RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT
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nbcnews.com
Senate Democrats accuse NRA of promising access to U.S. officials in exchange for Russian business
Leigh Ann CaldwellLeigh Ann Caldwell is an NBC News correspondent.
5-6 minutes
WASHINGTON — The results of a congressional probe into the National Rifle Association’s ties to Russia paints a picture of NRA officials providing Russian officials access to American elected officials in exchange for lucrative business opportunities.
The investigation, conducted by Senate Finance Committee Democrats who released a report on their findings Friday, found that top officials at the NRA used the organization’s financial resources — largely collected by member dues — to curry favor with two Russians, Aleksander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Central Bank of Russia, and his deputy, Maria Butina, who said they had access to top Russian officials.
The investigators focused on a trip in 2015 in which Butina and Torshin led a delegation of NRA officials to Moscow. Former NRA President David Keene and his wife, Donna Keene, organized the trip with the promise of new business opportunities by the Russians, including access to a Russian arms manufacturer that was under U.S. sanctions.
Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking member of the Finance Committee, launched his probe in February 2018 just as federal investigators were exploring potential links between Kremlin-linked individuals and the powerful gun lobby. The final report from former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team did not specifically address the NRA’s relationship with Moscow.
Wyden alleges that the NRA might have violated numerous tax laws by ignoring the parameters associated with nonprofit tax status. He is calling on the IRS to investigate.
“This report lays out in significant detail that the NRA lied about the 2015 delegation trip to Moscow. This was an official trip undertaken so NRA insiders could get rich — a clear violation of the principle that tax-exempt resources should not be used for personal benefit,” Wyden said in a statement.
"The NRA has abused its tax-exempt status and essentially become a business enterprise that its board members and leadership use for lucrative personal business opportunities, including in Moscow," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement Friday. "As the disturbing truth continues to surface, the NRA’s status as a tax exempt entity needs to be thoroughly investigated.”
The NRA is currently undergoing a crisis in its ranks as infighting and federal investigation into its finances have rocked the organization. The New York State attorney general is investigating the organization for allegations that it violated its tax status. Butina is serving an 18 month sentence for conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign official.
The probe was limited in scope. It relied on the NRA to voluntarily hand over documents and the Republicans on the Finance Committee opted not to cooperate with the investigation.
The staff for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, reviewed the documents obtained by Wyden’s staff and issued a separate report stating they found that the $6,000 in question to pay for the trip to Russia is “relatively insubstantial” and the evidence “does not raise concerns that the NRA abused its tax-exempt status purposes” when NRA officials traveled to Moscow in 2015.
“The Minority report reads more like a political document directed at an organization well known in U.S. politics to be despised by Democrats for its advocacy for Second Amendment rights,” the Republican response says.
The Democratic investigation did not reveal the kind of expansive scheme by Russia to launder millions into the U.S. election campaign through the gun lobby, as McClatchy had reported was being explored by federal investigators. Documents obtained by Wyden’s team showed more limited financial relationships, though; in one case, the gun lobby would offer payments to Butina as a reimbursement for expenses she said she incurred while hosting the NRA delegation in Moscow, despite the group later saying the trip was not official business.
When Butina told the Keenes that a senior Russian delegation would only meet with the group if the “head of the most powerful political organization in America” attended, Donna Keene fretted in one email to then-NRA President Allan Cors that his cancellation “will risk — I think completely burn — all the inroads NRA volunteers have worked on so hard for so long,” while also potentially hurting Torschins’s “pro-American career.”
“We’ve worked for 7 years to build trust with the Russians,” Keene added.
Peter Brownell, an Iowa native and ammunition company executive who was set to succeed Cors as NRA president, would ultimately attend in place of Cors. Another email obtained by the committee showed a conservative operative linked with the Mueller probe promising Brownell that he would “benefit greatly” from the trip by building connections with Russian arms manufacturers.
The congressional probe also found that the NRA provided both Russians “broad access to events” over a three-year period, where both could have met top GOP figures including presidential candidates.
Mike Memoli
Mike Memoli is an NBC News correspondent.
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washingtonpost.com
Trump told Russian officials in 2017 he wasn’t concerned about Moscow’s interference in U.S. election
By Shane Harris ,
6-8 minutes
President Trump meets with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, next to Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak at the White House on May 10, 2017. (Russian Foreign Ministry Photo/AP)
President Trump told two senior Russian officials in a 2017 Oval Office meeting that he was unconcerned about Moscow’s interference in the U.S. election because the United States did the same in other countries, an assertion that prompted alarmed White House officials to limit access to the remarks to an unusually small number of people, according to three former officials with knowledge of the matter.
The comments, which have not been previously reported, were part of a now-infamous meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, in which Trump revealed highly classified information that exposed a source of intelligence on the Islamic State. He also said during the meeting that firing FBI Director James B. Comey the day before had relieved “great pressure” on him.
A memorandum summarizing the meeting was limited to all but a few officials with the highest security clearances in an attempt to keep the president’s comments from being disclosed publicly, according to the former officials, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.
The White House’s classification of records about Trump’s communications with foreign officials is now a central part of the impeachment inquiry launched this week by House Democrats. An intelligence community whistleblower has alleged that the White House placed a record of Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, in which he offered U.S. assistance investigating his political opponents, into a code-word classified system reserved for the most sensitive intelligence information.
The White House did not provide a comment Friday.
It is not clear if a memo documenting the May 10, 2017, meeting with Lavrov and Kislyak was placed into that system, but the three former officials said it was restricted to a very small number of people. At the time, the White House had recently begun limiting the records of Trump’s calls after remarks he made to the leaders of Mexico and Australia appeared in news reports. The Lavrov memo was restricted to an even smaller group, the former officials said.
A fourth former official, who did not recall the president’s remarks to the Russian officials, said that memos were restricted only to people who needed to know their contents.
“It was more about learning how can we restrict this in a way that still informs the policy process and the principals who need to engage with these heads of state,” the fourth former official said.
But the three former officials with knowledge of the remarks said some memos of the president’s communications were kept from people who might ordinarily have access to them. The Lavrov memo fit that description, they said.
White House officials were particularly distressed by Trump’s election remarks because it appeared the president was forgiving Russia for an attack that had been designed to help elect him, the three former officials said. Trump also seemed to invite Russia to interfere in other countries’ elections, they said.
The previous day, Trump had fired Comey amid the FBI’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign had coordinated with Russia. White House aides worried about the political ramifications if Trump’s comments to the Russian officials became public.
Trump had publicly ridiculed the Russia investigation as politically motivated and said he doubted that Moscow had intervened in the election. By the time he met with Lavrov and Kislyak, Trump had been briefed by the most senior U.S. intelligence officials about the Russian operation, which was directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin and included the theft and publication of Democratic emails and the seeded of propaganda in social-media, according to the findings of the U.S. intelligence community.
Trump’s firing of Comey touched off an investigation into whether the president had tried to obstruct the FBI’s probe. His comments about Comey’s dismissal being a relief, which were first reported the same month by the New York Times, reinforced suspicions that Trump dismissed Comey because the FBI was investigating him.
According to the fourth former official, Trump lamented to Lavrov “all this Russia stuff” was detrimental to good relations. Trump also complained, “I could have a great relationship with you guys, but you know, our press,” this former official said, characterizing Trump’s remarks.
H.R. McMaster, the president’s then-national security adviser, repeatedly told Trump that he could not trust the Russians, according to two former officials.
On some areas, Trump conveyed U.S. policy in a constructive way, for instance, telling the Russians that their aggression in Ukraine was not good, one of those former officials said.
“What was difficult to understand was how they got a free pass on a lot of things — election security and so forth,” this former official said. “He was just very accommodating to them.”
The former official observed that Trump has “that streak of moral equivalency,” recalling how he once dismissed a question about the assassination of journalists and dissidents in Putin’s Russia by telling Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”
Another former official said that Trump wasn’t the only one to conflate Russia’s interference in the U.S. elections with U.S. efforts to promote democracy and good governance abroad.
The president and his top aides seemed not to understand the difference between Voice of America, a U.S.-supported news organization that airs in foreign countries, with Russian efforts to persuade American voters by surreptitiously planting ads in social media, this person said.
One former senior official said Trump regularly defended Russia’s actions, even in private, saying no country is pure. “He was always defensive of Russia,” this person said, adding the president had never made such a specific remark about interference in their presence.
“He thought the whole interference thing was ridiculous. He never bought into it.”
Greg Miller contributed to this report.
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Barr Went to Rome to Hear a Secret Tape from Joseph Mifsud, the Professor Who Helped Ignite the Russia Probe
ROME–When Attorney General William Barr showed up at the U.S. embassy’s Palazzo Margherita on Rome’s tony Via Veneto last week, he had two primary requests. He needed a conference room to meet high level Italian security agents where he could be sure no one was listening in. And he needed an extra chair for U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut who would be sitting in as his right-hand man.
Barr was in Rome on an under-the-radar mission that was only planned a few days in advance. An official with the embassy confirmed to The Daily Beast that they had to scramble to accommodate Barr’s sudden arrival. He had been in Italy before but not with such a clear motive. Barr and Durham are looking into the events that led to Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and suddenly all roads were leading to Rome.
The Daily Beast has learned that Barr and Durham were especially interested in what the Italian secret service knew about Joseph Mifsud, the erstwhile professor from Malta who had allegedly promised then candidate Donald Trump’s campaign aide George Papadopoulos he could deliver Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The Italian Justice Ministry public records show that Mifsud had applied for police protection in Italy after disappearing from Link University where he worked and, in doing so, had given a taped deposition to explain just why people might want to harm him.
A source in the Italian Ministry of Justice, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast that Barr and Durham were played the tape. A second source within the Italian government also confirmed to The Daily Beast that Barr and Durham were shown other evidence the Italians had on Mifsud.
Ever since Robert Mueller concluded his probe in March 2019, Barr has worked to blunt its impact—and investigate the investigators behind it. Barr assigned Durham to look into the Mueller probe’s origins. And the Attorney General’s name is listed in the whistleblower complaint about the July 25 call Trump made to the Ukrainian president to pressure him into investigating political rival Joe Biden. According to the complaint, Barr was directly involved in the president’s attempt to “solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” The minutiae of his involvement are feeding a scandal gripping Washington that changes by the nano-second.
The U.S. Department of Justice did not return numerous emails and calls for clarification about Barr, Durham, and Mifsud. But they did issue a statement on Monday confirming that the American legal team had been in the eternal city.
“As the Department of Justice has previously announced, a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins of the U.S. counterintelligence probe of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign,” Kerri Kupec, the Justice Department spokesperson, said in a statement. “Mr. Durham is gathering information from numerous sources, including a number of foreign countries. At Attorney General Barr’s request, the President has contacted other countries to ask them to introduce the Attorney General and Mr. Durham to appropriate officials.”
The Italian intelligence community had Mifsud on their radar for some years before he got involved in the Trump campaign’s troubles. His affiliations with both the Link University of Rome and London Center of International Law Practice—both often affiliated with western diplomacy and foreign intelligence agencies—made him an easy target. So did the slew of apartments he owned in Malta that are allegedly tied to a racket involving Russians buying Maltese passports for cheap.
What Mifsud did or didn’t know about Clinton’s emails is still murky; what Barr and Durham were privy to is even less clear. Papadopoulos has distanced himself from the professor, tweeting just this week that he “exposed Mifsud’s connections to Italian intelligence” even though the Italians were watching him long before they parted ways.
Mifsud met Papadopoulos through his Italian wife, Simona Mangiante, a lawyer and part-time lingerie model who had hoped to launch her acting career with a role playing French actress Brigitte Bardot in an American film. Mangiante told The Daily Beast last year that she met Mifsud doing some legal consulting for one of his classes. His ties to Russia seemed potentially useful to her husband, who was then an integral part of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy advisory panel at the time.
Before he disappeared, Mifsud said he had met Papadopoulos “three or four times,” helping to facilitate connections between “official and unofficial sources” in Italy, Russia, and Ukraine. He denied any wrongdoing but went into hiding–either on his own or through the Italian protective services—in 2017 and has only been seen in sporadic photos since.
Several mainstream Italian newspapers on Tuesday reported that Mifsud is cooperating with Barr and Durham’s investigation and some even suggested he met them in person in Rome last week. The Daily Beast reached Stephan Roh, Mifsud’s Swiss lawyer, by phone Tuesday. Roh said he hadn’t seen his client “for quite some time” but that he “doubted” he would show his face in Rome.
The sources in Rome who confirmed that Barr and Durham came to learn more about Mifsud also told The Daily Beast that they expected Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to meet the same intelligence agencies on his state visit that began Tuesday.
Pompeo is meeting the Italian president, the prime minister, and the Pope while in Rome. His official mandate is to discuss Libya, China trade, and sanctions on Russia, which Italy does not support. Pompeo will also be spending time with the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Callista Gingrich and her husband, Newt. The Secretary of State is giving a keynote address at one of the ambassador’s events on religious freedom at the Vatican, and has arranged some free time for a private viewing of the ancient Roman Colosseum. He will briefly visit the Umbrian hamlet of Valle Peligna, where his grandfather is from and where, perhaps coincidentally, Madonna’s Italian family also has roots. He is then heading to Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Greece before returning to Washington.
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Barr Went to Rome to Hear a Secret Tape from Joseph Mifsud, the Professor Who Helped Ignite the Russia Probe
ROME–When Attorney General William Barr showed up at the U.S. embassy’s Palazzo Margherita on Rome’s tony Via Veneto last week, he had two primary requests. He needed a conference room to meet high level Italian security agents where he could be sure no one was listening in. And he needed an extra chair for U.S. Attorney John Durham of Connecticut who would be sitting in as his right-hand man.
Barr was in Rome on an under-the-radar mission that was only planned a few days in advance. An official with the embassy confirmed to The Daily Beast that they had to scramble to accommodate Barr’s sudden arrival. He had been in Italy before but not with such a clear motive. Barr and Durham are looking into the events that led to Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, and suddenly all roads were leading to Rome.
The Daily Beast has learned that Barr and Durham were especially interested in what the Italian secret service knew about Joseph Mifsud, the erstwhile professor from Malta who had allegedly promised then candidate Donald Trump’s campaign aide George Papadopoulos he could deliver Russian “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. The Italian Justice Ministry public records show that Mifsud had applied for police protection in Italy after disappearing from Link University where he worked and, in doing so, had given a taped deposition to explain just why people might want to harm him.
A source in the Italian Ministry of Justice, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast that Barr and Durham were played the tape. A second source within the Italian government also confirmed to The Daily Beast that Barr and Durham were shown other evidence the Italians had on Mifsud.
Ever since Robert Mueller concluded his probe in March 2019, Barr has worked to blunt its impact—and investigate the investigators behind it. Barr assigned Durham to look into the Mueller probe’s origins. And the Attorney General’s name is listed in the whistleblower complaint about the July 25 call Trump made to the Ukrainian president to pressure him into investigating political rival Joe Biden. According to the complaint, Barr was directly involved in the president’s attempt to “solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election.” The minutiae of his involvement are feeding a scandal gripping Washington that changes by the nano-second.
The U.S. Department of Justice did not return numerous emails and calls for clarification about Barr, Durham, and Mifsud. But they did issue a statement on Monday confirming that the American legal team had been in the eternal city.
“As the Department of Justice has previously announced, a team led by U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins of the U.S. counterintelligence probe of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign,” Kerri Kupec, the Justice Department spokesperson, said in a statement. “Mr. Durham is gathering information from numerous sources, including a number of foreign countries. At Attorney General Barr’s request, the President has contacted other countries to ask them to introduce the Attorney General and Mr. Durham to appropriate officials.”
The Italian intelligence community had Mifsud on their radar for some years before he got involved in the Trump campaign’s troubles. His affiliations with both the Link University of Rome and London Center of International Law Practice—both often affiliated with western diplomacy and foreign intelligence agencies—made him an easy target. So did the slew of apartments he owned in Malta that are allegedly tied to a racket involving Russians buying Maltese passports for cheap.
What Mifsud did or didn’t know about Clinton’s emails is still murky; what Barr and Durham were privy to is even less clear. Papadopoulos has distanced himself from the professor, tweeting just this week that he “exposed Mifsud’s connections to Italian intelligence” even though the Italians were watching him long before they parted ways.
Mifsud met Papadopoulos through his Italian wife, Simona Mangiante, a lawyer and part-time lingerie model who had hoped to launch her acting career with a role playing French actress Brigitte Bardot in an American film. Mangiante told The Daily Beast last year that she met Mifsud doing some legal consulting for one of his classes. His ties to Russia seemed potentially useful to her husband, who was then an integral part of the Trump campaign’s foreign policy advisory panel at the time.
Before he disappeared, Mifsud said he had met Papadopoulos “three or four times,” helping to facilitate connections between “official and unofficial sources” in Italy, Russia, and Ukraine. He denied any wrongdoing but went into hiding–either on his own or through the Italian protective services—in 2017 and has only been seen in sporadic photos since.
Several mainstream Italian newspapers on Tuesday reported that Mifsud is cooperating with Barr and Durham’s investigation and some even suggested he met them in person in Rome last week. The Daily Beast reached Stephan Roh, Mifsud’s Swiss lawyer, by phone Tuesday. Roh said he hadn’t seen his client “for quite some time” but that he “doubted” he would show his face in Rome.
The sources in Rome who confirmed that Barr and Durham came to learn more about Mifsud also told The Daily Beast that they expected Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to meet the same intelligence agencies on his state visit that began Tuesday.
Pompeo is meeting the Italian president, the prime minister, and the Pope while in Rome. His official mandate is to discuss Libya, China trade, and sanctions on Russia, which Italy does not support. Pompeo will also be spending time with the U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican Callista Gingrich and her husband, Newt. The Secretary of State is giving a keynote address at one of the ambassador’s events on religious freedom at the Vatican, and has arranged some free time for a private viewing of the ancient Roman Colosseum. He will briefly visit the Umbrian hamlet of Valle Peligna, where his grandfather is from and where, perhaps coincidentally, Madonna’s Italian family also has roots. He is then heading to Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Greece before returning to Washington.
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