From Russia with Love for the NRA

It all started with a Russian mobster. Now the gun lobby is attacking anyone who dares to question the Trump-Putin nexus.
 
When National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) last month, he made some curious and unexpected comments about Russia. Talking about reporters and average Americans concerned about the Trump administration’s ties to Vladimir Putin and Russia, LaPierre mocked, “They’re horrified. They’re all afret over the Russian-American equation.” He then added, “Even more alarming is they’ve apparently found willing co-conspirators among some in the U.S. intelligence community.” [At least six different U.S. intelligence agencies are currently investigating the administration’s ties to Russia after Putin’s government interfered in the 2016 presidential election]. In the past, LaPierre told CPAC, these U.S. intelligence officials would have been “hanged for treason.”

Somehow, this ominous threat entirely escaped the attention of the media. But reporters are now beginning to chronicle disturbing ties between the NRA and Russia’s authoritarian government (to include great pieces from the Daily Beast, Bloomberg News, Time magazine, Think Progress, and others). This new research suggests that LaPierre’s remarks had real, and nefarious, purpose.
 
This article will take a chronological look at how the trilateral relationship between the NRA, Putin’s government, and the Trump campaign/administration has developed over time. 
 
The NRA’s relationship with Russia appears to have begun in May 2013, when mob boss Alexander Torshin attended the organization’s annual meeting in Houston, Texas. At that time, Torshin was serving as a senator in Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party in the upper house of parliament. Torshin was also known to have ties to the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian intelligence agency formerly known as the KGB. 
 
In addition, Spanish investigators have determined that Torshin has engaged in money laundering for the Taganskaya mafia in Moscow. This dirty money is frequently channeled through banks and properties in Spain. Spanish investigators recorded phone conversations that Torshin had with Taganskaya boss Alexander Romanov in 2012 and 2013, and seized relevant documents during a raid on a villa that Romanov owned at the time. “Within the hierarchical structure of the organization, it’s known that Russian politician Alexander Porfirievich Torshin stands above Taganskaya leader in Spain, Alexander Romanov, who calls him ‘godfather’ or ‘boss’ and conducts ‘activities and investments’ on his behalf,” the Spanish Civil Guard concluded.

None of this seemed to bother NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre and then-NRA President (and former American Conservative Union chair) David Keene, who extended Torshin an invitation to join the organization in Houston. Torshin, for his part, said he was attracted to the NRA because it represents “‘stability’ — the credo of Putin’s reign.”
 
A few months later, in the fall of 2013, Keene traveled to Russia for a conference hosted by an organization called The Right to Bear Arms. The head of this pro-gun group is the enigmatic Russian national Maria Butina. At various times, Butina has portrayed herself as a Siberian furniture store owner, a “representative of the Russian Federation,” a graduate student in Washington, D.C., a journalist, and a liaison between the Trump transition team/administration and Russia. What is certain, however, is that Butina has a close relationship with Alexander Torshin. “The former president of the legendary NRA” David Keene spoke at The Right to Bear Arms conference, and Torshin attended. It is unclear to this day where Butina’s group gets its funding. 
 
On January 2, 2014, Torshin published an op-ed piece in the Washington Times in which he bragged about being a lifetime member of the NRA. “Last year, I had the pleasure of attending the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Houston,” he wrote. He also described Mikhail Kalashnikov’s invention of the AK-47 as one of Russia’s “greatest accomplishments.” The opinion editor of the Washington Times is none other than David Keene, who assumed the position in July 2013. By that time, Keene had stepped down as NRA president (Jim Porter was elected as his successor at the 2013 annual meeting), but he retained his seat on the NRA board of directors, which he holds to this day.

In April 2014, Torshin attended the NRA’s annual meeting again — as did Maria Butina. At the site of the convention in Indianapolis, Butina was given the “rare privilege” of ringing a Liberty Bell replica and presenting then-NRA president Jim Porter with a plaque. She was a special guest of former NRA president Sandy Froman at the NRA’s Women Luncheon, and of David Keene at the general meeting.
 
Clearly, she and Torshin had made quite the impression on NRA leadership.
 
At that point, however, the organization was not ready to embrace Russia’s authoritarian government. On May 12, 2014, Keene published an editorial in his Washington Times where he criticized President Obama’s handling of a crisis in Ukraine triggered by the Russian military’s incursion into Crimea:

What Mr. Putin is discovering is that no one in the West these days is willing or able to do much either to check Russia’s aggression or to stand up for their friends. The United States under President Obama’s leadership is content to issue rhetorical denunciations, insult Mr. Putin by claiming he runs a second-rate country that doesn’t understand the times in which we live, and deny he and his friends visas to visit the United States.

Two months later, U.S. sanctions against Russia were extended to include firearms exports. Under Executive Order 13661, the Treasury Department began to sanction Russian gun maker Kalashnikov Concern in response to the takeover of Crimea. This infuriated the NRA, who issued a statement on July 17, 2014:

The only decent product ever produced by the USSR was the AK-47. After the breakup of the USSR and the end of Cold War, Russia has continued to produce well-regarded AK-pattern rifles that have become popular among American gun owners … While the United States government blames the Ukrainian conflict for this latest move, gun control advocates will no doubt applaud the ban on…so-called “assault weapons.”

Meanwhile, the ties between the NRA and Maria Butina continued to deepen. On August 11, 2014, The Right to Bear Arms announced it would host an “open meeting” in Moscow featuring NRA “life member” Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican operative who managed Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign in 1992. Erickson has also been identified as a “friend and ally” of Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart. David Keene probably recommended Erickson, who had served on the board of the American Conservative Union (with Becky Norton Dunlop, a senior Trump transition team official).

In 2015, Alexander Torshin left parliament and was appointed the deputy head of the Central Bank of Russia. He selected Maria Butina as his special assistant in that position.
 
Despite the role of its friends in Vladimir Putin’s government, the NRA was still outwardly critical of Russian aggression. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 27, 2015, LaPierre attacked the foreign policy of President Obama, warning, “You feel it. The threats are all around us. Russia’s advancing.”
 
Butina, however, was ready to lay the groundwork for a new kind of relationship between conservatives and her home country. She published an op-ed in The National Interest on June 12, 2015 titled “The Bear and The Elephant” in which she questioned the value of sanctions against Russia and opined, “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 later, Donald Trump announced he would seek the Republican nomination for president of the United States.
 
On July 11, 2015, Butina showed up at a Trump campaign rally in Las Vegas, where she presented herself as a reporter and asked the Republican candidate a question. “I’m from Russia. My question will be about foreign politics,” she said. “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’s answer must have been music to her ears. “I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we’ll get along with Putin,” he said in response. “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.”
 
It looks like Paul Erickson might have been at the Las Vegas rally as well.
 
Then, from December 8–13, 2015 — the same week that former National Security Advisor Lt. Gen Michael T. Flynn (ret.) was paid to appear at Russia Today’s 10th anniversary gala dinner in Moscow beside Vladimir Putin — an NRA delegation traveled to the city to meet with Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister in charge of Russia’s defense industry. The delegation consisted of David Keene, Paul Erickson, board member and gun manufacturer Pete Brownell, high-dollar NRA donor Joe Gregory, and radical right wing Milwaukee County, Wisconsin sheriff David A. Clarke. The 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. 
 
“Rogozin is chairman of the Russian Shooting Federation and his board hosted a tour of Federation HQ for us while we were there,” Keene explained. “It was non-political. There were at least 30 in attendance and our interaction consisted of thanking him and his board for the tour.” Rogozin tweeted that they discussed a forthcoming rifle competition in Russia. Alexander Torshin was present at the meeting.

The trip generated immediate controversy, however, because Rogozin has hardline anti-American views and was subject to U.S. sanctions in response to Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine. Rogozin is the former leader of the ultra-right party Rodina (Motherland) and has advocated for the restoration of the Russian Empire, to include Alaska, which he calls “Russian America.” From 2008 to 2011, he served as the Russian ambassador to NATO, where he focused on preventing Ukraine and Georgia from joining NATO. Rogozin has also bragged about Russia’s “first strike” cyberwarfare capability.
 
Under the terms of U.S. sanctions, the NRA delegation’s visit with Rogozin would not have been illegal unless the two sides did business together. Keene claims that did not happen — which begs the question of why he brought multi-millionaire pharma king Joe Gregory along for the ride. Even if business was not discussed, however, it’s difficult to believe the two sides did not at least talk about the sanctions against Russian firearms exports. The presence of GOP campaign operative Erickson and conservative firebrand Clarke also suggests that the meetings had a political component. During the trip, Sheriff Clarke tweeted a photo of a Russian military officer standing alongside him with the caption, “Red Square near the Kremlin with a Russian officer. Met earlier with Russian Foreign Minister [Sergey Lavrov] who spoke on Mid East.”

In February 2016, Paul Erickson formed a limited liability corporation with Maria Butina called Bridges, LLC. It is unclear what this organization, based out of South Dakota, actually does.
 
Taganskaya mafia boss Alexander Romanov was sentenced to almost four years in a Spanish prison in May 2016, after pleading guilty to illegal transactions. Alexander Torshin claims that he hasn’t spoken with his good friend Romanov since November 2013. Taganskaya’s criminal activity has continued in Spain even with Romanov behind bars.
 
That same month, on May 20, 2016, the NRA endorsed Donald Trump for president of the United States at their annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. [The NRA would ultimately spend more than $30 million to elect Trump — more than Trump’s top super PAC.] Also present at the convention was Torshin, who shared a table with Donald Trump, Jr. at one of the event’s dinners.
 
The NRA leadership was still not ready to get into bed with Vladimir Putin, however. On the same day he publicly endorsed Trump onstage at the convention, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre described “a brazenly emboldened Russia” as a foreign policy disaster.

On July 22, 2016, WikiLeaks released thousands of hacked emails from top aides at the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The emails raised questions about whether the DNC favored Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign over that of Bernie Sanders.
 
The first hint that the NRA’s position on Russia might be changing occurred on July 28, 2016. On that day, John Bolton — a foreign policy surrogate for the NRA and the chairman of their International Affairs Subcommittee — appeared on Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Stephen Bannon and defended candidate Donald Trump. A day earlier, Trump had appeared at a news conference and encouraged Russia to illegally hack into U.S. government servers to obtain emails from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”). 
 
Bolton told Bannon the following: “[Trump] did not call on the Russians to hack into Hillary’s computer … I think he was dinging the Democrats for being more concerned about the just terrible emails we saw out of the DNC than the security risk that Hillary created by her own actions. And I think the Democrats are scared to death that the Russians, or somebody, does have all those emails that are…about the Clinton Foundation.”

One month later, Bannon was named Donald Trump’s campaign manager after Paul Manafort resigned from the position amidst investigations into his lobbying history in Ukraine, where he supported pro-Russian interests.

On October 7, 2016, the U.S. intelligence community released a report indicating that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the DNC emails that were released by WikiLeaks.
 
Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States on November 8, 2016.
 
On January 2, 2017, David Keene published an op-ed in the Washington Times in which he completely reversed his position on Vladimir Putin. Keene titled his piece “Confusing Putin with the Old Soviet Threat” and wrote:

We seem prepared to believe any evil of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has with its second-rate military establishment and failing economy somehow morphed in the minds of many Americans into a greater threat than the old Soviet Union. Hillary Clinton and [Clinton campaign chair] John Podesta are convinced Mr. Putin cost her the White House and that President-elect Donald Trump might as well be working for the Kremlin … [Putin] is an internally popular Russian nationalist who runs what is, by U.S. standards, a crony capitalist autocracy and has acted internationally in ways that deserve condemnation, but he is neither Hitler nor Stalin … It would be a mistake to conclude that Moscow’s historically typical meddling in its own neighborhood makes it as great a threat to us and our interests as the old Soviet Union.

Four days later, the U.S. intelligence community declassified a report which concluded that “Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election,” with the specific goal of harming Hillary Clinton’s “electability and potential presidency.” “We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump,” the report stated.
 
On Inauguration Day — January 20, 2017 — Maria Butina and Paul Erickson attended the invitation-only Freedom Ball to celebrate Donald Trump’s swearing in as President of the United States.

During the February 15, 2017 edition of NRA-TV’s Live Updates, host Grant Stinchfield discussed a New York Times article that had appeared a day earlier. The article stated that “American law enforcement and intelligence agencies intercepted [communications between members of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and senior Russian intelligence officials] around the same time they were discovering evidence that Russia was trying to disrupt the presidential election by hacking into the Democratic National Committee.” Stinchfield made the following observations:

You know there’s a big issue in Washington now, all this discussion over what’s been going on with Russia, the Trump administration, Michael Flynn, the national security adviser, who [has now resigned because of unreported contacts with the Russian Ambassador to the United States] … I believe what is going on in Washington is you have a concerted effort with Obama loyalists inside these bureaucratic agencies, from the Justice Department to the intelligence community, trying to undermine [President Donald Trump] every step of the way. Is there anything Congress can do to root out those loyalists who are really, I believe, trying to destroy America from the inside?

That brings us to February 24, 2017, when NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre appeared at CPAC and suggested executing U.S. intelligence officials who are uncovering details about the Trump team’s ties to Russia.
 
The NRA was clearly hedging its bets approaching the November 2016 election — with most of the country expecting Hillary Clinton to coast to victory — but now their intentions are perfectly clear. They are 100% behind the Trump administration’s rapprochement with Vladimir Putin. The organization that once counseled its members to stockpile firearms in preparation for insurrection against the American government is now perfectly comfortable with the new president’s authoritarian style of governing and wedded to one of the world’s most dangerous dictators.

Important questions still remain…

· Did Alexander Torshin have an alliance between the Putin government and the American conservative movement in mind from the moment he attended his first NRA meeting? Did he view David Keene — one of the most influential conservatives since William F. Buckley — as a key figure who could help broker such a deal?

· Why Paul Erickson? How did an obscure Republican operative suddenly become a key liaison in the NRA-Russia-Trump relationship? Why won’t the Trump administration say whether Erickson served on their transition team?

· What was really discussed at that December 2015 meeting between the NRA delegation and Dmitry Rogozin?

· What is the purpose of the holding company established by Paul Erickson and Maria Butina?

· Did Alexander Torshin, Maria Butina and/or Dmitry Rogozin play a role in the NRA’s decision to endorse Donald Trump for president?

· Why Donald Trump? Why would veteran Russian intelligence operatives and the NRA hitch their fortunes to a badly flawed candidate who was viewed as a long shot to win the presidency?

· It seems almost certain that Dmitry Rogozin was aware of Russia’s interference in America’s 2016 election. Alexander Torshin was likely aware as well. Were NRA leaders aware? Did they know that the Russians were responsible for the hack on the DNC before the U.S. intelligence community shared this information with the public in October 2016?

· Has the NRA played any role in the Trump administration’s plans for an expanded police state and military? The NRA, of course, stands to benefit from a gun industry that is selling more hardware.

One gets the sense that we are still staring at the tip of the iceberg. Just how deep do the ties between the NRA and Putin’s government run? Only time will tell. 
 
The decision of the NRA to embrace Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump has an air of desperation about it; the quintessential all-or-nothing gambit. Like the Republican Party in general, the NRA is seeing the demographic and cultural changes occurring in the United States and wondering how they are possibly going to appeal to a significant segment of voters moving forward. Additionally, gun ownership in the U.S. is steadily declining. Perhaps these realities have made the gun lobby contemplate hypocritical, unsavory alliances with authoritarian leaders that could ultimately be their undoing.