As for the NRA, it will ultimately contribute at least $30 million toward Trump’s election, a sum still being investigated by both media and federal law enforcement as possibly having been illegally commingled with “Russian money.”176
More of Trump’s lucrative but clandestine connections to the NRA will surface in 2019, when the Daily Beast reveals that “the Trump 2020 campaign is reportedly using a shell company to buy ads in coordination with the National Rifle Association, using the same potentially illegal techniques as the 2016 campaign.”177
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On April 7, 2015—eight months before he hosts NRA officials in Moscow—Torshin, along with Butina, is introduced by Simes to Federal Reserve vice chairman Nathan Sheets and treasury undersecretary for international affairs Stanley Fischer.178 Not long after these meetings between two Kremlin agents and two of America’s top public financial institutions, the Kremlin makes its first contact with a unit of the Treasury Department, the Office of Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes, to propose what it calls the “ISIL Project”: an information-sharing agreement between the Kremlin and the United States focused on “financial institutions in the Middle East suspected of supporting ISIS.”179 Incredibly, officials within the Treasury Department agree to the Kremlin’s proposed project using “a Gmail backchannel with the Russian government”—a channel that thereafter will be used by Kremlin agents not to track ISIS but to “press[] their American counterparts for private financial documents on at least two dozen dissidents, academics, private investigators, and American citizens … [including] sensitive documents on Dirk, Edward, and Daniel Ziff, billionaire investors who had run afoul of the Kremlin.”180 That the Kremlin is seeking information on the Ziff brothers months before it releases a summary of its principal conclusions on the subject to the Trump campaign only underscores how seriously the Kremlin takes this research. Indeed, U.S. intelligence officials have since said that the Russian outreach to the Obama administration’s Treasury Department in 2015 was by 2016 almost certainly an espionage operation directly orchestrated by Russian intelligence.182 The Treasury Department has “refused to tell BuzzFeed News why its officials were communicating with unofficial Gmail accounts at the same time that Russia was sending the suspicious requests, or to say whether it eventually turned over any documents [to the Kremlin] in response.”183 The Kremlin’s 2015 espionage, and the Treasury Department’s silence over what it ultimately disclosed to the Russians, does suggest that by the time Kremlin agents arrived at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, they knew or had good reason to suspect that the individuals on whom they would be providing the Trump campaign so much information, the Ziff brothers, were indeed Clinton donors.
In February 2015, two months before he sets up a meeting between Torshin and Butina and Treasury and Federal Reserve personnel Fischer and Sheets—and just over a year before he becomes a key Trump campaign national security and foreign policy adviser—Dimitri Simes, along with the Russian-born publisher of the Center for the National Interest’s in-house publication, the National Interest, travel to Moscow to meet personally with Vladimir Putin.184 While it is unknown what Simes, his publisher, and Putin discuss in Moscow, that it may well have involved Donald Trump is underscored by the fact that, in the same month Trump announces his presidential run, Simes publishes an article by Butina stating that “certain U.S. politicians and Russians share many common interests,” an article that at the time appears to apply only to one GOP candidate: a New York City businessman with a surprisingly sunny view of both the Russian Federation and its president.185
When the Mueller Report reveals, in April 2019, that Simes acted as perhaps the Trump campaign’s most indispensable adviser on Russia, it will give many Americans an opportunity to learn about the Soviet-born think tank director and his Center for the National Interest for the first time. Simes’s center was founded by former president Richard Nixon as the Nixon Center in 1994; Nixon personally installed Simes as the president and chief executive of the conservative think tank that year.186 In 2011, the center changed its name to the Center for the National Interest, but the Nixon family remains closely involved in the think tank, with Julie Nixon Eisenhower—whose brother-in-law is Ed Cox, the New York state GOP chairman who introduced Carter Page to Trump’s campaign—sitting on CNI’s board along with Simes, his fellow Trump adviser Richard Burt, and (by spring 2016) Jeff Sessions, head of Trump’s Simes-concocted national security advisory committee.187
Simes’s decades at the Nixon Center/Center for the National Interest apparently also