Last October, in “God, guns … and Russia?” I wrote about the magnanimous contribution that the NRA made to the election of Donald Trump. The gun group endorsed him on May 20, 2016, much earlier in the election cycle than they had ever before endorsed a Republican presidential candidate. From Politico’s report on the pushback of the membership to the endorsement:
To endorse so early in the process is virtually unprecedented for the group; they didn’t get behind Mitt Romney in 2012 and Sen. John McCain in 2008 until October.
That, and the $30 million spending pledge struck me as odd at the time, but it wasn’t until later that the ties between the NRA and the woman now sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial became clearer. I wrote about Maria Butina’s Russian gun rights organization, The Right to Bear Arms, and her work with the Russian banker and politico Alexander Torshin, who was a lifetime member of the NRA. The close ties between the Russians and the NRA has led to speculation that the NRA money for Trump’s election campaign may have come from Russia.
The Right to Bear Arms hosted a delegation from the NRA during the same time frame. Attendees included David Keene, NRA board member Pete Brownell, NRA donor Joe Gregory, and Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, he of the boy-scout-merit-badge-covered uniform shirt who became a top Trump surrogate. They not only met with Torshin and Butina, but with a sanctioned Russian, according to Tim Mack of The Daily Beast.
“In March 2014, the U.S. government sanctioned Dmitry Rogozin—a hardline deputy to Vladimir Putin, the head of Russia’s defense industry and longtime opponent of American power—in retaliation for the invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
Eighteen months later, the National Rifle Association, Donald Trump’s most powerful outside ally during the 2016 election, sent a delegation to Moscow that met with him.”