WASHINGTON — An investigation by Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee alleges that the National Rifle Association "became a foreign asset" for Russia ahead of the 2016 election.
The committee's ranking member, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, began the probe in February 2018. The report, published Friday, found the NRA "engaged in a years-long effort" to facilitate the U.S.-based activities of Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin.
"The scope of the NRA’s support for these Russian activities—activities that the DOJ indicted as an illegal foreign government-sponsored influence scheme—raise concerns about whether the activity that the NRA, its officers, and board members engaged were in furtherance of the organization’s exempt purpose," the report said.
Butina, an admitted Russian covert agent, was sentenced in April to 18 months for gathering intelligence on the NRA and other groups at the direction of a former Russian lawmaker.
The report also focused on the group's involvement in organizing a 2015 visit to Moscow where Butina and Torshin led a delegation of NRA officials.
"NRA officers’ apparent use of the NRA for personal gain fits a larger pattern of reported self-dealing and raises serious questions about whether the NRA broke U.S. tax laws," Sen. Wyden tweeted.
In response, the staff for committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, issued a separate report stating they found the $6,000 paid for the Russia trip as "relatively insubstantial" and declared the evidence in the minority's report "does not raise concerns that the NRA abused its tax-exempt purposes when some of its high-ranking officials traveled to Russia in December 2015."
"The Minority report reads more like a political document directed at an organization well known in U.S. politics to be despised by Democrats because of its advocacy for Second Amendment rights," the majority's rebuttal report stated.
