- Moscow Cozies Up to the Right. Alex Altman, Elizabeth Dias. ... As the murky ties between Moscow and members of Donald Trump's campaign consumed the city outside, ...
Former Russian senator Alexander Torshin, center, with Vladimir Putin at a Kremlin ceremony in 2011 Konstantin Zavrazhin—Getty Images
Moscow Cozies Up to the Right
Updated: Mar 10, 2017 6:53 PM ET | Originally published: Mar 08, 2017
Bistro
Bis, a swanky French joint on Capitol Hill, is a Washington institution
that has hosted all sorts of political summits over the years. But the
group that piled into the restaurant's Leaders Room on the night of Feb.
1 was among the more unusual. For four hours, current and former
Russian officials dined with two Republican Congressmen, a conservative
magazine publisher, a longtime GOP consultant and a close friend of top
White House strategist Steve Bannon.
As
the murky ties between Moscow and members of Donald Trump's campaign
consumed the city outside, the group dining inside the George Hotel
explored ways to strengthen the bonds between the two countries. "We
have so many people who are trying to destroy the relationship between
Russia and the United States," says Representative Dana Rohrabacher of
California, who attended the dinner and has visited Russia at least a
half-dozen times over the past five years. "I'm trying my best to expand
the amount of personal contacts we have with people who are engaged in
government in Russia."
Russia
is equally keen on cultivating links to Republicans. Some of the
officials who attended the dinner--including a deputy central banker and
former Russian senator named Alexander Torshin, and his protégée, a
young gun-rights activist named Maria Butina--have been part of a
years-long campaign to build connections between Russia's leaders and
American conservatives. The crusade, which predates the rise of Trump,
has garnered scant attention but achieved significant success, sparking
new alliances with leading U.S. evangelicals, lawmakers and powerful
interest groups like the NRA.
The
outreach to Republicans marks a dramatic shift in Russia's attempts to
influence U.S. domestic politics. During the Cold War, the Kremlin tried
to forge links to the American left. Such efforts haven't stopped
entirely. It's no accident that Green Party presidential candidate Jill
Stein scored a seat at Vladimir Putin's table at a 2015 banquet in
Moscow for the state-sponsored propaganda outlet RT, or that RT hired
former MSNBC anchor Ed Schultz, who boasts a fervent liberal fan base.
But over the past five years, Russia has also been fostering a growing
affinity on the right. According to a February Gallup poll, nearly
one-third of Republicans now say they have a favorable impression of
Putin, up from 12% two years ago and far higher than Putin's rating
among Democrats.
The
role reversal isn't lost on the coterie of conservatives who have led
the effort to ease tensions with Moscow. "We were some of the biggest
cold warriors ever," says Paul Erickson, a veteran Republican activist
who attended the Feb. 1 dinner. "But then the Wall fell. We won. 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."
What
would right-wing activists in the U.S. have in common with Putin's
Russia? More than you might expect. Conservative Christianity has been
one common touchstone. The dinner at the George Hotel, hosted by
conservative activist and Rockefeller scion George O'Neill Jr., was part
of the festivities surrounding the National Prayer Breakfast, an annual
event run by evangelicals to forge new, if informal, diplomatic ties
through shared spiritual principles. Evangelicals have discovered common
ground with Moscow's nationalist and ultraconservative push--led by the
Russian Orthodox Church--to make the post-Soviet nation a bulwark of
Christianity amid the increasing secularization of the West.
Prominent
social conservative leaders, like Franklin Graham, say they see Putin
as a powerful partner in the quest to protect Christian religious
minorities. In war zones like Syria, says Graham, Putin has been a
stronger defender of Christians than U.S. leaders. "Islam teaches to
kill Christians and Jews," claims Graham, president of the Billy Graham
Evangelistic Association. Putin "sees himself in the Middle East as
defending the Christian remnant that is left in Syria." In 2015 Graham
met privately with Putin, who has supported Syrian President Bashar
Assad's regime, while visiting Moscow at the Russian Orthodox Church's
invitation. They planned a conference on persecuted Christians, which
will be held in Washington in May. "He was very supportive," says
Graham. "He said he would do all he could from his office to help."
Catholic
leaders like Brian Brown have been impressed by the Russian Orthodox
Church's decision to tighten policies on abortion and uphold traditional
marriage. Since 2014, Brown, president of the National Organization for
Marriage, has worked closely with the church and with Russian
anti-abortion and antigay marriage activists like FamilyPolicy.ru. In
late January, Brown visited Moscow to seek the Duma's support for his
group's new manifesto on those issues. These new bonds with Russia have
"been a sea change, both in my own view and also, I think, for many
conservatives," Brown says. "Wherever there are folks standing up for
marriage, we will meet with them."
While
some activists bonded over faith, others found shared purpose in guns.
Russia has no real tradition of Second Amendment rights. But with
Torshin's help, Butina has managed to form close relationships with top
NRA officials. Butina, 28, was running a furniture business in her
provincial Siberian hometown just a few years ago. After moving to
Moscow in 2011, she founded a gun-rights organization, the Right to Bear
Arms, and began traveling back and forth to the U.S. "She's very, very
well connected with elected officials in the Soviet Union," says Alan
Gottlieb, who founded the Second Amendment Foundation, serves on the
board of the American Conservative Union and has met with Butina and
Torshin in Russia.
In
2015, a collection of NRA officials flew over to attend Butina's annual
gun conference. Among them was Erickson; former NRA and ACU chief David
Keene; gun manufacturer and NRA first vice president Pete Brownell; and
Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke, a Trump supporter and sensation
among the conservative grassroots. One of their hosts was Russian Deputy
Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, who was sanctioned by the White House in
2014 in connection with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. According to a
disclosure filed by Clarke, Butina's group shelled out $6,000 for the
sheriff's meals, lodging, transportation and other excursions on the
trip.
NRA
allies say the group is happy to work with international
firearms-advocacy groups to advance mutual interests. The NRA forked
over some $30 million to help elect Trump, about two and a half times
the amount it shelled out on the 2012 election, despite his previous
support for gun-control measures. (The group did not respond to a
request to comment for this story.) "I am deeply grateful for the
friendship of the American NRA," Butina, now a graduate student in
international relations at American University in Washington, wrote in
an email to TIME. "My work has been focused exclusively on the expansion
of gun rights--very publicly."
But
Butina's attraction to the Republican Party runs broader than common
ground on gun rights. "It may take the election of a Republican to the
White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation
and the United States," she wrote in the summer of 2015 in the National
Interest, a magazine published by the Center for the National Interest.
The same Washington think tank hosted a foreign policy speech for
candidate Trump in April 2016, where Trump was introduced to Russian
ambassador Sergey Kislyak, according to the Wall Street Journal.
In
April 2015, Butina and Torshin traveled to Tennessee to attend a
fundraiser for a political group backing the presidential campaign of
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, then viewed as a leading contender for
the GOP nomination. In July, she attended Walker's campaign kickoff in
Wisconsin. The same week, Butina flew to Las Vegas for one of Trump's
first campaign events. She asked Trump whether he would end the
"damaging" U.S. government sanctions on Russia. "I know Putin, and I'll
tell you what, we'll get along with Putin," he responded. "I don't think
you'd need the sanctions."
It
wasn't the pair's only brush with the Trump campaign. Torshin, who
according to Bloomberg News has been accused by Spanish investigators of
directing a money-laundering operation for a Moscow syndicate (he has
denied any wrongdoing), boasted of meeting the President's son Donald
Trump Jr. at a 2016 Louisville meeting of the NRA, where he is a
lifetime member. That encounter "should have set off alarm bells," said
one former White House official. "It is a big deal."
Last
month Torshin assembled the delegation of Russians who attended the
National Prayer Breakfast. The group of 16 included Kremlin advisers,
university presidents and the mayor of an eastern Russia city. At the
Bistro Bis dinner, the room was set in traditional Russian style, with
the guests on one side of a long table and the Americans on the other.
"The better to hear, the better to toast," Butina explained.
--With reporting by MICHAEL SCHERER/WASHINGTON
Correction: The
original version of this story incorrectly stated that Alexander
Torshin attended an April 2016 speech by Donald Trump at the Center for
the National Interest in Washington. Torshin did not attend.
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