The criminal complaint describes one of the charges against Maria Butina as conspiracy to infiltrate organizations active in US politics in an effort to advance the interests of the Russian Federation. Her efforts were sharply focused on infiltrating the NRA, as well as elite GOP circles, and conservative religious organizations and events that brought them all together, such as the National Prayer Breakfast.

There is another big strand of the Trump-Russia story where Maria Butina’s name has not yet appeared — but where a few intriguing connections raise questions about whether or not Butina had any involvement with Trump’s data company, Cambridge Analytica.

Michigan GOP operative Saul Anuzis said in a Washington Post article that he had met Maria Butina a handful of times. Anuzis has served on the NRA Board’s Public Affairs committee since 2012, a group Butina would have been likely to interact with.

Anuzis has some significant connections to Cambridge Analytica. In 2014 he set up a PAC funded by Robert Mercer, the largest funder of Cambridge Analytica. In 2015 while Anuzis was working on the Cruz campaign, his son Matas started working at Cambridge Analytica as a project manager on the Cruz campaign. In 2016 Cambridge Analytica worked on the “Trigger the vote” campaign for the NRA. And Saul’s son Matas continued to work at Cambridge Analytica until they closed in April 2018.

While Saul only described a handful of meetings with Butina, given her goal to infiltrate organizations active in US politics and to further the interests of Russia, it seems likely that Butina would have been interested in the work of Cambridge Analytica, first for the Cruz campaign, and later for the Trump campaign. In 2017 Senator Dianne Feinstein was curious about this as well, and in a letter she sent to Cambridge Analytica requesting copies of communications with various people, one of the people Feinstein included was Maria Butina.

Maria Butina met GOP operative Saul Anuzis

In a Washington Post story on how Butina gained access to elite conservative circles, Saul Anuzis, a GOP political operative who met Butina at a handful of conservative events in 2016, said:

“She was like a novelty…she ran a gun rights group in Russia and, by definition, with the kind of repression under Putin, your assumption was that was kind of a revolutionary, radical thing.”

A photograph of Anuzis with Butina recently circulated on Twitter and Anuzis told the Detroit Free Press he recalled the “photo being taken in 2016 or 2015 at the FreedomFest, an annual conservative gathering in Las Vegas.”

According to the Detroit Free Press Anuzis said “ he has met Maria Butina a couple of times but has never had much of a conversation with her.”

While it is not known if Anuzis’s meetings with Butina were incidental, given the mission of Butina to influence US politics, Saul Anuzis had a unique combination of connections and experience that likely would have been of interest to her and to the Russian officials who directed her work.

Saul Anuzis GOP background and RNC tech work

Saul Anuzis, like many of the people in the Trump-Russia story, has a very full resume that combines business ventures, campaign consulting work and political roles. Anuzis’s areas of expertise range from telecommunications to political consulting to digital technology, campaigns and advertising — the latter work is strikingly similar to the work of Cambridge Analytica.

Anuzis is co-founder and co-owner of Michigan-based Quick Connect VOIP and Quick Connect USA. He is a Managing Partner of Coast to Coast Strategies, LLC.

On his website, wittily named thatssaulfolks.com, Anuzis describes early work with Newt Gingrich at American Solutions and for Jack Kemp’s 1988 Presidential campaign. He was chair of the Michigan Republican Party from 2005 to 2009, directly following Betsy DeVos who had been chair from 2003 to 2005.

In a February 2012 New York Times story on campaign advertising, Anuzis is cited as chairman of the Republican National Committee on Technology, and he described digital ad spends and how the benefit of microtargeting is that campaigns can spend their money more efficiently by finding a particular audience and they can “literally target the household.”

Saul Anuzis’ skill set at the RNC with digital advertising and campaign marketing is very similar to work carried out by Cambridge Analytica.

Anuzis served on the board of CampaignGrid, a campaign consulting group which worked with Ron Paul and Chris Christie, and he was on the board of Victory Solutions and RAP Index, a federal advocacy micro-targeting company.

In his bio on the Coast to Coast website, Anuzis describes diplomatic experience working as consul for the Republic of Lithuania, .

Anuzis’s connections within the GOP are far reaching, and in addition to his Michigan connection to Betsy DeVos, the Secretary of Education, he appears to know another Trump cabinet member, Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior. Anuzis appeared in a photograph with Zinke, at a fundraiser for a Virgin Islands organization known as VIGOP, which was described in an October 2017 Politico story on how Ryan Zinke helped raise millions of dollars for questionable PACs.

Anuzis was briefly Michigan chairman of the presidential campaign of Ted Cruz, a significant client of Cambridge Analytica, before Anuzis switched his support to Trump when he became the nominee.

In April 2018, Anuzis was named president of the 60 Plus Foundation, a conservative free-market senior organization that is largely funded by the Koch brothers which has sought to privatize social security, end the federal estate tax, and strengthen gun rights.

Saul Anuzis NRA Board Public Affairs Committee

In 2012 Anuzis was appointed to the NRA Board’s Public Affairs Committee and per a recent 2018 announcement he is still serving on this committee.

His instagram account includes a photograph (below) from a January 9, 2015 NRA board meeting, which shows his namecard, and includes a woman in the back right who resembles Maria Butina (this has not been confirmed).