Did the Russian government illegally funnel money to the NRA to help Trump win the presidency?
The NRA has been financing the Trump campaign and has been infiltrated by Russian operative Maria Butina, an agent for Aleksander Torshin, who links to Putin’s people and Russian organized crime. As you can see from the links below, Spanish police have turned over to the FBI wiretaps of conversations involving Russian senator Alexander Torshin, a now-retired deputy governor of the Bank of Russia suspected of money laundering who met with President Donald Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., during the 2016 US presidential election. Torshin has long been on the Spanish government's radar for his suspected involvement in money laundering and organized crime. The Muller investigation was surely investigating how Torshin used the NRA as a vehicle to funnel Russian money into the election to boost Trump. Some known Russians living in the US, such as Dimitri Simes (The National Interest), have been interviewed by Mueller on the issue. Butina has cultivated her own ties with the American gun-rights activist and Republican strategist Paul Erickson, whom she has been acquainted with since 2013. Torshin cultivated Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, R-California, who has now lost his seat.
Spanish court documents allege that Torshin’s ties to organized crime date back to the mid-1990s when he first served at Russia’s Central Bank as a mid-level official and became friendly with one of his subordinates, Alexander Romanov. While Torshin went into politics, Romanov pursued a business career, serving as an executive at Rosneft and a distillery. But Romanov also ran afoul of the Russian authorities, according to Spanish court documents, which linked him to Moscow's powerful Taganskaya mob. Romanov and associates in the Taganskaya gang participated in criminal operations known as “raids,” in which gangsters used force to take over companies, according to court documents and interviews. According to the Spanish documents, in 2005, Romanov was convicted of financial crimes in Russia and served prison time. According to Spanish officials, Romanov remained a friend and business associate of Torshin, forging an alliance that bridged politics, business and crime in a manner typical of the Russian underworld. Another Russian lawmaker, Vladislav Reznik, was indicted in Madrid on charges of having a similar business and political relationship with a Russian crime boss, Gennady Petrov. Torshin also did business and communicated with other suspected Taganskaya figures, according to the case file. On July 12, 2013, an FBI agent working on organized crime issues at the U.S. embassy in Madrid provided Spanish investigators with a memorandum on the Taganskaya gang, including figures identified by Spanish documents as associates of Torshin. The memo shows that the FBI had been tracking the Russian group since the 1990s. According to the memo, the FBI described the Taganskaya mob’s involvement in illicit corporate “raids” in Russia and suspected money laundering in New Jersey. It also says that a Taganskaya figure described by the Spaniards as an associate of Torshin “may have been running financial operations for deceased thief-in-law Vyacheslav Ivankov” — a notorious mobster who during the 1990s spent time in New York and lived in Trump Tower for a while. Letitia James's actions are excellent news because her work is likely to revive investigations into whether the Russian mob, unknown to Trump but not Putin, used the NRA to funnel funds to the Trump campaign.
In 2016, a Spanish investigation connected Maria Butina's boss, Torshin, a Russian MP, a senator and former deputy governor of the Bank of Russia, with Alexander Romanov, the leader of the Taganskaya organized crime group, who had been arrested in Spain and sentenced to four years in prison in May 2016 for illegal transactions.
In February 2017, the Trump White House abruptly canceled a scheduled meeting between President Trump and high-level Russian central banker and senator Alexander Torshin after a national security aide discovered the official had been named by Spanish police as a suspected "godfather" of an organized crime and money-laundering ring, according to an administration official and four other sources familiar with the event. One year later, Russian interest in the National Prayer Breakfast only strengthened. In 2018 a large delegation of Russians — as many as 60 — got invited to attend the Prayer Breakfast; Russia had the largest group of any country that year. Torshin has been attending NRA annual meetings in the United States since at least 2011. Following the 2011 meeting, then NRA President David Keene expressed his support for Torshin's "endeavors" and extended an invitation to the 2012 meeting. Torshin has attended every NRA annual meeting between 2012 and 2016, occasionally with Butina, and has met every NRA president from 2012 until 2017. Torshin has, in fact, publicly boasted and tweeted that he and Butina are the only two Russians he knows of who are lifetime NRA members. Butina and Torshin attended the 2014 NRA annual meeting as special guests of former NRA president Keene. Torshin has since been a subject of an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. Special Counsel Robert Mueller pursued the above-mentioned Spanish leads that Torshin has links to Russian organized crime and laundered money from the Russian government to the NRA to benefit Trump's campaign. Torshin has also been the subject of an FBI probe into whether the Russian government attempted to illegally funnel money to the NRA to help Trump win the presidency.
As we now know, on May 16, 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report stating it had obtained "several documents that suggest the Kremlin used the NRA as a means of accessing and assisting Donald Trump and his campaign through Torshin and Butina, and that The Kremlin may also have used the NRA to fund Mr. Trump's campaign secretly."
The event in 2017 had been planned as a meet and greet with President Trump and Russian senator Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Bank of Russia and a close ally of President Vladimir Putin, in a waiting room at the Washington Hilton before the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 2, 2017. Torshin headed a Russian delegation to the annual event and was among a small number of guests who had been invited by Prayer Breakfast leaders to meet with Trump before it began. But while reviewing the list of guests, a White House national security aide responsible for European affairs noticed Torshin's name and flagged him as a figure who had "baggage" his suspected ties to organized crime. Torshin, once a leader of Putin's United Russia Party and a senator in the State Duma before being named deputy governor of the Bank of Russia in 2015, was one of the key figures in the Kremlin's meddling in the politics of the United States.
In addition to his appearance at the Prayer Breakfast - an event he has been attending for several years before 2017 - Torshin is also a "life member" of the National Rifle Association - which spent more than $30 million in support of President Trump's campaign. Torshin has regularly shown up at the gun lobby's annual conventions, even engaging in target-shooting contests in the exhibit halls with US politicians and strategists. His then assistant, Maria Butina, is the founding chair of a Russian gun-rights group, the Right to Bear Arms, described as a Russian version of the NRA. While attending the 2016 NRA convention in Louisville, Ky., Torshin was introduced to Donald Trump Jr. at a private dinner at a Louisville restaurant, according to three sources familiar with the encounter. In Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, Torshin, a former senator, directed dirty-money flows for mobsters in Moscow before being named a deputy head of the central bank last year, according to investigators in Spain.
They concluded that in the structure of the organized criminal group, Torshin "stood higher" than Romanov. As a result of wiretapping, which took place several months before the arrest of Romanov, Spanish intelligence agencies concluded that Romanov was following financial orders from Torshin and that Torshin himself could be the manager of the gang's assets. Romanov‘s properties in Spain, 80% of which Spanish police believe belong to Torshin, have been confiscated. Spanish police had planned to arrest Torshin in 2013 when he arrived in Mallorca for a friend's birthday party, but he did not arrive. Spanish police think that Russian authorities have tipped him off.
In 2018, wiretappings from the Spanish police were handed over to the FBI. When asked if this had any relationship with politics in the US, José Grinda, a Spanish prosecutor, replied, "Mr. Trump's son should be concerned." https://www.businessinsider.com/fbi-obtains-alexander-torshin-wiretaps-from-spanish-police-2018-5
Within the organization's hierarchical structure, it's known that Russian politician Alexander Porfirievich Torshin stands above Romanov, who calls him godfather or boss and conducts activities and investments on his behalf, investigators concluded in the report. Romanov was sentenced to almost four years in a Spanish prison in May after pleading guilty to illegal transactions totaling 1.65 million euros ($1.83 million) and $50,000.
Spain has been at the vanguard of European and U.S. efforts to eradicate suspected Russian criminal networks, whose tentacles prosecutors say reach into the highest echelons of power in Moscow. Earlier this year, a Spanish judge issued arrest warrants for 12 Russians as part of the crackdown, including two top officials, one of whom got his warrant dismissed on appeal. The allegations related to Torshin in the Civil Guard report are based on recordings made of phone conversations he had with Romanov in 2012 and 2013 and documents seized during a raid on a villa on Majorca's island Romanov owned at the time. Cristobal Martell, a lawyer for Romanov, didn't respond to e-mails and calls seeking comment.
Torshin said in an interview at the central bank's headquarters in Moscow that he first met Romanov in the early 1990s and later worked at the bank simultaneously, Torshin in the position he has now and Romanov, a lower-level employee. He said the two men kept in touch off and on but haven't spoken since Romanov was arrested in Spain almost three years ago. He admitted to being a godfather, but only in the Russian Orthodox sense, to Romanov's teenage son, who was baptized in 2000. "I'm a public individual, and I'm not hiding anywhere," Torshin said. One of Torshin's superiors at the bank between 1995 and 1998, former First Deputy Governor Sergey Aleksashenko, said Torshin might have returned to his old post at the behest of the FSB, with which he appears to have longstanding ties. Aleksashenko, a former head of Merrill Lynch in Moscow, was later a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
When he left parliament, Torshin, as deputy speaker, was part of the powerful National Anti-Terrorism Committee, a state body whose members include the FSB director and the ministers of defense, interior, and foreign affairs. He may be best known in Russia for leading the official inquiry into the 2004 Beslan school siege that left 334 dead, more than half children. His report concluded that the worst terrorist attack in modern Russian history could have been prevented if local police followed Moscow's orders to intensify surveillance and tighten security.
Torshin, who keeps Putin's small bust next to an Orthodox icon in his office, didn't elaborate on his FSB ties beyond what is publicly acknowledged. The FSB's press service in Moscow didn't respond to a request for comment. The central bank's press service said only that Governor Elvira Nabiullina hired Torshin for his political acumen. "The need for a better quality of interaction with the legislature became particularly evident during the acute phase of the decline in oil prices and the subsequent decline of the ruble at the end of 2014," the bank said.
A senior Spanish official said on condition of anonymity that prosecuting Torshin isn't worth the effort because Russia doesn't cooperate in cases involving high-ranking officials. In a 488-page complaint reviewed by Bloomberg in 2016, the product of a decade of investigations, Spanish prosecutors said members of another Russian syndicate, the St. Petersburg-based Tambovskaya group, moved into Spain to launder criminal proceeds in 1996 when Putin was deputy mayor of the city.
One of the prosecutors who wrote that report, Jose Grinda, told U.S. officials in 2010 that Putin runs a "virtual mafia" state where the activities of criminals are indistinguishable from those of the government, according to a classified cable from the U.S. Embassy in Madrid that was published by WikiLeaks.
Romanov may have been sidelined in jail, but that hasn't curtailed Russian criminal activity in Spain. In June 2017, Spanish police announced the detention of eight people accused of moving money for both the Taganskaya and Tambovskaya groups. Police said the raid in Catalonia led to the freezing of 142 bank accounts and 191 properties. Prosecutors said in a summary of their case against Romanov that one of the sources of funds that he laundered related to the Taganskaya mob's violent takeover of a prime piece of Moscow real estate, the General Univermag Moskva department store, during which a lawyer was murdered. The documents recovered from Romanov's villa show that Torshin used his position as a senior legislator to petition Russian law-enforcement authorities to intervene on behalf of alleged Taganskaya members in their dispute with the store's ousted management, according to the Civil Guard report. Torshin said in the interview that responding to requests for assistance as part of his job.
One of the people who allegedly orchestrated the department store grab was Grigory Rabinovich, a partner at a law firm in Moscow called Kremlin Partners, according to the prosecutors' case against Romanov. Rabinovich said in an interview that he'd done nothing wrong. He said that while he's done business with Romanov in the past, he's never met Torshin and had nothing to do with the lawyer's killing. "There was no point in his death," he said. "He wasn't of use to anyone."
As for Romanov, who left Russia for Spain sometime around 2008, after he finished a prison sentence for embezzling money from a vodka producer, Torshin said at the time he hadn't talked to him in more than 2 1/2 years. "The last time we spoke was on Nov. 27, 2013, when I turned 60," Torshin said. "He called to wish me a happy birthday." After the arrest and jailing of Maria Butina, who was later freed and expelled, it is not clear whether Torshin is still in contact with heavyweights in the NRA. Torshin, and his assistant, sometimes described as his associate or a representative, Maria Butina, have established a cooperative relationship between the Russian-based "Right to Bear Arms," which Butina founded in 2011. Torshin has been attending NRA annual meetings in the United States since 2011, but he is now banned from entering the US.
In January 2018, McClatchyDC reported that Robert Mueller's Special Counsel investigation is pursuing allegations that Torshin has links to Russian organized crime and laundered money from the Russian government to the NRA to benefit Trump's campaign. Torshin was also the subject of a probe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into whether the Russian government attempted to illegally funnel money to the NRA to help Trump win the presidency. Most of that money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.
On May 16, 2018, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report stating it had obtained "many documents that suggest the Kremlin used the National Rifle Association as a means of accessing and assisting Donald Trump and his campaign" through Torshin and Butina, and that "The Kremlin may also have used the NRA to fund Mr. Trump's campaign secretly." Most of that money was spent by an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors. In April 2018, OFAC imposed sanctions on 23 Russian nationals, including Torshin, whose assets in the United States were frozen and whose entry into the United States was barred, besides being subject to other financial disabilities Then; in April 2018, the Treasury's OFAC imposed sanctions on 23 Russian nationals, including Torshin, whose assets in the United States were frozen and whose entry into the United States barred, besides being subject to other financial disabilities. Other individuals from that list are Putin’s people involved in the laundering of dirty slush funds and funneling these funds into the Trump Organisation before 2016. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions-factbox/russian-businessmen-officials-on-new-u-s-sanctions-list-idUSKCN1HD22K
Nomad. Consultant
3 年Did Martians aid Biden/Harris steal the election? ugh