New revelations about Maria Butina's funding shine light on why Russia targeted NRA

[turbinetree]

ThinkProgress talks to Mark Galeotti about oligarchs, infiltration, and the blurred line between lobbying and espionage.

CASEY MICHEL
JUL 23, 2018, 6:48 PM

One week after the Department of Justice laid out its official complaint against Maria Butina — namely, how the Russian national managed to build up a network of contacts in the Republican Party and National Rifle Association (NRA) alike — a number of questions remain. Who, for instance, is the unnamed second American who helped Butina coordinate her efforts? Which other Republicans did she manage to meet with? And what was Butina’s ultimate aim in cultivating her NRA contacts?

New revelations from the weekend brought an answer to one of these lingering questions. On Sunday, a person familiar with Butina’s testimony before Senate investigators told the Washington Post that she’d been financed by Russian billionaire Konstantin Nikolaev. A governmental document supporting Butina’s current detention noted evidence that Butina’s “Twitter messages, chat logs, and emails refer” to Nikolaev, whom Butina described as her “funder.”

Nikolaev, worth an estimated $1.2 billion, isn’t nearly as prominent as other Kremlin oligarchs — or even some of the so-called “minigarchs” attempting to climb into Russia’s upper crust — nor has he been on the receiving end of previous U.S. sanctions, despite revelations that he has worked closely elsewhere with Kremlin insiders like Arkady Rotenberg and Gennady Timchenko. (For good measure, Nikolaev’s son, Andrey, worked as a volunteer with Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016.)

The news of Nikolaev’s role in Butina’s infiltration efforts, however, follows on the heels of other oligarch-linked revelations, ranging from a coup attempt in Montenegro to protests in Macedonia, funded or brain-stormed by Russian oligarchs.

https://thinkprogress.org/new-revelations-about-maria-butinas-funding-shine-light-on-why-russia-targeted-nra-311b92f1418d/





Malcolm Nance refers to this in his new book...................

[Wellstone ruled]

1. No collusion,what the F.

Yup,no Russians in my Campaign,what the F.