A GOP Kremlin-insider connected Alexander Torshin to Congressmen. Then he joined the NRA
Part 4 of a 5 part series — Chapter 2; the Grand Old Putin Party.
This is the missing link between the Kremlin and the National Rifle Association.
A Republican insider co-organized his annual World Russia Forum with a high-ranking Russian Central Banker who deeply embedded himself into the National Rifle Association (NRA) after meeting Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) and a high-ranking member of the American Conservative Union, whose leader later ascended to be the NRA’s President.
Now, the FBI is investigating possibly illegal financial ties between the NRA and Russia’s current deputy central banker Alexander Torshin, a former deputy Chairman of the Russian Federation Council.
Torshin is a high-ranking member of Putin’s United Russia political party
But Spanish authorities want him on money laundering charges as a “godfather” of the Taganskaya gang, and they recently provided wiretaps of his conversations to the FBI.
Dr. Edward Lozansky introduced Russian “godfather” Alexander Torshin to American politics and members of Congress after a November 2009 meeting in Moscow.
Then, Torshin attended the April 2010 National Prayer Breakfast according to this RIA Novosti report, which hasn’t been previously covered in the Western media: (via a translator)
“There the breakfast is not formal or serious discussion. You don’t need to decide things there, but simply find common ground on hot issues” — emphasized Torshin.
He reiterated the importance that it’s called a “breakfast”, the food is not the point. “Some eggs and tea — that is all,” explained Torshin.
Dr. Edward Lozansky is a Republican conservative movement insider with decades of dubious links to the politics, ruling class and intelligence services of Russia.
He’s a GOP conservative activist with forty years’ experience — a Soviet-emigre, who took American citizenship but has since moved back to Moscow, who is now professor at Russian state-run universities — and an opinion columnist at the Washington Times.
Dr. Lozansky and Torshin’s 2009 meeting is memorialized on a Russian government website which immediately preceded the legislator’s rapid rise in the highest circles of America’s gun lobby.
We know Dr. Lozansky first met with Alexander Torshin in his role as a high-ranking Russian legislator from Putin’s party United Russia on November 6th, 2009 because it is published on this public page in the Russian Federation Council’s website (translation).
The meeting was held to formalize Torshin’s role co-organizing the professor’s World Russia Forum event in 2010 in Washington, D.C.
The Federation Council’s website says:
At the meeting of the First Deputy Chairman of the Council of Federation Alexander Torshin and the President of the World Russian Forum Edward Lozansky , the possibility of holding a joint Russian-American event in the framework of celebrating the 65th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War and World War II was discussed.
In particular, E. Lozansky said that for already 28 years in the United States in honor of Victory Day a “meeting on the Elbe” for the veterans participating in this historic event has been held. He proposed in the anniversary 2010 to hold a similar meeting in Washington, on April 25, with the participation of Russian officials.
According to E. Lozansky , within the framework of this event it will be possible to discuss various directions of mutually beneficial cooperation between our countries. In turn, Alexander Torshin supported this idea and promised to discuss the possibility of participation of the Russian side in this project at a meeting of the Victory Organizing Committee.
The earliest known contact by Torshin with American politics was an introduction to the Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, which was blown off by her aides for a meeting with the Lt. Governor, who doesn’t recall Torshin.
Notably, the requirements for a person to register as with the Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act is that they engage in political for or in the interests of a foreign principal under their direction in any way.
Last year, Gazprom-owned tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda called Dr. Lozansky the “main Russian lobbyist in the US.”
Dr. Lozansky and his wife Tatiana are well known in Washington, D.C. as the proprietors of Russia House in Dupont Circle. Russia House is the former Soviet Union’s “unofficial” trade mission in the 1990s, which housed a think tank and business center, that has long since converted into a restaurant, which he still haunts.
A thorough search of the internet and private search tools revealed no prior ties between Alexander Torshin and or between Torshin and any American entities or causes prior to his late 2009 meeting with Dr. Edward Lozansky.
However, before Torshin attended Dr. Lozansky’s World Russia Forum, he visited the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C.
The First Vice-Speaker of the Federation Council liked the informal nature of the prayer breakfast so much — noting that it wasn’t about eating, though eggs and tea were served — that he told RIA Novosti (translated) on April 2nd, 2010 that he planned to bring it to the Duma.
The 2010 World Russia Forum Was Co-Organized By Alexander Torshin
Notably, the World Russia Forum adopted verbatim all of the themes expressed in the Council’s post.
Alexander Torshin’s peak political media moment at home, prior to attending the 2010 World Russia Forum, was his role chairing the Commission to investigate the Beslan Terror terror attack, an event of considerable controversy.
Luckily for Russians, his high-profile proposal in October 2009, to implement American-style private prisons in Russia along with a mass incarceration penal code, failed.
Then former Federation Councilman Torshin was a panelist at the 2010 World Russia Forum — which he presumably co-organized as stated — and he suddenly became his country’s foremost gun rights legislator.
His listed public appearance at the Forum was for the Congressional luncheon, with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA).
Donald Devine, the Vice Chairman of the American Conservative Union (ACU) — which organizes the annual Conservative Political Action forum best known as CPAC — was one of the speakers at that World Russia Forum.
At the time, David Keene was at the end of his run as the ACU’s Chairman which lasted from 1984–2011.
In May 2011, Senator Torshin ascended to become the Acting Chairman of Russia’s Federation Council for several months before a permanent Chair was elected.
In 2011, David Keene ended his long career at the scandal ravaged American Conservative Union, which runs the annual CPAC convention gatherings.
His former partner Matthew Schlapp runs CPAC today, and his wife Mercy is President Trump’s strategic communications advisor.
That’s when Keene assumed the new role of NRA President, a title which he would hold for a little over two years.
The Washington Times hired David Keene in the role of Opinion Editor in July 2013, shortly after he relinquished the NRA’s top post in the wake of the Newtown mass shooting.
The month following his return to the Deputy Chairman’s role in Athena Russian Federation Council, that’s when Alexander Torshin tweeted that he’s an NRA member for the first time.
On October 23rd, 2013, David Keene met then-Duma Member Alexander Torshin in Moscow, when he was still a prominent member of the NRA’s Board of Directors, according to this Facebook post memorializing the encounter.
Keene has since deleted the linked page on his website about meeting Torshin.
Dr. Lozansky was an occasional contributor to the Washington Times newspaper starting in 2000, but beginning on December 30th, 2013, he began writing what would become a nearly monthly column for the opinion section. Seven of his columns in the Times since 2014 were paid placements.
On January 2nd, 2014, Torshin published a lone column in the editorial section of the Washington Times, eulogizing Mikhail Kalashnikov, who created the AK-47 assault-rifle carried by the Russian army.
The following month, US-Russia relations changed forever after Vladimir Putin seized the Crimean peninsula and forcibly annexed it.
Alexander Torshin left the Federation Counsel in 2015 and became Deputy Chairman of the Russian Central Bank.
“Alexander Torshin’s official title is State Secretary, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Russia,” says Anders Åslund, the distinguished Georgetown University professor who is the senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Counsel for Russia and Ukraine.
“But when I made inquiries, I was told that Torshin was representing Putin’s Presidential Administration, because their central bank is not truly independent.”
Central banks are supposed to be independent of governments.
At the end of 2015, Torshin held a very conspicuous meeting with a delegation from the NRA in Moscow, complete with tours of Red Square for his guests, including former Milwaukee County Sheriff David A Clarke, Jr. and with Deputy Prime Minister Dimitri Rogozin.
Across town that night, eventual Trump campaign advisor and convicted former National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn was paid to fly to a dinner with celebrating the RT network’s 10th Anniversary with Russian President Vladimir Putin and the newly sanctioned Russian oligarch Victor Vekselberg, amongst others.
Since then, Dimitri Rogozin has switched jobs last month from his post at the Kremlin, in charge of the Russian military-industrial complex, to his new job as the head of the space agency, Roscosmos.
Putin’s choice of Rogozin for the formerly apolitical Russian space agency which is part of the International Space Station consortium will make it nearly impossible to hold high level meetings due to the US and EU sanctions against him.
Last June, a few weeks after we published the first installment in this series, Dimitri Rogozin made a post on Facebook and tagged his friend Dr. Lozansky (below) though the caption doesn’t reference the professor, that we can tell.
Sometime between then and now, Dmitry Rogozin wiped his widely followed Facebook account clean
But we captured a screenshot and translation of the post.
As of today, Dr. Lozansky is still Facebook friends with both Dmitry Rogozin and his wife.
Putin’s favorite House Republican Congressman was a regular at the World Russia Forum
Rep. Rohrabacher is infamous for being best known as Putin’s favorite Congressman.
Putin and Rohrabacher first met over 20 years ago, when the former was a Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg.
Over drinks they held an arm-wrestling contest.
The smaller, former KGB officer trounced the American Congressman, touching off an international bromance that continues until this day.
He is also a frequent and long-time guest at the World Russia Forum, including the 2015 edition shown above — a year after Russia invaded Ukraine — when the panel participants were whittled down to only a tame crop of Russia Today regular contributors that Brookings fellow James Kirchick called “Putin’s bootlickers,” like professor Steven Cohen, and his wife, Katrina van Heuvel who publishes The Nation, which he characterized as “Pravda, in English.”
Dr. Lozansky called Rohrabacher a key Trump advisor on Russian TV in February 2016, when nobody else did.
Last summer, The Daily Beast reported that Rep. Rohrabacher took a strange trip to Moscow in April 2016, for a meeting at the Kremlin with the same Russian Prosecutor-general Yuri Chaika, whose agent Natalia Veselnitskaya, met with the Trump Campaign’s top officials just two months later.
Then, Rep. Rohrabacher was singled out in Special Counsel Mueller’s February 2018 indictments against former Trump Campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy Rich Gates.
This February, Gates pled guilty to lying to the FBI in an attempt try and cover up a 2013 meeting between Manafort and Rep. Rohrabacher regarding Ukraine.
The Russian Cultural Center was one of the sponsors of Dr. Lozansky’s 2010 World Russia Forum.
It’s a is part of the Rossotrudnichestvo, a state-run organization controlled by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The FBI has been probing the Rossotrudnichestvo for spying activities since at least 2013. Christopher Steele’s Trump Russia dossier posited a connection between the cultural organization and Putin’s attack on the 2016 election.
“To be sure, the Kremlin uses diaspora groups, NGOs, and cultural organizations to conduct influence operations around the world,” says former Obama National Security Council Russia specialist, Dr. Michael Carpenter, who is now the Senior Director Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement.
“It also uses the state-run cultural organization Rossotrudnichestvo as a cover assignment for its intelligence operatives.”
More recently, business intelligence company Fusion GPS — who collated Christopher Steele’s dossier — recently told Congress that the FBI considers the RCC a front for Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, and has investigated them for spying activities.
That year’s World Russia Forum also included former Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) — recently a pro-Trump “progressive” candidate for Ohio’s governor who lost in the primary — Carl Levin (D-MI) and Bill Delahunt (D-MA), along with Vladimir Platonov, Speaker of the Moscow Duma.
Another notable speaker was the Director of the Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISS).
RISS is an organization that’s officially part of the Russian Presidential Administration, which last year Reuters reported drafted Putin’s plan of attack America’s 2016 elections.
After the 2010 World Russia Forum — but before joining the NRA — Senator Torshin also undertook a very public, somewhat Quixotic push to loosen handgun laws in Russia.
The Gun Lobby arrives in a country with no gun rights
Alexander Torshin’s involvement with gun issues rose dramatically thereon and coincided with his relationship to Maria Butina, an attractive young woman from the Russian countryside, who has been called his official aide.
Butina joined Putin’s United Russia Party in 2011 and wrote a very defensive story in her LiveJournal — a popular blogging site for Russians —that translates as “Operation Implementation” and ran in the party’s Youth Primaries that year.
Alexander Torshin’s plan to expand gun rights drew coverage media — coverage even though the Russian Ministry of the Interior was against the plan (since, logically, it would increase gun violence) — because he is a member of Putin’s United Russia party.
Most educated Russia pundits have pointed out that there is no right to bear arms in Russia, and that Putin does not want one either, though handgun laws were loosened in response to Torshin’s campaign.
Maria Butina formed a group called “Right to Bear Arms” and maintained a close relationship with Torshin.
“The Russian ‘NGO’ the Right to Bear Arms, which has been in the news,” says former US National Security Council Russia Director Michael Carpenter, who is currently the Senior Director of the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, “is illustrative of a front organization designed to co-opt the NRA and like-minded 2A groups in the United States.”
Butina’s unusual drive to promote Russian individual gun rights drew notice in America in 2012 when she and Torshin lobbied the Federation Council, their Senate, to create gun rights.
It’s very unusual for a political movement for a policy that Putin opposes, to openly coalesce around a key member of his United Russia party, but that’s what happened with Butina and Torshin.
The stout Russian legislator and his slim, red-headed side kick became the Russian darlings of the NRA, working hard to promote the gun maker Kalashnikov USA — an unsanctioned spin off of the sanctioned parent company — which is now under federal investigation for ties to Putin’s government.
The pair went on to make a very high profile appearance together with Governor Scott Walker (R-WI) at his speech to the NRA’s annual meeting in Tennessee, which was extensively documented by Walker’s Section 527 tax-exempt political organization “Our American Revival.”
Sometime between then and now, Our American Revival removed the link to this April 2015 photo gallery of from their website, but it remains intact inside Archive.org.
Butina noted her a pleasant surprise in her blog about her conversation with Gov. Walker, that “will remain in my memory forever,” citing his use of Russian pleasantries and the aspiring presidential candidate’s lack of “aggression” towards her home country.
It turns out that Our American Revival obtained significant donations — documented by tax filings — of $250,000 in April 2015, from a company owned by the Russian oligarch Len Blavatnik, who is a US citizen and longtime Kremlin-linked business partner with recently sanctioned Oleg Deripaska.
Those donations made Blavatnik’s Access Industries into Gov. Walker’s second largest donor to the tax-exempt group, behind the founder of the shipping company U-Line.
In September 2016, after Walker’s presidential hopes were long gone, Len Blavatnik donated another $100,000 to Our American Revival.
One of Walker’s presidential PACs also collected $1.1 million dollars from Access Industries, most of which was refunded when he quit the presidential race after only a three month campaign.
Two months after her meeting with Gov. Walker, Maria Butina penned a memorable op-ed four days before Donald Trump launched his campaign, entitled “The Bear and the Elephant” in the Center for the National Interest’s website, a pro-Putin policy think tank.
Her story prophetically explained that, “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.”
Two days after Butina’s story was published, she attended Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s presidential campaign launch, along with Torshin and Keene.
Exactly one month after Maria Butina wrote her Bear and Elephant op-ed and visited Gov. Walker’s campaign launch, the Russian gun activist asked Donald Trump a question about sanctions against Russia in a public forum.
Alexander Torshin continued to visit all of the NRA’s annual meetings, eventually connecting with Donald Trump Jr. in May 2016 during the presidential election, just weeks before his infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian agents.
Eventually, on February 2nd, 2017, Torshin tried to have a meet and greet with President Trump before the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.
Alexander Torshin’s meeting with Trump got abruptly cancelled when his ties to Russian mafia money laundering activity in Spain were exposed.
Now, he’s under FBI investigation, and so is the NRA.
In April 2018, Alexander Torshin was placed on the US Treasury’s sanctions list in for his role in Putin’s attack on America’s last presidential election.
Today, Maria Butina’s website ongun.ru is offline, its domain registration expired.
Alexander Torshin’s and Maria Butina’s activities from 2011 to present have been well documented, even including her detour in South Dakota with NRA activist Paul Erickson, who approached the Trump campaign trying to setup a meeting with Putin.
But Torshin’s main point of entry to the American Conservative Union, leading eventually the NRA and ultimately high-ranking officials from the Republican Party was Dr. Edward Lozansky and his World Russia Forum.
Dr. Lozansky’s cooperative planning for the 2010 World Russia Forum with a leader from a foreign political party alone, should have caused him to file an immediate FARA registration with the US Department of Justice.
And Alexander Torshin’s first, undeniable step into conservative American politics was his visit to the 2010 National Prayer Breakfast.
Supplemental Material
Relationship chart of the main people in Story 4:
Donald Trump Jr.’s relationship to the main people in Chapter 4:
The Grand Old Putin Party is a series of investigative reports co-authored by Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson.
Ed. Note: Added excerpt from RIA Novosti story cited in original release on 7/19/18 to story.
