Rachel Maddow takes a look at the days top political news stories. By the letters, chs. Confidential human source. Now, the trove of documents detail reports of payments to steele, mostly redacted. You can see there, thats a lot of white space. There are two exceptions. The final page is information from a document, from february 2016. Of course, thats long before the russia probe began. It says steele was, quote, verbally admonished by the fbi and that steele acknowledged the admonishment and even signed a document noting it. Now, from this excerpt, which obviously is tantalizing, we dont have the wider context of why. The other item comes from page two of these new documents. It concerns the fbis decision to terminate its relationship with steele. Guess when . Just days before the 2016 election. Now, this document says steele had confirmed his relationship with the fbi to an outside party. And that he was a source for a, quote, online article. In addition to revealing his relationshi
Rachel Maddow takes a look at the days top political news stories. They are known as the steele dossier. They allege, among other things, that the Trump Campaign had organized collusion with the kremlin. Quote, this is something of huge significance. Way above party politics, that Intelligence Officer told corn, that would be steele. Quote, i think trumps own party should be aware of this stuff, as well. The official confirmation of the fbi investigation into the Trump Campaigns contacts with russia was not confirmed for many more months. Its even easy to forget that, because its the kind of big information thats the center of American Politics, so we all talk about it. People who dont even follow the news know about it. But lets be clear. It was not until march 2017, many months later is, thats after the inauguration, after the election, when fbi director james comey went down to the hill, where he was testifying and said, yes, there was an open probe. By that time, the fbi had also i
was a guy named paul erickson, who was an nra activist. and he had been working with her to infiltrate, penetrate, make connections with people in the nra and other conservative groups. so if she were raided, as she was, one would expect him to know about it and word to start filtering out. which could have caused a tremendous panic within the nra and might have and might have led to anyone being connected with butina, to be scared, i m not sure about an indictment, but to be scared of being caught up certainly exposure. yes. and peter brunell was very much involved, having gone, you know, on trips that butina organized and having been one of the nra highest officials that she had cultivated. when you look at the nra, which has a lot of seasoned
we do the same thing and value the same kind of things and we need to work together. there are no more peoples more alike than americans and russians. i mean, it s fine if you want to bring people together with commonality, but that s not usually what you hear from conservative political operatives in america, certainly not back then, 2013. fast forward to december 2015. the middle of what is, of course, the pre-presidential campaign season. keene as well as other nra leaders include pete brownwell, and they head back to russia. this is their second visit. they go to russia. butina facilitating a meeting with a ceo of a private russian gun manufacturer, which produces a sniper rifle identified by the pentagon not for domestic use or hunting, but actually as a threat to american soldiers. the nra leader is treated to a tour of that facility and a chance to shoot some guns on site. the nra reportedly spent $30 million to support trump in 2016. and on the one hand, they do
curious indictment of a woman named maria butina. now, she was suspected as an unregistered agent of the russian government. that she was trying to mount this covert influence operation through a conservative group, a gun rights group in the u.s. tonight, the same reporter who had the breakthrough scoop about the steele dossier has a new and obviously provocative question. did alleged russian spy, maria butina, cause a leadership shake up at the nra? the backstory here is an fbi dive, prior to the fact of trump becoming president, into russian attempts to influence the nra, which is a weird story. now, that counterintelligence investigation focused on a man who also has become more well known one of these oligarchs. his name, aleksandr torshin. he s a russian banker and a putin ally. her protege is maria butina and she founded a gun rights group in russia called the right to bear arms. so you have a putin-connected