“absolutely” be in line for nuclear weapons, with two proffered justifications: first, that the United States would otherwise be paying for Saudi Arabia’s defense, and second, that Saudi Arabia’s acquisition of nuclear weapons “is going to happen anyway. It’s going to happen anyway. It’s only a question of time.”163 The first of these two justifications for arming the Saudis with nuclear weapons calls to mind Trump’s repeated claims on Twitter that Saudi Arabia does not pay enough for its own defense; these complaints, along with his statement on CNN, may well have served as a signal to the Saudis—and their allies—that as president Trump would get out of their way if they ever sought to begin arming themselves in “self-defense.”
Flynn’s 2015 and 2016 policy prescriptions for Saudi Arabian energy and nuclear weapons development would not merely impact Riyadh, however. Lawfare explains that, “in 2009, the United Arab Emirates voluntarily included a legally binding provision to its 123 agreement to never acquire or develop enrichment and reprocessing technology. The agreement also bound the U.S. to impose those same conditions in future agreements on other countries in the region, or if not, to lift them on the UAE.”164 MBZ therefore knows, in 2015, that any decision the U.S. government makes on nuclear energy in Saudi Arabia—including a decision to allow or even encourage Saudi Arabia to pursue nuclear weapons—applies to the UAE as well. Moreover, Egypt, another member of the Red Sea Conspiracy, has a clause identical to the Emiratis’ in its own nuclear agreements with the United States.165
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As Vladimir Putin is hosting Michael Flynn in Moscow on December 10, 2015, the Kremlin is also playing host to other individuals central to Trump’s campaign: top officials at the National Rifle Association (NRA) who make a trip to the Russian capital, from December 8 through December 13, that is jointly orchestrated by the organization and U.S.-dwelling Kremlin operative Maria Butina.166 In Moscow, the NRA officials and some of their most prominent U.S. supporters—a travel group that includes former NRA president David Keene, future NRA president Pete Brownell, NRA fundraiser Joe Gregory, NRA “benefactor” Arnold Goldschlager, and high-profile Trump surrogate David Clarke—meet with Kremlin officials. The NRA pays for the group’s travel expenses and for the gifts they present to their Kremlin hosts.167 Keene in particular is interested in securing a “private interview” with Putin.168
According to the Daily Beast, Maria Butina’s boyfriend, GOP operative Paul Erickson—who will later be indicted for wire fraud and money laundering—exchanges emails with certain of the NRA travelers prior to their Moscow trip. The emails reveal that the officials “believed they were meeting with Kremlin power players who could influence the country’s president.”169 The reason officials at the NRA would want to “influence” Putin is likewise revealed in Erickson’s emails: the GOP operative’s plan, apparently embraced by the NRA brass with whom he spoke, was to “creat[e] a way for the Kremlin to connect with a future Republican president.”170 Because U.S. presidents ordinarily can call other world leaders at will, the implication in the Erickson-NRA effort is that the channel they wish to create to the Kremlin is a covert back channel—an ambition that carries with it the desire to hide GOP-Kremlin contacts from the American public, U.S. media, the U.S. intelligence community, or all three. Indeed, Erickson will represent in his emails to the NRA officials—possibly on intelligence received, at least in part, from his Russian girlfriend—that “Russia believes that high-level contacts with the NRA might be the best means of neutral introduction to … the next American President.”171 Erickson underscores that the officials’ Moscow trip therefore has “enormous diplomatic consequences.”172 He adds that the Kremlin’s interest is only in communicating via back channel with a Republican president, and that nothing he has said to NRA representatives applies if the next U.S. president is a Democrat.173
Among the Kremlin officials the NRA delegation meets in Moscow are Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister—whose ministry will make contact with the Trump campaign using Ivan Timofeev and Joseph Mifsud as cutouts just ninety days later—deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin, and Dimitri Simes’s Russian Central Bank contact (and its deputy governor) Alexander Torshin, who will later be accused by federal prosecutors, as an unnamed and unindicted co-conspirator, of being Maria Butina’s handler in the United States.174 Many of those the NRA officials meet with, including Rogozin and Torshin, will later be sanctioned by the United States as punishment for the Kremlin’s election hacking and interference during the 2016 presidential campaign.175