anexplanationofunfortunateevents:

THIS
IS IMPORTANT. Part of why I often start Trump-Russia posts by saying “this is an explainer for people
who are interested but a little confused, but you don’t need to be interested in this” is because I think it should be easier to
distinguish between “developments which make great clickbait” and
“developments you have to understand.” Let me be clear:

YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THIS.

Even
leftier-than-thou caricatures who don’t care at all about foreign
sabotage of American elections – because what did we expect, going
out in that pantsuit? – need to get a grip on this story, because it
is plugged into the structural issues which give corporations and
wealthy individuals such overwhelming influence in American politics.
If you don’t care about Trump-Russia, mentally replace every
mention of Russian intelligence or the Kremlin with “the mafia,” so you can understand it. 

The
National Rifle Association is singularly responsible for the epidemic
of gun violence in America.Their primary purpose is so cartoonishly monstrous on its own that it
can be hard to get sight of the other ways they affect American
politics. They’re a keystone conservative interest group.
An “A” rating from them isn’t just “this candidate
supports the second amendment,” it’s “this
candidate passes muster as a conservative overall.” Kind of a
Zagat’s Guide for right-wing assholes.

So,
on top of their other sins, they’ve almost single-handedly
radicalized elected Republicans. It’s not just that they can give
campaign contributions, although those are substantial. They prop up primary campaigns
against any Republican who doesn’t do exactly what they want, which
is punishment even if you win the nomination. Primaries cost time and
money, and a nasty primary can hurt their chances in the general
election or make them politically weakened in their next term. (Sound familiar?) They got a lot more effective at that in 2010,
after the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v FEC opened the
floodgates for more “dark” (essentially untraceable) money
flowing through political advocacy groups.

The
NRA actively stokes the public health crisis of gun violence. It
stokes the tensions caused by systemic racism. It’s consolidated the power to make or break Republican elected
officials. And it has functionally unlimited funding which is
effectively impossible for voters to track. When you hear about weak
spots in American democracy that the Kremlin could find and exploit,
this is what it means.

That
is exactly what did happen, and special prosecutor Robert Mueller and
his FBI agents are investigating it. 

The
campaign finance aspect of this is pretty straightforward. It’s
illegal for foreign entities to make financial contributions to a
political campaign, and there’s good reason to suspect that Russian
sources pumped money into the NRA as a means of funneling support to
the Trump campaign. This might be how they reported spending more in 2016 than any other campaign year…and shelled out even more than reported. Investigators are going to scrutinize that, more or less in the same
way as they’re looking into the other financial crimes.

The
NRA is also implicated in the meetings between Trump campaign
representatives and sketchy Kremlin figures. Their 2016 national
convention was apparently a safe space for a meeting between Donald
Trump, Jr. and the Russian banker/suspected organized crime kingpin Alexander Torshin, who also met with Trump Sr. at the 2015 NRA
convention. It regularly spreads talking points from Russian
propaganda. It’s had shady ties to Putin since years before the
Trump campaign. 

Torshin
is part of The Right to Bear Arms, an NRA partner program in Russia,
which is weird because, Russian history being what it is, gun rights are not a thing in Russia.
Even if there were
widespread interest, it wouldn’t be allowed. Putin’s regime keeps
civil society under its thumb because it’s terrified of peaceful
protests. 

(We are in this geopolitical clusterfuck because President Snowflake got #triggered when his neighbors went out for a walk four years ago.) They really don’t want to arm potential dissidents. 

But they really
do want to form ties with the American right. Torshin’s
Russian group hosted one high-profile American gun rights activist in
2014 on a trip to Moscow, and a delegation of NRA leadership in late 2015. In
early 2016, members of the group opened a mysterious corporation in
South Dakota with members of the NRA. 

In
May of 2017, NRA leadership freaked out about reporting on
Trump-Russia – months before they were accused of being involved. 

So
if congressional Republicans seem more unhinged than usual to you
lately, you’re probably right. If there’s something down this road – and apparently it’s
actually worse than it looks right now – then they’re not just protecting Trump out of ideology,
partisanship, or fear of their Trump fanatic voters. If dirty rubles
flowed into the 2016 election through the NRA’s political action
committee, they didn’t just go to the Trump campaign. They
contaminated most of the Republicans in Congress, many of whom also got help from the Kremlin in the form of stolen Democratic
emails. 

At
best, Republicans in Washington are agitated because they’ve
realized they are in a situation where they look really guilty. At
worst, they’re agitated because they know they are really guilty.

The
National Rifle Association is the rotten heart of the modern
Republican Party. If it’s this deep in the Russian campaign against
American democracy, the implications are massive.

Further
Reading:

• You
  can read the whole McClatchy report about the investigation, or a summary at Rolling Stone. 
• Here’s a timeline and explanation of the NRA’s relationship to Russian power brokers, and an explanation of why it’s happening.