5 Takeaways from Recent Revelations in Maria Butina Case
Recent investigative reporting and court documents in the case of Russian spy Maria Butina (conspiracy and acting as an unregistered foreign agent) have revealed a great deal about the “covert influence operation” she conducted with leaders from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Center for The National Interest (CFTNI) to groom the next Republican U.S. president to implement a pro-Russia foreign policy.
Here are five takeaways:
1) The Russians didn’t initially favor Trump for president in 2015.
A recent court filing by prosecutors in the Butina case confirms that she met at least twice with 2016 Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, in order to lobby him to adopt a pro-Russia foreign policy should he become president.
NRA and CFTNI board member David Keene introduced Butina and her boss, deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank Alexander Torshin, to Walker during the NRA’s annual meeting in Nashville in April 2015. Walker, a presumptive presidential candidate, was speaking at the meeting along with many other GOP hopefuls. Butina was surprised to hear Walker greet her and Torshin in Russian and recalled on her blog, “I did not hear any aggression towards [Russia], [president Vladimir Putin], or my compatriots.” Four days after Butina and Torshin met Walker, Russian oligarch Len Blavatnik gave $1.1 million to Walker’s Unintimidated Super PAC.
The second meeting occurred at Walker’s campaign launch party in Waukesha on July 13, 2015. Butina attended and spoke with Walker and aide Mike Gallagher, who was elected to Congress in Wisconsin’s 8th congressional district in 2016.
In the early months of 2015, Walker’s chances of winning the GOP nomination for president looked good. “Judging from the American polls — our bet on [Walker] is correct.” Butina told Torshin excitedly. “You will be the creator of something sensational, God willing!” he replied. By the middle of the summer, however, Donald Trump took a lead in the GOP presidential primary polls which he never relinquished.
Torshin, Butina, and her American co-conspirator (and lover) Paul Erickson turned their attention to the oafish and corrupt New York businessman. Erickson had long been out of national politics, but suddenly began popping up in the Washington Times (where David Keene serves as opinion editor) as a validator of Trump. Erickson was quoted on at least two occasions praising him (e.g., “Houston, we have a [presidential candidate Ross] Perot ’92 on steroids.”).
2) The NRA-Russia relationship isn’t just about politics.
Yes, Torshin, Butina and their American co-conspirators in the NRA (Keene, Erickson, etc.) wanted to elect a Republican president in 2016 who would implement a pro-Russia U.S. foreign policy. But the NRA-Russia relationship was forged years earlier, over business.
In 2010 the NRA’s lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action (NRA-ILA), partnered with legendary gun designer Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of the AK-47, for a fundraiser. Kalashnikov autographed gold- and silver-plated AK-74s that were sold to raise nearly $2 million for the NRA-ILA. It is not presently known who connected Kalashnikov to executive director Chris Cox of the NRA-ILA, but Torshin would be a logical suspect. The then-United Russia Senator was a close personal friend of Kalashnikov’s and both men were life members of the NRA.
Five years later, an NRA delegation traveled to Moscow and toured the private defense firm that manufactures the T-5000 sniper rifle, ORSIS. The delegation was in town to meet with Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, then-deputy defense minister Dmitry Rogozin, Torshin, Butina and other Russian officials. [Rogozin is closely tied to ORSIS.] A recent scoop from ABC News reveals this wasn’t the only piece of business conducted by the NRA delegation in Moscow, however.
Outdoor Channel president and CEO Jim Liberatore was a member of the NRA delegation along with David Keene, Paul Erickson, gun-maker Pete Brownell, fascist Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke, and high-dollar NRA donors. Keene had told Butina that Liberatore wanted to develop a show called “Putin’s Russia” for the Outdoor Channel featuring the Russian outdoors, hunting, fishing, and conversation efforts. While in Moscow, Liberatore discussed the idea with Butina.
After returning to the United States, Liberatore sent her a pitch for the show. “Conservation is a bedrock for both [the U.S. and Russia], and there is no bigger champion for this in Eastern Europe than Vladimir Putin,” he mused. Butina’s job was to get the Kremlin’s approval for the show. She asked for a $5,000-a-month stipend from the Outdoor Channel for this purpose. They paid her for four months before realizing she had no intention of fulfilling her end of the bargain.
Another scoop from the New York Times suggests that NRA leaders’ business interactions with the Russians are driven by petty, unadulterated greed. The Times revealed that Butina, Erickson, Keene, and Keene’s wife Donna were trying to broker the sale of a massive amount of Russian jet fuel in Virginia in 2017. All parties to the deal seemed to be trying to scam the others. Butina wanted the Keenes to give her $25,000 as a “good faith gesture” for reaching out to Russian oil refineries to secure the jet fuel, with a final commission of $1 million. Ms. Keene asked Butina to contact Russian energy giant Gazprom for assistance. Instead, Butina reached out to a member of her pro-gun front group The Right to Bear Arms and a coffee bean trader.
“There’s no port in the world that could hold the amount of oil they were saying they could sell,” said an Israeli-American businessman pitched on the plan by Erickson and Butina. “I knew they didn’t have any clue.”
3) Paul Erickson recruited George O’Neill, Jr.
It was revealed months ago that right-wing scion and Rockefeller heir George O’Neill, Jr. is involved in the “covert influence operation” designed by Keene and Torshin and implemented on the ground in the U.S. by Butina and Erickson. At Butina’s request, O’Neill helped organize and fund “U.S.-Russia Friendship Dinners” to bring GOP leaders together with top Russian officials.
George O’Neill is a twisted individual who bucks his family’s politics by embracing a hedonistic version of fascism. On the issue of foreign relations, O’Neill’s chief policy guru is paleoconservative non-interventionist Pat Buchanan, who believes the U.S. should stop imposing its moral values on Putin and Russia. O’Neill met Buchanan and his national political director, Paul Erickson, when Buchanan ran for president in 1992. O’Neill was tech savvy, valuable volunteer for the campaign.
We can now confirm it was Erickson who brought O’Neill into the operation to establish a back-channel line of communication between the Trump campaign/transition and Russia. “Quietly — VERY quietly — there is a movement alive in Russia that’s looking ahead to a post-Putin era,” he told O’Neill in a February 2016 email. “These players are not disloyal to the current president; they are simply realists about the future and the need for Russian/American friendship …[Alexander Torshin] is making a triple bet: That [the GOP] are a better match for diplomatic relations with Russia, that a [Republican] will win the 2016 Presidential contest and that the NRA is the best back-channel into any [Republican] administration.”
O’Neill bought in and Erickson introduced him to Butina so the pair could begin their work on the “friendship dinners.” O’Neill convened one of these dinners at the 2017 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.
O’Neill’s engagement with the Russians inspired him to be more vocal about his rabidly pro-Putin views. He’s published two op-eds on the topic in Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative in the past couple of years.
4) About Pat Buchanan…
Speaking of Pat Buchanan, I’ve been searching for some time for evidence that he was involved in the “covert influence operation” designed to elect a pro-Russia U.S. president. Buchanan (along with David Keene and CFTNI co-founder and honorary co-chair Henry Kissinger) is one of the key progenitors of the treasonous pro-Putin foreign policy now being employed by the Trump administration.
The first glimmer of evidence of Buchanan’s involvement might have just turned in up a court filing. In a successful motion to deny Maria Butina bond, U.S. prosecutors published an invitiation that Erickson sent to an unknown party in March 2016. It was an invitation to attend one of the U.S.-Russia Friendship Dinners and it read:
Russian spy Maria] Butina represents factions within the top echelons of Russian power (political and business) that desperately want a new dialogue with the U.S. on behalf of the current regime and that are already (very quietly) imagining a post-[Russian president Vladimir] Putin era within Russia … Toward that end, our old friend from your…campaign, [George O’Neill, Jr.], has offered to host dinners in both Washington, D.C. and New York City in late May that will bring together very small groups of leading American thinkers with an unofficial but sanctioned Russian team consisting of [the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank Alexander Torshin], Butina, and an oligarch that has a foot inside Putin’s dacha and the international business community. The goal is simple and private: To have a candid discussion about shared international security interests and what steps need to be taken to bolster U.S.-Russian relations in the future.
As stated previously, O’Neill was a valuable campaign volunteer for Pat Buchanan in 1992. Given how candid Erickson was in the invitation about the operation’s ties to Putin and his oligarchs, he must have had great confidence that the invitation’s recipient embraced a pro-Putin U.S. foreign policy.
Buchanan fits the bill on all counts. It’s long past time a reporter asked him about his communications with Erickson, Butina, Keene and others involved in Russia’s covert influence operation over the past five years. [Keene enlisted Erickson in late 2013, introducing him to Butina in Moscow at a meeting of her “pro-gun” front group The Right to Bear Arms.]
5) Add Konstantin Nikolaev to the central cast of characters.
Recent reporting from the Associated Press suggests it was oligarch Konstantin Nikolaev who first conceived of the Russian front group The Right to Bear Arms, approaching libertarian upstart Butina in 2011 to lead the outfit. Nikolaev funded the group for its first three years of existence, 2012–2014. The AP reports that he and his wife, Svetlana Nikolayeva, the CEO of aforementioned Russian gun manufacturer ORSIS, “hoped to make money from the idea.”
When Nikolaev reached out to Butina, she had little knowledge about firearms and couldn’t shoot. Boris Pashchenko, the head of a shooting club in Moscow, taught her from the ground up, starting with the basic rules of gun safety. A representative in the Russian arms industry reports that Nikolaev also hired a PR firm to fashion Butina’s pro-gun image.
It’s unclear if Russian central banker Alexander Torshin worked with Nikolaev to create The Right to Bear Arms in 2011. In 2010, Torshin published a pro-gun pamphlet promoting the same NRA talking points. The Right to Bear Arms would employ a year later.
Since distancing himself from The Right to Bear Arms, Konstantin Nikolaev has been at the center of other efforts to influence the GOP. The oligarch owns a 34% stake in Russia’s biggest private rail transport operator and sits on the board of American Ethane, a U.S. company in Houston. Vladimir Putin’s former chief of staff, Alexander Voloshin, has a significant stake in American Ethane that is “potentially worth tens of millions of dollars.” The CEO of American Ethane, John Houghtaling (Russian wife), says the fact that Voloshin is close friends with Henry Kissinger makes him one of the “good guys.”
In November 2017, President Trump signed a series of trade agreements with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in Beijing. One of them was a $26 billion deal for American Ethane to supply liquid ethane to a large Chinese conglomerate. Since then, American Ethane has secured two more contracts with Chinese energy companies. All told, the three deals are worth an estimated $72 billion. They would triple the amount of ethane currently being exported by all U.S. producers.
Notably, when American Ethane lobbied for the trade deal on Capitol Hill, they failed to disclose their numerous Russian investors as required by federal law. Additionally, Voloshin, Nikolaev and Yuriev are all classified as Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs) by the international Financial Action Task Force on Money Laundering.
How Nikolaev has managed to fly under the radar of American media is anyone’s guess.
