“mpressing the NRA’s Russian hosts is the quickest way to secure a private interview with President Putin,” an organizer of the NRA’s infamous 2015 trip to Moscow wrote.
A former NRA president hoped to win access to Vladimir Putin on a trip to Moscow, according to an email from one of the trip’s organizers. That organizer, Republican operative Paul Erickson, also said the trip could have “enormous diplomatic consequences.” The email, sent in November 2015 and reviewed by The Daily Beast, came just months before the Kremlin’s election meddling went into full gear.
In the email, Erickson wrote that an official with the Russian Central Bank had made a tantalizing, though tentative, offer to former NRA president David Keene: an interview for his newspaper with Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the time, Keene was the opinion editor for The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper. He had previously helmed the NRA, and he maintained close ties with its top officials. And he was one of the small group of people on the trip.
“mpressing the NRA’s Russian hosts is also the quickest way to secure a private interview with President Putin on behalf of David Keene and the Washington Times–a plum that was dangled in front of Keene by Torshin himself during a recent Torshin visit to Washington, DC,” Erickson wrote. “High stakes all around.”
The NRA’s Russian hosts were a powerful group. Alexander Torshin, who Erickson said had tentatively offered Keene a Putin interview, was a deputy governor at Russia’s powerful central bank at the time. Justice Department prosecutors later alluded to him when they charged Erickson’s girlfriend, Russian gun rights activist Maria Butina, with conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent in the U.S. Butina pleaded guilty to the charge last month. Her organization, called The Right to Bear Arms, had helped organize the trip Keene went on.
The NRA officials on the trip also met with Dmitry Rogozin, a Putin deputy and prominent figure in the Russian defense industry who is under U.S. sanctions. And they met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to The Washington Post.
The Erickson email, which has not been previously quoted, indicates that the NRA officials on the Moscow trip believed they were meeting with Kremlin power players who could influence the country’s president. The existence of this email was first reported by The New York Times.
Erickson’s email also said the trip could help ease relations between Russia and the U.S. by creating a way for the Kremlin to connect with a future Republican president.
“As we discussed over lunch in Iowa, Russia believes that high level contacts with the NRA might be the BEST means of neutral introduction to either the next American President OR to a meaningful re-set in relations with the Congress under a (God forbid) President Clinton,” he wrote. “This simple good will trip would have enormous diplomatic consequences for a future U.S. / Russia bilateral relationship to the world.”
The email also described tensions that emerged before the trip between two NRA power-brokers: David Keene, the NRA’s president from 2011 to 2013; and Allan Cors, its president at the time of the trip. Cors initially planned to go on the trip, which Keene and Butina helped organize. But a few weeks before departure, he abruptly bowed out. In the email, Erickson said Cors cited health problems as the reason for his cancellation. According to Erickson, it enraged Keene.
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But now, Cors contradicts the story Erickson described in that email. In a statement the NRA’s lawyer provided to The Daily Beast on his behalf, Cors said he pulled out of the trip because he was worried it would reflect poorly on the NRA. The statement, part of which was in the Times story, said nothing about any health problems.
“When we spoke, [NRA CEO] Wayne [LaPierre] expressed concerns about this trip and suggested that I not participate,” Cors said in the statement. “I was, at the time, president of the NRA and Wayne did not want any misconception that this was an official trip. Frankly, I had similar concerns. Therefore, I gracefully bowed out.”
The NRA lawyer also told The Daily Beast that the group did not formally sanction the trip and that its CEO expressed concerns about it.
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David Clarke, the conspiratorial former Milwaukee County sheriff who once claimed Black Lives Matter would team up with ISIS, also went on the trip, along with other influential NRA donors and board members.
The trip has drawn the attention of investigators. Federal prosecutors in Washington D.C. told Erickson’s attorney several months ago that they were considering charging him for illegally acting as a covert agent of a foreign government, under a statute Justice Department lawyers refer to as “espionage-lite.” Butina is in jail awaiting sentencing and has agreed to cooperate with federal investigators. Meanwhile, the Senate intelligence committee is scrutinizing the NRA’s Russia connections as part of a wide-ranging, bipartisan probe into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential elections in the U.S. And Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, is also scrutinizing the trip.
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EXCLUSIVE: Leaked email shows NRA heavyweight David Keene wanted access to Putin: https://t.co/48dsQaD5jy
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) January 31, 2019
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