NRA Distances Itself From Curious Russia Trip

As the scandal surrounding the Russian infiltration of the NRA has grown, the gun group has maintained a steely silence. The NRA has not responded to perhaps a dozen inquiries about its Russian ties from Rolling Stone alone. But an outside lawyer for the gun group and a past president of the NRA have now spoken to the New York Times for the paper’s new dispatch on the scandal.

The NRA is attempting to create distance between CEO Wayne LaPierre and the NRA officers who traveled to Moscow in 2015, at the invitation of criminal Russian influence agent Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin — the sanctioned now-former Russian central banker described in court documents as her handler — where the NRA members met with top members of Vladimir Putin’s government.

William A. Brewer III, a lawyer who represents the NRA, tells the Times: “Wayne was opposed to the trip.” Allan Cors, who was president of the gun group at the time of the 2015 meeting in Moscow, underscores this same talking point: “Wayne expressed concerns about this trip and suggested that I not participate. Wayne did not want any misconception that this was an official trip,” Cors added. “Frankly, I had similar concerns.”

Such concerns, oddly, did not prevent the trip from taking place. And the Times reports the NRA paid for at least some travel expenses. The NRA delegation included first vice president Pete Brownell (whose allegedly unsanctioned participation didn’t prevent his rise to become NRA president in 2017); Joe Gregory, who chairs the Golden Ring of Freedom, the NRA’s elite club for million-dollar lifetime donors; and past president David Keene, who had forged the NRA’s close ties to Moscow, visiting in 2013 to declare: “There are no peoples that are more alike than Americans and Russians.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/nra-russia-lapierre-786193/