Russia and the NRA Is a Match Made in Trumpland

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

14 June 18

Russia's meddling in 2016 was just one of the kleptocracy's ventures.

t’s time to start paying attention to overseas news again, the way thoughtful people did while the previous Republican administration was lying us into a war. For example, there are a couple of tres piquant tales in the UK press today.

Josh Marshall flagged the first one, a McClatchy story about how Russian money got laundered into the president*’s 2016 presidential campaign through the National Rifle Association. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a Moscow kleptocrat with a sackful of cash.

The contacts have emerged amid a deepening Justice Department investigation into whether Russian banker and lifetime NRA member Alexander Torshin illegally channeled money through the gun rights group to add financial firepower to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. Other influential Russians who met with NRA representatives during the campaign include Dmitry Rogozin, who until last month served as a deputy prime minister overseeing Russia’s defense industry, and Sergei Rudov, head of one of Russia’s largest philanthropies, the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. The foundation was launched by an ultra-nationalist ally of Russian President Putin…

...A photograph taken during a 2015 trip to Russia by leaders of the powerful group showed them meeting with Torshin, Rogozin and Rudov, and a source knowledgeable about the visit confirmed the gathering. The source spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid damaging relationships. The NRA, Trump’s biggest financial backer, spent more than $30 million to boost his upstart candidacy; that's more than double what it laid out for 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney, and the NRA money started flowing much earlier in the cycle for Trump.

Torshin, as it turns out, has a long and varied career as one of the primary Volga Bagmen. Spain wants his ass for money-laundering.

Torshin has drawn focus in part because he was implicated in a years-long investigation by Spanish authorities into money-laundering by the Russian mob. Spanish prosecutor Jose Grinda, who has led that investigation, was in Washington late last month and met with FBI officials for several hours, a well-placed source said. During his visit, Grinda also acknowledged in an appearance at the Hudson Institute that a few months ago his office provided the FBI with transcripts of wiretaps in which a since-convicted Russian money-launderer spoke with Torshin and called him “El Padrino” — Spanish for godfather, Yahoo News reported. Spanish authorities have alleged that Torshin helped launder money years ago into Spanish hotels and banks for Russian mobsters, a development first reported in 2016 by Bloomberg News.

If that weren’t enough, and it never is, The Guardian reports on the mysterious Russian money behind the Brexit campaign in the UK, and on the guy behind Nigel Farage, the Brexit white supremacist who was an honored guest of the nominee at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland.

Banks, who gave £12m of services to the campaign, becoming the biggest donor in UK history, has repeatedly denied any involvement with Russian officials, or that Russian money played any part in the Brexit campaign. The Observer has seen documents which a senior Tory MP says, if correct, raise urgent and troubling questions about his relationship with the Russian government. The communications suggest:

• Multiple meetings between the leaders of Leave.EU and high-ranking Russian officials, from November 2015 to 2017.

• Two meetings in the week Leave.EU launched its official campaign.

• An introduction to a Russian businessman, by the Russian ambassador, the day after Leave.EU launched its campaign, who reportedly offered Banks a multibillion dollar opportunity to buy Russian goldmines.

• A trip to Moscow in February 2016 to meet key partners and financiers behind a gold project, including a Russian bank.

• Continued extensive contact in the run-up to the US election when Banks, his business partner and Leave.EU spokesman Andy Wigmore, and Nigel Farage campaigned in the US to support Donald Trump’s candidacy.

(As DNexon at LGM shrewdly observes, this story at least provides the pleasant collateral benefit of making PolitiFact look like the bland bowl of foolish Both Siderist oatmeal that it’s always been. Good call, kids. And thanks, again, Anthony Kennedy.)

There’s a reason why Rachel Maddow has been leading her program every night now for months with a monologue that sounds like the lost chapters of a novel by Dostoevsky. The whole megillah about the president* and the Russians only looks confusing if you look at the 2016 presidential election in isolation. However, it’s plain that the Trump campaign was simply another vehicle through which the Russian kleptocracy could launder its money.

(The kleptocrats knew that they could because, I believe, they’d been doing similar business with the president* and his businesses ever since every American bank refused to go near him.)

The Trump campaign might as well have been a hotel on Cyprus, or an overpayment on a condo in Florida. This laundering machine is vast and international in scope, and governments around the world are just coming to grips with how deeply it has penetrated their institutions. That it is being run by a country with an economy no better than the 11th-largest in the world is a testimony to the strength of an established kleptocracy willing to do almost anything with its money except, you know, make a decent life for its people. Of course, there still seem to be people in this country who see Vladimir Putin as a bulwark against the neoliberal threat to the liberal order. These people are foolish.

Elections are not properties to be bought and sold and mortgage. They are part of our democratic patrimony, and they should be treated as such. Nothing about the Trump campaign was ordinary. Nothing about this presidency* is, either. The campaign was nothing more than another unit in the great Russian laundromat. The presidency* is nothing more than the loose change that collects in the lint trap. What the hell is wrong with people, anyway?