Last October, in “God, guns … and Russia?” I wrote about the magnanimous contribution that the NRA made to the election of Donald Trump. The gun group endorsed him on May 20, 2016, much earlier in the election cycle than they had ever before endorsed a Republican presidential candidate. From Politico’s report on the pushback of the membership to the endorsement:
To endorse so early in the process is virtually unprecedented for the group; they didn’t get behind Mitt Romney in 2012 and Sen. John McCain in 2008 until October.
That, and the $30 million spending pledge struck me as odd at the time, but it wasn’t until later that the ties between the NRA and the woman now sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial became clearer. I wrote about Maria Butina’s Russian gun rights organization, The Right to Bear Arms, and her work with the Russian banker and politico Alexander Torshin, who was a lifetime member of the NRA. The close ties between the Russians and the NRA has led to speculation that the NRA money for Trump’s election campaign may have come from Russia.
As I wrote last October:
The Right to Bear Arms hosted a delegation from the NRA during the same time frame. Attendees included David Keene, NRA board member Pete Brownell, NRA donor Joe Gregory, and Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, he of the boy-scout-merit-badge-covered uniform shirt who became a top Trump surrogate. They not only met with Torshin and Butina, but with a sanctioned Russian, according to Tim Mack of The Daily Beast.
“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.”
The affidavit filed in support of the criminal charges against Maria Butina also discusses her work with an organizer of the National Prayer Breakfast.
The National Prayer Breakfast is an annual event put on by the Family, also known, at one time or another, as the Fellowship Foundation, National Committee for Christian Leadership, International Christian Leadership, National Leadership Council and the International Foundation. According to Jeff Sharlet, who wrote the book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, this quasi-religious, highly secretive group started in 1935 by a Lutheran preacher and has successfully spread its tentacles around the world. The group is now also known, thanks to reporting by Sharlet and Rachel Maddow, as the force behind Uganda’s kill-the-gays law.
Of course, the Family prefers that the public never hears about their international political activities, other than the annual National Prayer Breakfast that includes an appearance by the sitting president. The first breakfast was held in 1953 and attended by President Eisenhower after some arm-twisting by Billy Graham. From a recent Vox interview with Jeff Sharlet:
Eisenhower said no at first as well. But he owed an electoral debt to Billy Graham, who, working with the Family, had helped swing the evangelical vote for Eisenhower. This was back when Southern evangelicals did not vote Republican. So he attended. The idea was, “Look, I’m going, I don’t want any press. I don’t want this to become a tradition.” Suddenly, you have this tradition.
And so every president since has gone. Most of Congress goes. Lots of world leaders go. The Family uses it as the centerpiece — the one public event they do in the year. But it’s only one-tenth of 1 percent of the iceberg [of their work]. As they describe it, it is a recruiting device to bring those whom they are interested in into what they describe as prayer cells, where they meet. And I’m quoting here [from Family documents]: where “you meet Jesus, man to man.” Meanwhile, around the prayer breakfast — which is just one event on the first Thursday of February — is a week-long lobbying festival.
You get the oil industry hosting events. You get defense contractors hosting events. So you look at the list of foreign leaders who are coming again and again from around the world. They’re there for access to American power; they’re there to cut deals.
Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, who has taken over the Graham family businesses, the Billy Graham Evangelical Association and Samaritan’s Purse, is also visible at the annual breakfast. Unlike his father, who found the Soviet Union to be a godless evil, Franklin appears to favor Putin’s Russia.
In 2014, before even meeting the dictator, Graham was onboard with a regime that allowed him to attack President Obama (not that he needed any particular reason), according to Jack Jenkins, writing for ThinkProgress.
In 2014, Graham published an opinion piece about the Russian president’s decision to sign a law barring the distribution of “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations” to children. The law, which was widely perceived to be homophobic, stirred controversy ahead of the 2014 Olympic games in Sochi. But Graham defended it anyway, saying America’s embrace of LGBTQ rights amounts to “secularism” that “is as godless as communism.”
He also lauded Putin’s pledge to protect Christians in Syria, noting how it was “one justification for his support of the Assad regime in Syria.”
“It’s obvious that President Obama and his administration are pushing the gay-lesbian agenda in America today and have sold themselves completely to that which is contrary to God’s teaching,” Graham wrote. “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda.”
Putin, known for playing the long game, has been wooing the religious right for some time.
The potential political benefits for the Kremlin are obvious: The Religious Right would be a prize for anyone looking to gain influence American politics, as right-wing faith leaders — especially those who claim evangelical Christianity — have long played an active role in elections. What’s more, some of their most controversial members (including Graham) have only gained influence during Trump’s rise.
Just before Butina’s NRA-affiliated guests arrived in Russia in the winter of 2015, Franklin Graham was there on a visit as well. He found much to approve of, unsurprisingly, in Putin’s attitude toward homosexuality. Apparently the sin of gay is so very much worse than the murders of journalists and rivals that he happily spent forty-five minutes meeting with Putin and, like Trump, has only found the positive in his repressive rule.
The last time Graham had visited Moscow, with his father, Billy Graham, in the 1980s, the practice of religion was prohibited. On this trip, he said, conditions for Christians in Russia remained difficult. But Graham recalled that Putin listened as he described evangelical Christianity and the challenges facing Christians around the world. Putin explained that his mother kept her Christian faith even during the darkest days of atheistic communist rule.
“He understood,” Graham said of the Russian leader.
Putin offered to help Graham organize an international conference on Christian persecution in Moscow, Graham said. Instead, a Russian delegation is expected when the conference takes place in May in Washington, Graham said.
He has since posted on Facebook requesting prayers for the Russian leader.
As yet, there is no evidence within the criminal charges against Butina that she approached Graham, or that the two were even acquainted, but they did move within the same right-wing bubble, and attended the same prayer breakfasts—it seems likely that they met somewhere along the way. After all, it was her mentor and boss, Alexander Torshin who pushed to form ties with the religious right, as I wrote last year:
In addition to his NRA ties, Torshin has also cultivated a long-term relationship with the evangelical movement on the right. According to the Washington Post:
“Torshin was also a leader in a Russian movement to align government more closely with the Orthodox church. [...]
After Trump’s victory, Torshin returned to the United States with a delegation of prominent Russians to attend the annual National Prayer Breakfast in Washington in February. In addition to his gun-rights work, Torshin also had helped build a similar prayer breakfast in Moscow from an obscure monthly event a decade ago into one more resembling the annual ritual in Washington.
Putin now sends an annual greeting to the Russian event, a recognition of its value in allowing “Russian and American guests to come together under one roof in order to rebuild the relationship between the two countries that has degraded under the administration of President Obama,” said breakfast organizer Peter Sautov in an email.”
I concluded that October essay with these words:
The growing Russian ties between our gun lobby and the right-wing evangelical movement should be an issue of concern as great as the Russian interference in our 2016 and future elections. Putin is a long-term planner who now has ties to the U.S. State Department (as long as Tillerson is not fired), the NRA (which in turn controls the GOP), the religious right, and the Oval Office. Mueller really needs to expand his investigation.
Apparently he already had.