UPDATE: Citing and excerpting the McClatchy item, WaPo added:
So what’s going on here? “If you were running an influence operation with the goal of subverting 70 years of Republican hawkishness on Russia, infiltrating the right’s most powerful lobbying group wouldn’t be a bad way to do it,” CAP’s Max Bergmann, who heads the Moscow Project, tells me. “We already know that at least some of the people that tried to set up meetings between the Trump campaign and the Russian government did so under the guise of their ‘shared values’ on gun rights and sometimes did so through NRA channels.” But of course since Russia has no real gun rights movement, Bergmann posits that this outfit “has all the markings of a Kremlin front, created with the intention to, in the words of former CIA director John Brennan, ‘suborn individuals‘ in the United States.”
Q. If you can't trust the NRA, who can you trust? A. Honest people.