The Daily Beast has reviewed a U.S. intelligence report showing Alexander Torshin regularly communicated with the Kremlin about his connection to the National Rifle Association (NRA) and suggested the former get involved with the latter.
While there has been speculation that Torshin and his protegée, Maria Butina, had the Kremlin’s blessing to woo the NRA—and federal prosecutors have vaguely asserted that she acted “on behalf of the Russian federation”—no one in the White House or the U.S. intelligence community has publicly stated as much. Senior Russian government officials, for their part, have strenuously distanced themselves from Butina’s courtship of the NRA, which she did at Torshin’s direction.
The report, on the other hand, notes that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs was fine with Torshin’s courtship of the NRA because the relationships would be valuable if a Republican won the White House in 2016.
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The report, published last year, is based on conversations that happened in 2015, before NRA leaders visited Moscow on a trip arranged by Torshin and Butina. The document does not specifically name the NRA or the Republican Party, but its context makes clear it is discussing those two American organizations.
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The report notes that Russian officials discussed having their embassy in Washington participate in the work of courting the NRA. Kremlin officials also discussed preparations for NRA members’ upcoming trip to Moscow. Torshin recommended that someone from President Vladimir Putin’s executive office, meaning the group of people who support his day-to-day activities, meet with the group.
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Kremlin officials at the highest levels have tried to distance themselves from Torshin’s outreach to the NRA. Last month, Putin denied that he or his security chiefs were aware of the undertaking. “I asked all the heads of our intelligence services what is going on,” he said, regarding Butina. “Nobody knows anything about her.”
And in April of 2017, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s longtime spokesman, said nobody in the Kremlin knew anything about the broader courtship of American conservatives by prominent Russians. “We know nothing about that,” Peskov told The Washington Post.
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In December of 2015, [Butina] and Torshin helped arrange for a group of influential NRA members to travel to the Kremlin, where they had high-level meetings—including with the country’s powerful minister of foreign affairs, Sergei Lavrov, and sanctioned Putin deputy Dmitry Rogozin, an ultra-right-wing politician who oversaw the country’s defense industry. A schedule of the 2015 trip reviewed by The Daily Beast showed attendees also planned to drive to the Presidential Administration Office on Dec. 9, 2015, for a meeting with Evgeny Lukyanov, then the deputy secretary of the Security Council. NRA trip participants did not respond to queries about whether the scheduled meeting with Lukyanov took place ...
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Torshin and Butina’s outreach to the NRA ended unhappily for both of them. The U.S. placed Torshin under sanctions, and he recently left his post at the central bank. Butina, meanwhile, pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to act as a covert foreign agent. She is in jail awaiting sentencing, and agreed to cooperate with American prosecutors on their investigations.
Full story: Kremlin Blessed Russia’s NRA Operation, U.S. Intel Report Says (Daily Beast)