A top senator just introduced a slew of new names into the Senate's Russia probe

• The Senate Judiciary Committee's top Democrat sent letters to several members of President Donald Trump's campaign team on Wednesday.
• The letter contained new names that may be of interest to investigators probing Russia's election interference.
• Those entities had not previously been known to be of interest to the Judiciary Committee, which is also investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday requested new documents related to Russia's election interference from several of the Trump campaign's foreign policy advisers. She asked them in separate letters for documentation of any contact they had with Russia-linked entities during the 2016 election.

Some of those entities had not previously been known to be of interest to the committee, which is investigating whether any Trump associates colluded with Russia to undermine Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

One of them is Paul Erickson, a longtime Republican activist who told associates that he was an adviser to Trump's transition team. He reportedly started a business - a limited liability company called Bridges, LLC - with Russian gun-rights champion Maria Butina. Erickson traveled to Moscow in August 2014 to meet with Butina's gun-rights organization.

Butina and her associate Aleksander Torshin, a Russian politician and banker close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, are also of interest to the committee. Torshin asked the campaign through an intermediary whether Trump would meet with him on the sidelines of the NRA convention last summer, according to emails forwarded to Trump's son-in-law and top adviser Jared Kushner.

Feinstein asked both campaign national co-chair Sam Clovis and campaign national security adviser JD Gordon for their communications with or concerning "the NRA, Paul Erickson, Alexander Torshin, Maria Butina," and others associated with Torshin's outreach.

"I'm always glad to clear up popular misconceptions, myths and blatant falsehoods surrounding all things Trump-Russia, like I've already done with other Congressional committees," Gordon told Business Insider. "I look forward to a valuable exchange of information with the Senate Judiciary Committee as well."

A new request to Carter Page

In her letter to Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page, Feinstein asked for "all communications to, from, or copied to you with or concerning" Russian political scientist and Putin foreign policy adviser Sergey Karaganov; Randi Levinas, the executive vice president and chief operating officer of the US-Russia Business Council; and Bernie Sucher, a former managing director and head of global markets for Russia at the wealth management firm Merril Lynch.

Page's trip to Moscow last July just before the Republican National Convention has come under heightened scrutiny amid revelations that he met with a top Russian government official and at least one employee of Russia's state-owned oil company, Rosneft.

Levinas told Business Insider on Wednesday that the US-Russia business council reached out to both campaigns during the election to figure out who was the "Russia person" on both sides "dealing with economic and business issues."

"Page's name had been mentioned in the press," Levinas said. "So I reached out to Bernie Sucher to try to get in touch with him."

Sucher and Page evidently overlapped at Merril Lynch, where Page worked between 2000 and 2008. Before joining Merrill Lynch, Sucher was the chairman of Alfa Capital - a limited liability company that is a member of Alfa Banking Group.

Feinstein also asked Page for his communications with or concerning Alfa Group, which reportedly came under scrutiny by both federal and congressional investigators after a computer server for the Russia-based Alfa Bank "repeatedly looked up the contact information for a computer server being used by the Trump Organization - far more than other companies did, representing 80% of all look-ups on the Trump server," according to CNN.

The US-Russia business council, for its part, "wanted to have a discussion about business with respect to Russia," Levinas said. "So I tried to set up a meeting with Page, and got a small dinner together that didn't materialize until later."

Levinas said she did not attend that dinner and did not know what was discussed.

'Happy to help'

Page told Business Insider that he would be "happy to help" the committee with its "latest tranche of irrelevant Witch Hunt information." He said he was not in touch with Karaganov, the former Putin adviser, during the campaign, adding that he hadn't spoken to him in "about 10 years or so."

"I'm pretty sure that was the last time we talked," Page said on Wednesday.

Karaganov, who now serves as the dean of the Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs at Moscow's Higher School of Economics, supported Russia's incursion into Ukraine and has advocated for Moscow to present itself as a moral defender of ethnic Russians in order to gain political influence in the regions they inhabit.

"We want the status of being a great power," Karaganov told Germany's Der Spiegel last year.

"We unfortunately cannot relinquish that," he said. "In the last 300 years, this status has become a part of our genetic makeup. ... We believe that Russia is morally in the right. There won't be any fundamental concessions coming from our side."