The Russians are widely known to recruit assets who knowingly or unknowingly provide them with information. They specifically target “rubes” who have access to inner circles of the people they want to spy on and to manipulate their opinions, thereby influencing the intended target. Enter Donald Trump, Jr. The Russians appear to have dialed in on the Republican gun fetish, using it as an opportunity to get cozy with the NRA, the Republican party, and Trump’s inner circle, possibly even Donald Trump himself. They so successfully penetrated the inner circle that even as Donald Trump was close to securing the Republican nomination, Don Jr. hosted a very special guest at a private NRA dinner, Alexander Torshin, governor of Russia’s central bank and boss of the recently arrested Russian spy, Maria Butina. From Vanity Fair:
Torshin did meet with Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., at a private dinner during an N.R.A. convention in Louisville, Kentucky, the following year.
In fact, Torshin and Butina were very active in the NRA and Trump circles, cultivating the relationships for years before the election. But is there an even bigger fish to be caught here? According to the indictment against Butina, she told her Russian bosses she’d had a private meeting with an “unnamed” political candidate in 2015. Maya Kosoff of Vanity Fair speculates that unnamed candidate could very well have been Donald Trump.
Could that candidate have been Donald Trump? Torshin, on his verified Twitter account, claimed in 2015 that he had access to Trump through the N.R.A., and cited the 2015 convention as a point of connection. Whether the two men spoke, however, is unclear. In a later interview with Bloomberg, Torishin “said he’s known Trump for five years and the two men last had a jovial exchange at the National Rifle Association Convention in Tennessee in 2015, just before the future president announced his run for the White House.” While Torshin allegedly tried to arrange a meeting with Trump during his campaign, the White House has previously denied that Trump and Torshin ever met. (The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
In 2015, Maria Butina was at the “FreedomFest” where Donald Trump was speaking and in very unlike Trump fashion, he called on a member of the audience for a question. In fact, the question was from Maria Butina and it was about lifting Russian sanctions, the biggest item on Putin’s wish list. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were hurting Putin and his oligarch allies politically with the sanctions and the Russians were desperate to get them lifted. Enter Donald Trump. Watch this video and ask yourself what the odds are of this being a random question? How often does Donald Trump call on audience members for questions?
The Russians don’t act impulsively, they play the long game. Is it a coincidence that Russians started throwing money at Donald Trump years before he ran for president? In 2013, Russian oligarch Aras Agalarov and his son Emin entered into a business relationship to host a beauty pageant with Trump in Moscow. Reuters reports Russians have spent at least $100 million buying Trump condos.
Former FBI counterespionage operative Naveed Jamali sat down with Salon to explain how the Russians take years to develop these relationships.
You can have someone who’s in the recruitment phase for years. It took them two years to get to the operational part for me. They could just say, “Hey, this person is useful; let’s just recruit them and we’re going to keep them in our back pocket until a time that we need them." This idea that the Russians recruited U.S. persons in a five-month window from the time that Trump started running for president is not credible. If there was a concerted effort to recruit these people it would have taken years to get to that point.
Talk about this in terms of tradecraft. If we’re painting the picture and you have Flynn or Tillerson, or someone around them, do you say, OK, we take him out, we wine him we dine him, and at some point we say, "We want something from you"? In your case did they give you a check, a suitcase full of money? What happened?
The approach for me was legitimate overt access, whereby they approached me through my business. It offers a legitimate way in. Of course you’re going to take them out to dinner, have pleasantries and conversations; that’s part of the process and that’s part of the assessment. The initial contact may be completely within in the bounds of legality, maybe within the bounds of being completely innocent and overt. You’ve done nothing wrong. The change is that as the relationship progresses eventually the Russians will get to the point where they believe that you are someone who is not just willing but someone they can trust with telling you what they want you to do. What they protect very closely, when it comes to their tradecraft, is what they want you to do.
As Rachel Maddow noted on Monday night’s must-watch show, we now must face the reality that a Russian asset may have ascended all the way to the White House. It’s horrifying and uncomfortable and we must now confront this reality.
The more the facts unfold before us, the more terrifying this situation is for the entire nation. We are in unchartered waters here and we have the weakest Congress in history refusing to act. It is time to ask why Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Republican leadership are opting out of their constitutional duty to act, to defend this nation from enemies foreign and domestic. The time is here. The time is now.