Torshin and Butina hosted Keene at a Right to Bear Arms conference in Moscow. In attendance at the Moscow conference of about 200 people was also long time conservative operative and lifetime NRA member Paul Erickson. At that time Erickson and Keene, were both members of the board of the American Conservative Union. Another ACU board member, Alan Gotlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment foundation, also attended the conference. In any case, Maria Butina and Paul Erickson meet for the first time in Moscow in November of 2013.
A little background on Paul Erickson. Erickson was born in LA in 1961. In 1980 he was forced to resign from University of South Dakota Student Association after providing confidential student information to Jim Abdnor’s U.S. Senate campaign and registering voters without proper notary certification. He later transferred to Yale University in Connecticut, and got his bachelors of arts degree from Yale in 1984 and his law degree from University of Virginia in 1988. He was active in conservative Republican circles, and dabbled with film production in the 1990s. He became a “media adviser” to John Wayne Bobbit in 1993 after Bobbit’s penis was famously cut off and reattached. But mostly Erickson created corporate ventures having to do with elderly health care, and left behind a trail of legal judgments against him for financial fraud. In 2011 he became a member of the board of the American Conservative Union. Other notable members of the ACU board back then included Matt Schlapp, Grover Norquist, John Bolton, Carly Fiorina, and Asa Hutchinson. In November of 2013, when he met 25 year old Butina in Moscow, Paul Erickson was a unmarried balding 52 year old Republican activist with a checkered past.
In April 2014 Butina and Torshin came to the US to attend the NRA annual meeting in Indianapolis as guests of Keene. “Butina was even given the “rare privilege” of ringing a Liberty Bell replica at an event honoring the NRA’s top donors.” In May Butina was back in the US visiting Keene at NRA Headquarters in Washington.
On September 3, 2014 Erickson traveled to Moscow and conducted a discussion group with Butina entitled “Meeting in Moscow with NRA Representative” at the Right to Bear Arms Headquarters. He emphasized that it is necessary to “fight for rights constantly, not stopping at what has been achieved.”
In January 2015, Alexander Torshin left the Russian parliament and was appointed the deputy head of the Central Bank of Russia. He selected Maria Butina as his special assistant in that position.
Back in the US again in early April 2015 Butina received another private tour of NRA Headquarters. On April 9 she and Torshin were in Nashville Tennessee at the NRA national meeting where they met Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and had a friendly exchange with the event’s star attraction, Donald Trump.
It is not known if Erickson also attended the 2015 NRA meeting, but from Nashville, Butina traveled to Paul Erickson’s home town of Vermillion, South Dakota, and gave a gun-rights lecture to 30 students at the University of South Dakota on April 16, 2015.
On June 12, 2015 in an op-ed for the publication National Interest titled “The Bear and the Elephant,” Butina wrote, “It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States.” Four days after the op-ed appeared, Donald Trump announced he would seek the Republican nomination for President of the United States.
On July 11, 2015 Maria Butina attended the Trump Freedom Fest rally in Las Vegas and, posing as a reporter, asked a question to the Republican candidate: “I’m from Russia. My question will be about foreign politics. If you will be elected as president, what will be your foreign politics, especially in the relationships with my country? Do you want to continue the policy of sanctions that are damaging both economies? Or [do you] have any other ideas?” Trump replied “I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we’ll get along with Putin. … I would get along very nicely with Putin, I mean, where we have the strength. I don’t think you’d need the sanctions. I think we would get along very, very well.”
On July 22, 2015 Butina was back in South Dakota again with Paul Erickson speaking to teenage Republicans at a youth camp in the Black Hills. She returned to Russia in July, but was back in South Dakota again in November.
On December 12, 2015 Butina was in Moscow to welcomed a large NRA delegation from the US that included Paul Erickson and David Keene.
The group also included board member and gun manufacturer Pete Brownell; high-dollar NRA donor Arnold Goldschlager; multi-millionaire pharma king Joe Gregory, who runs the NRA’s “Ring of Freedom” program for donors who contribute $1 million or more; and radical right wing Milwaukee County, Wisconsin sheriff David A. Clarke. Butina’s Right to Bear Arms “paid $6,000 for Clarke’s meals, hotel, transportation, and entertainment. Brownell covered the rest of Clarke’s expenses, including his airfare and visas. It’s unknown who paid for the rest of the delegates.
The group toured a gun manufacturing company and met with Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who was among the officials sanctioned by the White House following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Keene told the Daily Beast, which first reported the meeting, that the interaction with Rogozin was “non-political” and consisted of touring the headquarters of a shooting group that Rogozin chairs.
On February 10, 2016 Paul Erickson and now 27 year old Maria Butina “formed a limited liability corporation called Bridges, LLC in South Dakota. It is unclear what Bridges, based out of South Dakota, actually does. Public records don’t reveal any financial transactions by the LLC.” In a phone interview with McClatchy in 2017, Erickson said the firm was established “in case Butina needed any monetary assistance for her graduate studies.” Filing documents for Bridges LLC list Erickson as the “Agent” and the company address is Erickson’s address in Sioux Falls, SD, the same address used for one of Erickson’s health care businesses Investing With Dignity LLC.
On February 14, 2016 Alexander Torshin tweeted, “Maria Butina is now in the USA. She writes to me that D. Trump (NRA member) really is for cooperation with Russia.”
It is not clear what Butina or Erickson were doing in early 2016 or where they were, however:
In May 2016 Erickson wrote an email to the Trump campaign adviser, Rick Dearborn, with the subject line “Kremlin Connection.” In it, the NRA member said he wanted the advice of Mr. Dearborn and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, then a foreign policy adviser to Mr. Trump and Mr. Dearborn’s longtime boss, about how to proceed in connecting the two leaders. 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.’
Torshin and Butina attended the convention:
Torshin indicated he would be speaking to Trump on behalf of Putin himself. Campaign adviser and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner rebuffed the request, but Torshin was allowed to speak with Donald Trump, Jr. at a private dinner hosted by the NRA that weekend.
Trump was the NRA’s featured speaker in Louisville, and on May 20th, at the convention, the NRA endorsed Donald Trump for president of the United States. “The endorsement came far earlier in the election cycle than is typical for the organization.”
Butina, Erickson and Torshin’s work to bring the parties together seems to have to paid off spectacularly.
The National Rifle Association spent tens of millions of dollars backing Trump's presidential bid in 2016. The NRA endorsed Trump in May 2016. And the NRA disclosed it spent at least $30 million on Trump's behalf and attacking Hillary Clinton. That level of support is unprecedented – more than twice what the NRA disclosed it spent on Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential run.
The true sum the NRA spent to install Trump in the White House may be far higher. Campaign finance disclosures do not cover spending on unregulated Internet advertising or voter mobilization; citing two sources close to the gun group, McClatchy suggests the NRA may have spent upwards of $70 million on Trump's presidential bid.
In the fall of 2016 Butina began a master’s degree in the Global Security program in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C.
On Nov. 12, 2016, shortly after the election of President Donald Trump, Butina held a gala 28th birthday party for herself at Cafe Deluxe near American University:
The event was a costume party attended by Trump campaign aides and Erickson, who told guests that he was on the Trump presidential transition team. She dressed as Russian Empress Alexandra while Erickson was dressed as Rasputin.
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.
“She said so in my class. And she said so several times in the last semester,” Svetlana Savranskaya, Butina’s former American University professor and a staffer at the National Security Archive, told The Daily Beast. “She is a former journalist, so she keeps up her connections in Russia. And she also works and [claims to] keep connections with a member of the Russian Duma.”
Erickson and Butina have been seen in public frequently, at the invitation-only Freedom Ball after Trump’s inauguration; and holding court at Russia House, a Russian-themed bar in Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle. At one such gathering in the fall of 2016 Erickson bragged that he was advising the Trump transition team, according to two sources who were present; he is also said to have told a story about introducing Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47, to former NRA president David Keene. (Kalashnikov allegedly inspired the creation of “The Right to Bear Arms,” Butina’s gun rights group.)
Butina and Torshin met up again on February 2, 2017 to attend the National Prayer Breakfast. Unfortunately a planned meeting with Trump did not occur:
A meeting between Torshin, Butina and newly-elected President Donald Trump was canceled at the last minute at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 2, 2017. The three had been scheduled to meet in a waiting room at the Washington Hilton just before the event started. “Late the night before, we were told that all meet and greets were off,” said Butina. A Trump administration official flagged Torshin at the last minute as a figure with “baggage” (ties to organized crime in Russia).
Maria Butina, now 29 years old, is back home in Moscow running the Right To Bear Arms and blogging about gun rights. Paul Erickson, age 57, is back in his apartment in Sioux Falls, South Dakota worrying about information requests from the governmentand dodging reporters:
Our attempts to get Erickson to do an interview with us have been unsuccessful. We did speak with him through a speaker phone at his apartment building. Erickson told us the national reports about him were incorrect.
Clearly, Maria Butina is not back in Russia any longer. Tonight she is a guest of the US somewhere around DC. I’m wondering how Paul Erickson is doing tonight? Stay tuned.