Sanctioned Russians include dossier figure and banker linked to NRA
WASHINGTON – The Trump administration took its sternest action to date in response to Russia’s global aggression, imposing sanctions that freeze the U.S. assets of seven Russian oligarchs and 17 Russian government officials, including a top banker and Putin ally facing FBI scrutiny for his ties to the National Rifle Association.
Mcclatchy reported in January that the bureau was investigating whether Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank and a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, funneled money to the NRA so the gun rights group could beef up its hefty spending to aid Donald Trump’s presidential bid.
Also among those sanctioned are several Russian figures with ties to Trump’s inner circle or whose names have arisen in connection with Justice Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Russian Federation Council’s International Affairs Committee, at the Cuban Embassy in Moscow, in 2016.
Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s broad probe into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.
One of those is a senior member of Russia’s parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, whom a former British spy identified while researching Trump’s Russian connections during the campaign. Ex-spy Christopher Steele reported
in his now-famous Trump dossier that Kosachev was the Kremlin’s representative at a supposed clandestine, late-summer 2016 meeting with Trump’s lawyer to discuss how to conceal Russia’s efforts to help the real estate magnate defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton. Both Kosachev and the lawyer, Michael Cohen, have strongly denied that the meeting happened.
Kosachev called the U.S. announcement “another unjustified, unfriendly and meaningless step,” state-run media Ria-novosti reported. “This is the way to nowhere. Russia cannot be frightened by it and especially cannot be broken by it,” Kosachev said.
Billionaire aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, who is close to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, is also on the list. Emails revealed during parallel investigations by Mueller and the House and Senate Intelligence Committees showed former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort, who reaped millions in fees as a longtime consultant in Ukraine, offered through an intermediary to provide Deripaska briefings on the campaign’s progress; at the time, Manafort was hugely in debt to the oligarch. Deripaska has denied ever receiving any such briefings.