Trump associate socialized with alleged Russian agent Maria Butina in final weeks of 2016 campaign
Source: Washington Post
Maria Butina, the Russian gun-rights activist who was charged last month with working as an unregistered agent of the Kremlin, socialized in the weeks before the 2016 election with a former Trump campaign aide who anticipated joining the presidential transition team, emails show, putting her in closer contact with President Trump’s orbit than was previously known.
Butina sought out interactions with J.D. Gordon, who served for six months as the Trump campaign’s director of national security before leaving in August 2016 and being offered a role in the nascent Trump transition effort, according to documents and testimony provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee and described to The Washington Post.
The two exchanged several emails in September and October 2016, culminating in an invitation from Gordon to attend a concert by the rock band Styx in Washington. Gordon also invited Butina to attend his birthday party in late October of that year.
Prosecutors have said Butina, 29, who became a graduate student at American University in 2016, attempted to infiltrate the U.S. political system at the direction of a senior Russian official. Her activities came at the same time that, according to U.S. intelligence officials, Moscow was seeking to interfere in the presidential election to help Trump.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-associate-socialized-with-alleged-russian-agent-maria-butina-in-final-weeks-of-2016-campaign/2018/08/03/d87c1d84-96a6-11e8-80e1-00e80e1fdf43_story.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I know. Some people just have too much time on their hands! 
?h=e4d8ce4b&itok=Ohjs9qoO
J.D. Gordon
Trump Campaign Foreign Policy Advisor/Former Pentagon Spokesman
J.D. Gordon is a retired U.S. Navy officer who served as Pentagon spokesman from 2005 to 2009 under Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. In 2012, he founded Protect America Today, a super PAC focused on national security and foreign policy. Over the years, Gordon had been a senior advisor to Sarah Palin, Herman Cain, and Mike Huckabee and has been a recurring contributor to multiple conservative media outlets, including Fox News, The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, and The Hill. Gordon endorsed Donald Trump for president in February 2016 and became a part of his national security team.
During the Republican National Convention in July 2016, Trump campaign staffers worked to soften the official party platform concerning pledged support to Ukraine in fighting Russia. Gordon also met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during those few days in Cleveland but claims the two events are unrelated.
In January 2017, when the explosive Christopher Steele opposition-research dossier surfaced, it included a section describing a “Ukraine-WikiLeaks quid pro quo” wherein Trump would tamp down any talk of or retribution for Russia’s 2014 incursion into Ukraine and Russia would give stolen Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks.
Gordon told Business Insider in January he didn’t speak with convention delegates about changing the Republican Party platform language to remove the promise of sending arms to Ukraine. But in March 2017, Gordon told CNN he and other campaign officials did lobby to adjust the party platform to be more in line with Trump’s position on the issue.
https://investigaterussia.org/players/jd-gordon (Not much more at link)
