Kremlin has long denied that it had anything to do with the infiltration of the NRA and the broader American conservative movement. A U.S. intelligence report reviewed by The Daily Beast tells a different story. https://www.thedailybeast.com/kremlin-blessed-russias-nra-operation-us-intel-report-says

Torshin, the Russian central bank official who spent years aggressively courting NRA leaders, briefed the Kremlin on his efforts and recommended they participate, according to the report.

Its existence and contents have not previously been reported

While there has been speculation that Torshin &?Butina had the Kremlin’s blessing to woo the NRA—& fed prosecutors have vaguely said she acted “on behalf of the Russian federation”—no one in the WH or the USIC 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.

“This reporting indicates that Torshin was working with the blessing of the Kremlin, at a minimum,” one EU intelligence official told The Daily Beast.

The official added that this reporting is consistent with his group’s understanding of how the Kremlin operates.

“The NRA is quite powerful, so when you look to influence US politics, you should consider them as a convenient target,” the EU intelligence official added.

The report, published in 2018, is based on conversations from 2015, BEFORE NRA leaders VISITED MOSCOW on a trip arranged by Torshin/Butina.

It doesn’t specifically name NRA or GOP, but its context makes clear it is discussing the 2 US orgs.

(American intelligence reports generally do not name U.S. persons or organizations for privacy and legal reasons.)

According to the report, Torshin suggested that Russian officials use the NRA to reach out to politically active Americans.

Torshin, then a deputy governor at Russia’s central bank, noted the NRA’s influence in US politics.

TORSHIN told the Kremlin about his contacts in the NRA, including conversations/ meetings in the US and suggested that Kremlin officials scrutinize how some people affiliated with the group viewed relations between the US and Russia.

The report says Russian officials discussed having their embassy in DC participate in courting the NRA.

Kremlin officials also discussed preparing for NRA members’ upcoming trip to Moscow.

Torshin recommended that someone from Putin’s executive office, meaning the group of people who support his day-to-day activities, meet with the NRA group.

“My assessment of what was happening with Torshin/Butina/NRA was that the Russians decided, a good period of time before 2016, to run an influence op here in the US w a couple of different goals,” said @StevenLHall1 who spent 30 years in the CIA and oversaw its Russia operations.

“The obvious goal was the one the intelligence community assessed back in 2016, which was to help Donald Trump win and increase the likelihood that Hillary Clinton would lose. In addition, they wanted to create as much chaos in our democracy as possible.”

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.”

April 2017
Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s longtime spokesperson, 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. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/how-the-republican-right-found-allies-in-russia/2017/04/30/e2d83ff6-29d3-11e7-a616-d7c8a68c1a66_story.html?utm_term=.1f1329cad252

Torshin spent years building relationships w NRA.

TN lawyer, G. Kline Preston, who practices law in US & Russia, said he intro’d Torshin to David Keene, who helmed the NRA for a time & remained deeply active in its work after ending his time running it. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-kremlin-and-gop-have-a-new-friendand-boy-does-she-love-guns

Thanks to Keene, Torshin built connections throughout the gun rights movement and among prominent American conservatives.

Torshin also dispatched Butina, a Siberian gun rights activist, to work in the US maintaining those relationships and developing new ones.

Butina struck up a romance with Paul Erickson, also an influential member of the American gun rights movement. W/his help she built more elaborate plans for winning allies in the NRA.

Before moving to the US, Butina headed a Russian gun rights org called The Right to Bear Arms.

Oligarch Konstantin Nikolaev, with the help of P.R. operator Igor Pisarsky, helped fund the group. https://www.thedailybeast.com/exclusive-this-is-accused-russian-spy-maria-butinas-secret-money-man-in-moscow-sources-say

Dec 2015
Butina/Torshin helped arrange for a group of influential NRA members to travel to the Kremlin, where they had high-level meetings—including with Sergei Lavrov; and sanctioned Putin deputy Dmitry Rogozin, an ultra-right politician who oversaw RU’s defense industry.

The 2015 trip schedule, which The Daily Beast reviewed, 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.

When the trip made national news after the US intelligence community publicly asserted that the Kremlin had tried to help Trump win the 2016 campaign, Keene said it wasn’t about politics.

“Rogozin is chairman of the Russian Shooting Federation & his Board hosted a tour of Federation HQ for us while we were there,” Keene said.

“It was non-political. There were at least 30 in attendance and our interaction consisted of thanking him and his Board for the tour.”

Torshin and Butina’s outreach to the NRA ended unhappily for both of them. The United States placed Torshin under sanctions, and he recently left his post at the central bank.

And Butina gets to wear orange.

One veteran CIA officer noted that references to the Kremlin in intelligence reports have a more specific meaning than in general parlance, where Americans sometimes use the phrase as a metonym for the entire Russian government.

“In U.S. intelligence reports like this one, the phrase ‘the Kremlin’ generally refers to Vladimir Putin & his small inner circle, which would include key power ministers, including the heads of the...SVR/FSB/GRU, FM & oligarch cronies,” 30y CIA vet w deep knowledge of the RIS

“In this case, Kremlin decision-making would have likely been a smaller, even more limited, group.”

International affairs professor Nina Khrushcheva of the New School, meanwhile, told The Daily Beast that the American intelligence officers who produced the report described in this piece may have overstated the Kremlin’s organization and efficiency.

“I’m sure there’s truth to the report,” she said, “but that kind of incredible consistency and logic that Americans have in their report about what and how Russia is doing is just culturally wrong.”

“Russia is a chaotic country that makes it up as it goes along,” she added.