“Russian Officials Scramble as Plan to Delegitimize Western Democracy Moving Way Faster Than Intended”
—The Onion, FEBRUARY 2, 2017
Moscow’s leader was a lifelong practitioner of Judo. He would continue executing GLOBAL GRIZZLY across Europe and the Middle East while also carrying out his political warfare operation against the United States, GRIZZLY STEPPE. Attacking the United States was going to come in the form of a strategic flip against the anti-Atlantic alliance. Once pro-Moscow, right-wing populist political parties took control of liberal governments in the United States and France, they would have the ability to break up NATO and realign the Western world toward Moscow.
Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, equivalent to the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, boasted of how Russia had created a strategy to foster fifth columns in a nation. He believed that that Russian hybrid warfare and active measures could do the job from within a nation without violating its sovereignty. Gerasimov said:
“Of great importance here is the use of the global internet network to exert a massive, dedicated impact on the consciousness of the citizens of states that are the targets of the aggression. Information resources have become one of the most effective types of weapon. Their extensive employment enables the situation in a country to be destabilized from within in a matter of days.… In this manner, indirect and asymmetric actions and methods of conducting hybrid wars enable the opposing side to be deprived of its actual sovereignty without the state’s territory being seized.”
Russia would create a literal fifth column of fellow travelers in the United States to become a critical pillar in Putin’s Axis of Autocracy.
2016 WOULD BE a year of rebalancing the global spheres of influence. Russia had already spent a decade laying the groundwork for recruiting and seducing an entire American political party to support them. France was ready to be toppled. Austria was already in Putin’s pocket. Poland, Hungary, Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, and even Sweden had significant gains for pro-Moscow groups. The end of NATO and the European Union was nigh.
Once Donald Trump was nominated, key Republican groups and personalities, along with Russia, quickly fell in line behind Trump. Despite the intense scrutiny of Trump’s relationship to Putin, Republicans have already opened to Moscow’s charms. The party was accepting donations from Russian Americans associated with the Kremlin. When Trump asserted that it was a “good thing” to have relations with Russia, the base quickly followed suit. By the end of 2017, numerous conservative personalities would be found to have made ties with pro-Moscow politicians. The money trail of donations from Russian billionaires started to expand from individuals into the coffers of the RNC. They moved via shadowy political action committees unleashed by the Citizens United ruling. Unlimited money meant unlimited chances for Russian oligarchs to make individual Americans willing assets for Russian intelligence.
In 1994, the Republican Party, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich, won a major electoral landslide. They gained 54 House seats and took control of Congress. Unlike previous Congresses, this one was won outright on conservatism. The unabashed promise to remake America into a slightly more authoritarian and thus safer country won them votes. Their first act was to attack the Democratic Party machine and damage it. They impeached President Bill Clinton and opened a wave of investigations to bring down the Democratic President. In the eyes of the American Republicans, the Democratic Party was no longer a loyal opposition but a plague on the American system of government to be attacked at every chance.
This hatred of the Democratic Party was extended to President Barack Obama, who was labeled a weak and ineffectual leader. Republicans assaulted his calm leadership style. Most of the criticism from the right came from hawks like Rep. Mike Rodgers, and Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who wanted Obama to take decisive military action. Other Republicans called Obama weak on matters such as not carrying out the airstrike on Syria, or bringing Ukraine into NATO and arming them after the Russian invasion of Crimea, simply because he was a Democrat.
Former Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin was one of the first converts to the image of Vladimir Putin being the beacon of strongmen, although it was in the context of opposing Russia. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in March 2014, Palin said,
“Anyone who carries the common-sense gene would know that Putin doesn’t change his stripes. He harkens back to the era of the czars and he wants that Russian empire to grow again, he wants to exert huge power and dominance.… People are looking at Putin as one who wrestles bears and drills for oil. They look at our president as one who wears mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates. We are not exercising that peace through strength that only can be brought to you courtesy of the red, white and blue.”
On Fox News, Rudy Giuliani reflected on how much he admired Putin’s ability to provide orders and get things done. “Putin decides what he wants to do, and he does it in half a day, right? He decided he had to go to their parliament—he went to their parliament, he got permission in 15 minutes.”1
From 2010, Putin’s information agencies aligned themselves with the American conservative message to their own via Fox News and Russia Today. By 2012, the social media revolution would occur. Twitter, Facebook, and web alerts became the cruise missiles of the new war on democracy.
The Second Russia-Euro-American political war would not be limited to electronic systems. Traditional methods of using duped and recruited intelligence assets were employed. Russian intelligence agencies have a history of manipulating visiting American diplomats, politicians, and non-government organizations to seeing the world their way. One of the most infamous occurred in 1969. A. Allan Bates, President Lyndon Johnson’s Director of the Office of Standard Policy in the Commerce Department, repeatedly claimed that the Soviet Union had been “the first and thus far only nation which has solved the problem of providing acceptable low-cost housing for its masses of citizens.” While he could not provide data to back up his claims, he adamantly stated his personal experience in traveling through the Soviet Union convinced him that this was true. This impression by Bates filtered into his staff. Aide to Under Secretary of Commerce Howard Samuels stated, “The Soviet Union has far surpassed the United States in solving the low-cost housing needs of its people.”2 Unfortunately for him, his travels around Russia were guided by the KGB and scripted to give him this very exact impression with the intent of him bringing it back to the Western world and transmitting it as a “fact.” As part of the plan, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev would make scripted comments that supported his KGB-inspired notions.
Bates was lucky that he was just a target of state manipulation. Yuri Bezmenov, the former KGB officer, described the actual targets of Russian intelligence recruitment as self-absorbed conservatives.
“This was my instruction: try to get into large-circulation, established conservative media; reach filthy-rich movie makers; intellectuals, so-called ‘academic’ circles; cynical, egocentric people who can look into your eyes with angelic expression and tell you a lie. These are the most recruitable people: people who lack moral principles, who are either too greedy or too [much] suffer from self-importance. They feel that they matter a lot. These are the people who KGB wanted very much to recruit.”3
In fact, the Russians did not prefer recruiting from left-wing, communist, or socialist groups. Bezmenov said that idealistically minded leftists were useless to the KGB. “Never barter with leftists. Forget about these political prostitutes.… When they become disillusioned, they become your worst enemies.”4
However, Russian intelligence was also carefully trying to deflect core messaging in America away from the mainstream media. Social media was quickly overtaking CNN, the New York Times, and Yahoo! news as the principal methods of gaining news in America. Rational discourse, applied common sense, and thoughtful consideration of the facts were overpowered by the mainstreaming conspiracy theory insanity of Alex Jones’ InfoWars and the slightly more mainstream Breitbart news. Using this, they began honing a positive image of Donald Trump.
Although the Soviet Union fell in 1989, it would not be until 1993 when President Boris Yeltsin would sign a repeal of Article 121 of the Soviet-era Anti-Sodomy law. After this repeal, being openly gay in Russia was officially sanctioned. Gays felt a wave of openness and an ability to show their love publicly. Russia was still a conservative country with a newly rising Orthodox church, but gays were having their moment. This euphoria lasted until the second inauguration of Vladimir Putin in 2012. Then the gay community in Russia was filled with fear. The number of gay-bashing attacks, sanctioned by the Kremlin, exploded. Anti-gay religious groups called out the coming “demographic crisis”—a plunge in childbirth rates that they attributed to the freedom of gays to live their lives. One Duma member, Yelena Mizulina, told a news program that “Analyzing all the circumstances, and the particularity of territorial Russia and her survival… I came to the conclusion that if today we want to resolve the demographic crisis, we need to, excuse me, tighten the belt on certain moral values and information, so that giving birth and raising children become fully valued.”
Putin’s public partner in what became an open war on gays in Russia, and by extension the conservative movement worldwide, was the Russian Orthodox church. The Russian church had been suppressed for almost one hundred years when Putin freed it from the stigma of the Communist era. Understanding that Russians were naturally conservative and religious, he fostered the church’s place in post-Soviet society. This attracted the likes of then Indiana Governor Mike Pence. Pence is a devout evangelical Christian. In May 2011, he would meet privately with Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, Metropolitan of Volokolamsk and Chair of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). They met at Franklin Graham’s convention on global persecution of Christians. Pence conversed with him about the two countries’ focus on defeating ISIS.5 It was a defining moment, as Pence was seen as the religious component of the Trump team. His relationship with evangelicals and religious leaders worldwide was Trump’s point of entry into the religious community.
Back in 2014, John Aravosis, a writer for Americablog, wrote about evangelical ties to Moscow:
“Politically, the war over gay rights in America is over—while skirmishes remain, the gays have won, and the far right knows it. That’s why America’s religionists have moved their mission abroad, mostly to Africa, but also to Europe. And now, with Vladimir Putin’s help, they’ve found a new, more powerful home in Moscow.”6
In 2013, Brian Brown traveled to Moscow and testified in front of the Russian Parliament, at the same time Russia rolled out a draconian piece of anti-gay legislation and called the law “For the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values.”7 The legislation was a law prohibiting the open knowledge of gays, calling for a ban on “gay propaganda,” allegedly because children were being exposed to knowledge that gays existed. Over 100 conservative groups worldwide signed petitions supporting the law.
Soon after the legislation passed, the World Congress of Families, an anti-LGBT organization, abandoned its traditional annual conference always held in Rockford, Illinois, to hold its 2014 convention in Moscow in support of their anti-gay agenda.
Around the same time, Buzzfeed obtained an email cache that had been released online to Shaltai Boltai (Russian for Humpty Dumpty), a Russian hacktivist group with a mission to leak illicit Kremlin documents. The tranche of documents related to the “pro-family” convention, initially slated to happen in the US but which ultimately took place in Russia on September 10-11, 2014, with a full list of “confirmed” attendees naming 20 American pro-life, pro-marriage, anti-gay organizations. This included Brian Brown, the then president of the National Organization of Marriage (NOM).8 Brown said during his trip to Russia, “There was a real push to re-instill Christian values in the public square” and that activists from Russia and the US are “uniting together under the values we share.”9 Later in 2014, the American evangelicals would be drawn even closer to Moscow. Russia passed a ban for gays, single people, and unmarried people from adopting Russian children. American right-wingers were ecstatic. It seems like Russia was a bastion of Christendom they could finally admire.
Rabid anti-gay sentiment is a hallmark of all the nations in the Russo-European-American anti-globalist alliance. When Russia passed its anti-gay laws right-wing groups all over Europe celebrated. In a wave of intimidation, Italian right-wingers put up posters of Putin in a Russian Navy fur hat with the slogan “Io Sto Con Putin,” or “I’m with Putin,” all over gay neighborhoods in Rome. Others had a red, white, and blue Russian flag backgrounds with the words “Rome is with Putin. Obama is an Unwanted Guest.” In Poland, right-wing marchers sang a nationalist song titled “We Want God.” The European rallies were universally covered with Christian iconography. American evangelicals ate these rallies up and supported the Russian-backed outreach openly.
Scott Lively, a prolific evangelical anti-gay bigot, wrote of his time in Russia:
“Russia is today experiencing a Christian revival and is decidedly NOT communist. Some 30,000 churches have been built in the last year, and the ones in Moscow are reportedly overflowing with worshippers on Sundays. Most of the church is Orthodox, which is steeped in tradition, but at the same time relevant to the modern society.”
He would go on to close with “how incredibly ironic it is that Russia is now our best hope for stopping the conquest of the world by the ‘progressives.’”10
This was not the first time Lively wrote glowingly of Russia. In 2007, he wrote what his ministry called an Open Letter to the Russian People extolling their Christian spirit. The most noteworthy passage was his prediction that American evangelicals could soon be the next wave of Russian emigrés:
“While the United States and Europe continue to alienate their family-oriented citizens by following the destructive path of ‘sexual freedom,’ Russia could become a model pro-family society. If this were to occur, I believe people from the West would begin to emigrate to Russia in the same way that Russians used to emigrate to the United States and Europe. Russia might even win back the sympathies of its former states, such as Poland, Latvia and Lithuania, which are now chafing under the pro-homosexual demands of the European Union.”11
Brian Brown would later be hired as President of the World Congress of Families (WCF), a group designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. They bill themselves as a pro-family, anti-gay organization involved in planning international conferences intended to spread their conservative values. Their deep ties to Moscow are a typical cross-section of Russo-American collaboration in the family values community.
The WCF Director at the time, Larry Jacobs, attended the first Russian Sanctity of Motherhood conference where he asserted, “Russians might be the Christian saviors of the world.”12 Jacobs also ties American-Russian Christianity into a weapon against liberalism. One of his acolytes, Jack Hanick, is a member of their planning committee who works for the Russian propaganda channel Tsargrad television. He is also an associate of the Konstantin Malofeev and Alexander Dugin’s Katehon think tank.13 Hanick worked for Fox News from 1996 to 2011 as a producer though he parades himself as a “founding employee” of the network.
Jacobs posited at this Moscow conference: “Russian [and] Eastern European leadership is necessary to counter the secular post-modern anti-family agenda and replace what I’m calling the cultural-Marxist philosophy that is destroying human society and in particular the family.”14
It should be noted that right-wing Norwegian terrorist and mass-murderer Anders Breivik wrote extensively against liberalism using “cultural-Marxism,” a code word for American and European liberal democracy and multiculturalism.
There have been several signs over the last decade that conservatives, specifically evangelicals and NRA gun owners, have demonstrated a significant change of attitude toward America’s long-standing foe, Russia. The shift in attitude between the United States and Russia was occurring on many fronts, particularly as the two strategic opponents, President Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin, each ran and won their second terms. In the run-up to the 2012 election, Russia was reaching out to political opponents of Obama. One of the most favorably disposed Congressman was Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.). In his estimation, “There has been a change in the views of hard-core conservatives toward Russia. Conservative Republicans like myself hated communism during the Cold War. But Russia is no longer the Soviet Union.”15 Many Republicans saw Russia as a capitalist society with a decidedly conservative bent that favored them. The mail-order bride business, which started in the 1990s, was still booming and lovely, educated Russian women were available and not indisposed to older men with money. Additionally, the global porn industry had moved away from the San Fernando Valley and right into Moscow. What Republicans previously saw as a nation of brutalist apartment blocks and rusted Lada cars was now a land of rich oligarchs and Mercedes G-Wagens. A dreamland where money could buy you a police escort and all the young women one desired. Their sexy Russian bride, they believed, would be waiting home with a sparkling house and a martini in hand. It was the fantasy of a white Christian male paradise where everyone wanted to do business as long as the Tsarist motto “Orthodoxy. Autocracy. Nationality.” was accepted along with vodka-laced hypocrisy. It was the land of 1950s values and home to the Kalashnikov rifle.
To capitalize on the Russian-Christian bastion, they sponsored these “code” conferences. In December 2015, during the presidential nomination process, Evangelist Franklin Graham, son of famed televangelist Billy Graham, met privately with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin to discuss Russia’s commitment to assist Graham with a “conference on persecution of Christians.”16 From the perspective of a former Russian human intelligence officer like Putin, this community could be easily co-opted. As Franklin Graham said about Putin, “He said he would do all he could from his office to help.”17 The Americans were practically throwing themselves at the Kremlin’s feet.
On December 14, 2012, Adam Lanza, a 20-year-old from the village of Newtown, Connecticut, had just murdered his mother with a bolt action Savage .22 rifle. He then took a Bushmaster AR-15-style .223 caliber rifle, loaded it, and took a large quantity of ammunition and drove to the Sandy Hook Elementary School. He entered the school’s front door and massacred 20 children and six teachers. The attack stunned the nation. If an elementary school could be the target of an attack, then nowhere was safe. There was a national swell to impose some form of gun control, principally in restricting people with mental health issues from gaining access to guns. President Obama spoke on the matter and called on Congress to take action. This talk set off a national panic, a buying panic by gun owners who, by merely listening to the debate, assumed that America was about to seize or limit the purchase of firearms.
The Sandy Hook massacre occurred just weeks after Obama’s electoral victory for his second term. In the five months afterward, 3 million more guns above the usual sales would be sold. Correspondingly, 60 gun owners and 20 children would die from accidental discharges of guns purchased in the same period.
The shooting and firearms world has always been wary of government encroachment into their right to bear arms. Yet it may have been two widely disparate events that gave them the greatest fear and may have moved them to join arms with the unseemliest of allies, the Kremlin of Vladimir Putin: a 1989 school shooting in California and the sanctions imposed against the head of the Russian Defense industry in 2014.
In 1989, a shooting at an elementary school in Stockton, California, killed 5 children and wounded 30. All the victims were from the Asian community. The state of California acted swiftly and banned “assault weapons” or military-style weapons including the AK-47, which was used in the attack, and all AR-15 type weapons. For the gun community, this was a cause for outrage. Their principal complaint was that weapons such as the AK-47 were difficult to make “California legal.” There was some logic to the hoops and hurdles the state was using to make guns difficult to own for legal owners, but for Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, it was nothing short of communist tyranny.
In March 2014, President Obama sanctioned the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and head of the Defense Industry, Dmitry Rogozin, over the Russian invasion of Crimea. The NRA strenuously opposed the sanctions because they believed it would cut off imports of Russian weapons and cheap factory-built AK-47 ammunition.18 Kalashnikov ammo had already seen its price double from as low as 15 cents per round pre-Sandy Hook, to two to three times that amount afterward. The sanctions would make ammunition and authentic Russian spare parts more expensive. This, just a few months after the death of Mikhail Kalashnikov, was another outrage. The outrage brought about a withering number of articles in magazines such as American Rifleman, Recoil, Guns and Ammo, and Soldier of Fortune, all extolling the brilliance of the inventor of the AK-47 and disparaging the new restrictions on getting guns and parts. The glowing hagiography of Kalashnikov and the rise in AK ammo prices made American gun owners look admiringly toward Putin’s Russia.
The California ban and the sanctions against Russian leadership, which had little to no effect on parts or ammunition, belied the fact that there were a growing number of Russian firearms classes entering the American shooting sports community. These included new models of Eastern European origin—Kalashnikovs from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Romania, and even manufactured AK-47 variants. Popular in the US now is the Russian Izhmash Saiga-12 shotgun, which is a semiautomatic combat shotgun that can use 12-or 20-round drum magazines. There are also a myriad of Russian hunting shotguns. However, in Russia, virtually all these firearms are prohibited except for the criminals who buy them from the military black market. American shooters were in love with former Soviet weapons and developed an admiration of stereotypical Russian grit in combat. Dana Rohrabacher was right—in the shooting sports industry Russia was no longer the Soviet Union and they opposed liberals, which made them good enough for conservatives.
American admirers of Mikhail Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 class of rifles and machine guns, appear unaware that there were just 6 million civilian-owned weapons in Russia compared to 270 million in America. 4.2 million are shotguns for hunting ducks or birds. Only 700,000 are non-military hunting rifles. The Constitution of the Russian Federation states “… each individual has the right to defend his/her rights and freedoms by all means not prohibited by law.”19 However, all weapons must be purchased and registered with the Russian government. There were no such restrictions on the American Second Amendment even under President Obama, yet somehow the supporters of the American firearms industry found Russia to be a perfect bedfellow.
Aleksandr Torshin was a former Russian Senator in the upper chamber of the Russian Federal Assembly from 2001 to 2015. After leaving politics, he became the head of the Russian Central Bank. He was also suspected of having been tied to money laundering for the Russian mafia in St. Petersburg, the Taganskaya. In a brilliant exposé by the Washington Post, it was discovered that the Russian Federation had deep ties to the NRA. The first link came when Torshin was introduced to David Keene, the former president of the NRA, by G. Kline Preston IV. Preston was a Russian law expert who sported a porcelain bust of Putin in his Nashville office. He has been quoted as saying, “The value system of Southern Christians and the value system of Russians are very much in line.”20
During the 2012 elections, Torshin came to Nashville accompanied by Preston to observe voting and the election process.21 This is noteworthy because the American electoral process is well known around the world, but the street-level mechanics are also the most vulnerable. Any intelligence officer or surrogate would want to see it at the retail level to understand how money, politics, and influence affect votes.
Guns and religious evangelism run closely together in the United States. Most evangelicals are southern and rural. They view guns as a God-given right. Torshin was also active in the Russian Orthodox church’s outreach to the United States. He founded an international humanitarian organization, called Saint Sabbas the Presanctified, dedicated to preserving Christian shrines in Muslim-dominated Kosovo and Metohija (Western Kosovo). He was awarded a medal by the Serbian Orthodox Church, the Order of Holy King Milutin.22 That the two most powerful white Christian organizations in the US were brought to see Moscow’s point of view would make for the basis of an unstoppable political bloc.
Torshin would set out with his 28-year-old assistant Maria Butina. According to Time magazine, when Torshin recruited the lovely young woman she was a furniture salesperson in Siberia but moved to Moscow in 2011 to set up a pro-gun-rights group called Right to Bear Arms. This was the same time Torshin was publishing a pamphlet called “Guns Don’t Kill. People Kill.”23 Butina captured the hearts of American gun enthusiasts in provocative photos. In them she presented sultry photos of herself with Saiga combat shotguns, holding Makarov pistols and standing over a dead boar.
In 2013, they reached out to David Keene and other pro-gun enthusiasts and invited them to come to an annual meeting in Moscow. According to the Washington Post, the founder of the US Second Amendment Foundation, Alan Gottlieb, and his wife attended this annual meeting in Russia. They said that Torshin and Butina presented them with gifts specific to their individual interests.24 In April 2015, Butina and Torshin were invited to tour NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia. They both attended the NRA National Convention and were introduced to Wisconsin Governor and presidential candidate Scott Walker.25
The ties to Donald Trump took a leap when MSNBC reported that Torshin sat with Donald Trump Jr. at the NRA convention during Donald Trump Sr.’s speech. Junior, along with his brother Eric, fancied themselves as big trophy hunters. Donald Jr. was an enthusiast of large caliber guns. Torshin told Bloomberg News he had a “friendly exchange with Trump [Jr.].” The Russian connections with the Trump campaign grew.26
In July 2015, a month after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president, at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, Maria Butina was the first to publicly ask Trump about US-Russia relations. “If you are to be president what is your foreign politics [especially in] the relationships with my country and do you want to continue the politics of sanctions that are damaging both [economies]?”27 His response was, “I know Putin, and I’ll tell you what, we get along with Putin.”28 She quickly tweeted in Russian: “Asked US presidential candidate Donald Trump about the position with respect to Russia. Trump talks about the easing of sanctions.”29
Soon after that, the NRA donated as much as $30 million to Trump—triple the amount it gave Mitt Romney.30
The ties only increased as Trump started to become the sure frontrunner. In 2016, the NRA would send a delegation to Russia to meet with Dmitryi Rogozin, the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, and tour his Russian Shooting Federation headquarters. The attendees included David Keene, Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, NRA leading donor Joe Gregory, and board member Peter Brownell, owner of the biggest online gun shop in America, Brownells.31
The young, beautiful Butina had many friends in the shooting sports industry. One, conservative operative Paul Erikson, befriended her and set up an LLC in his home state of South Dakota for her. He claims it was set up in case Butina, who was attending the American University graduate school, needed funding for classes. Erikson had met Butina and Torshin with David Keene at the Right to Bear Arms conference in Moscow.32 Before May 2016, Erikson sent an email to Trump aide Rick Dearborn and Senator Jeff Sessions with the subject line: “Kremlin Connection.” The email stated that he wanted to work out how to coordinate a meeting between Trump and Putin during the campaign.
“Putin is deadly serious about building a good relationship with Mr. Trump.… He wants to extend an invitation to Mr. Trump to visit him in the Kremlin before the election. Let’s talk through what has transpired and Senator Sessions’ advice on how to proceed.”33
Moscow’s long-range sniper shot using the gun industry had hit its mark. With Erickson’s email, it was clear Russia’s influence on the Trump campaign was paying off.
In August 2016, Spanish prosecutors sought the arrest of Torshin on money laundering charges. The Spanish Guardia Civil, the investigative paramilitary police, have 33 audio recordings of Torshin and Alexander Romonov plotting to launder 15 million euros through a hotel in Mallorca for the Taganskaya mafia gang. Romonov was convicted in Russia and sentenced to 4 years for money laundering. In the audio clips, Romonov refers to Torshin when he says, “the boss himself cannot buy the hotel, because he is a civil servant” and “godfather.”34 Torshin was supposed to be en route to Mallorca for further meetings when the Guardia Civil prosecutors were waiting with a 12-man team to arrest him. At the last minute, Torshin canceled his trip as the Prosecutor General of Russia likely warned him that he was to be arrested.35
After Trump’s election, Butina and Torshin attended Trump’s first National Prayer Breakfast in DC. As part of his evangelical outreach, Torshin had created a similar but monthly Prayer Breakfast in Russia. To get more American and European conservatives to attend, he made it an annual event.36 Every year Vladimir Putin sends a greeting to the Russian event, a recognition of its value in allowing “Russian and American guests to come together under one roof in order to rebuild the relationship between the two countries that has degraded under the administration of President Obama.”37
With Trump in the White House, Torshin was now one of the Russian point men in the Washington circles. He had successfully managed to link all branches of the American evangelical gun-owning right and Republican Party leadership with Moscow through bibles and guns. However, his star would burn out fast. Torshin was scheduled to meet with Trump at the National Prayer Breakfast but reports say the White House canceled the meeting when reports emerged from Spanish authorities that Torshin was wanted on connections to organized crime.38
Once the presidency came under serious investigation by the Justice Department in 2017, the NRA created a series of web videos essentially threatening the potential for violence toward just about everyone who opposed Trump. Their spokesperson was Dana Loesch, a former writer and editor at Breitbart news, who had also worked on Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, a predecessor to Breitbart news. The NRA decided to take a page from the Russian playbook and stoke up tensions. The videos were designed to threaten the news media and the Democratic Party with gun-owning opponents. In the first video, titled “Freedom’s Safest Place—Violence of Lies,” she warned, “They use their media to assassinate real news, their schools to teach children that our President is another ‘Hitler,’ and they use their ex-President to endorse the ‘resistance.’ The only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight the left’s violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.”
In a second video, titled “The Ultimate Insult,” Loesch spelled out that the NRA is prepared to defend Trump’s calumnies and made claims that the FBI, the Democratic Party, and the 65% of Americans who oppose him, are the real enemies of America.
“These saboteurs, slashing away with their leaks and sneers, their phony accusations and gagging sanctimony, drive their daggers through the heart of our future, poisoning our belief that honest custody of our institutions will ever again be possible.”
The NRA-Russian money cat would be out of the bag on January 18, 2018, when McClatchy news reported that the FBI was investigating Russian money ties to the NRA for the Trump campaign.39 The NRA had funneled what was known to be $30 million to the Trump campaign but whispers that this number could be as high as $70 million, including contributions from Russian oligarchs, pro-Moscow businessmen, and the Kremlin itself, were now going to be spotlighted.
There were early hints through good news reporting that the FBI was on the Russian money trail for the Trump campaign through the NRA from as far back as 2015. In November 2016, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson testified before the House Intelligence Committee. He told them he believed there was a “crime in progress” between the Kremlin and the NRA:
“It appears as though the Russians, you know, infiltrated the NRA. And there is more than one explanation for why. But [it] appears the Russian operation was designed to infiltrate conservative organizations. And they targeted various conservative organizations, religious and otherwise, and they seemed to make a concerted effort to get in with the NRA.”40
On February 28, 2017, President Trump signed legislation known as HJ Resolution 40 that made it easier for the mentally ill to acquire guns.41 One year and four days later on February 14, 2018, Nikolas Cruz, a 19-year-old former student entered Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School and killed 17 students. He used an AR-15 rifle. Five of the seventeen victims were Jewish, and according to Rabbi Bradd Boxman at Kol Tivkah, a “huge number” of congregants attended the school.42 Other victims were ethnic minorities including one student of Asian descent.
Like clockwork Russian bots from the Internet Research Agency (RF-IRA) spewed out tens of thousands of anti-gun control tweets. They posted articles and lies demonizing the dead, the wounded student victims, and their parents who spoke out against guns. In one instance, mentions of an outspoken surviving student David Hogg had a 3,000% increase on Russian bot networks. The bot messages claimed he was not a student but a “crisis actor”—a conspiracy theory advanced by Alex Jones at Infowars.com that there were no victims but actors claiming tragedies to force the seizure of guns. Other RF-IRA bots introduced the fake news narrative that the shooter was a member of the ultra-left anti-fascist activists (ANTIFA) and not a White Supremacist.
The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre went on the attack simultaneously with the Russians. At the 2018 Conservative Political Action Committee convention days after the shooting, La Pierre: “Their goal is to eliminate the second amendment and our firearms freedoms, so they can eradicate all individual freedoms.… They hate the NRA, they hate the second amendment, they hate individual freedom.”
It should be noted this is the leader of an American group, who has Russian intelligence information warfare agencies broadcasting and defending his words from a country which does not have firearms freedom, led by an ex-KGB officer who is advised by a cabal of ex-KGB officers. What they have as a common cause is Putin’s chosen leader—Donald Trump.
While the Americans were blind, the Spanish government was not. Spain could clearly see that Torshin was Moscow’s man. The Spanish Prosecutor General’s indictment against Torshin stated bluntly:
“The criminal organizations from the countries of the East have as their main characteristics the penetration of different state powers, such as politics, which is represented in this case by the figure of the First Vice-chairman of the Federation Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Alexander Porfirievich Torshin.”43
On December 15, 2017, the Dallas News unveiled a blockbuster report on deep ties between Russian donors and high-ranking officials of the Republican Party. Author Ruth May penned this opening explanation:
“Buried in the campaign finance reports available to the public are some troubling connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to President Donald Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. We have allowed our campaign finance laws to become a strategic threat to our country.”44
Campaign finance reports show numerous Russian donors to Trump and the Republicans including Len Blavatnik, a dual US/UK citizen who was one of the top donors in the 2016 campaign. Considered the wealthiest man in UK—net worth $20 billion—who, according to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) data, donated a combined $462,552 between 2009 and 2014. In 2015, he donated $6.5 million to GOP Action Committees including millions to Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio, and Lindsey Graham.45 After Trump’s win, his holding company would donate $1 million from Access Industries to President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Committee. An Access Industries spokesperson stated the donation did not represent support for Trump.46
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the ranking Democratic leader on the House Intelligence Committee, told ABC News: “Unless the contributions were directed by a foreigner, they would be legal, but could still be of interest to investigators examining allegations of Russian influence on the 2016 campaign. Obviously, if there were those that had associations with the Kremlin that were contributing, that would be of keen concern.”47
Other donors include Andrew Intrater and Alexander Shustorovich, the chief executive of IMG Artists, who donated $1 million to Trump’s Inaugural Committee.48 He had a quarter of a million dollar donation rejected by the George W. Bush campaign due to ties with the Russian government.49 Simon Kukes, a Russian-born US citizen and oil magnate who was made CEO of Yukos after it was seized from Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was also a major donor.50 According to the Dallas Morning Herald, in just one election cycle Blavatnik, Intrater, Shustorovich, and Kukes donated $10.4 million, with 99% going to Republicans.51
A word of caution: There is absolutely nothing wrong with American citizens donating money to political campaigns and political actions committees for the purpose of winning elections and having their concerns and issues heard. That is the system we want to protect. The issue at hand is the fact the Republican Party vehemently denies that there is any contact with Russia, Russian interests, or people associated with the Russian government. Those denials are clearly inoperative.
Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough wrote an op-ed in frustration, “As a storm gathers over Washington and the world, Donald Trump’s Republican Party remains complicit in his frenzied efforts to undermine the American institutions and established values that conservatives once claimed to share.”52 How did this happen? Was it just a matter of money?
It would be Paul Erikson, friend of Maria Butina and one of numerous Americans who tried to engineer a meeting between Putin and Trump, who would succinctly explain what was happening to the party of Ronald Reagan’s hard-line anti-Communism. He told Time magazine, “There is a huge school within the conservative movement and the Republican Party that says you can’t look at these people through the same lens of the Cold War.” Now that Russia had money, supported the Second Amendment, and loved the same Jesus, they were allies to be protected. The overwhelming body of evidence indicates Putin tasked Russian intelligence agencies to support whatever conservative cause was supported by Trump, including evangelicals and now a fifth column—the “Alternative Right.”