(AP Photo)
On December 13, Maria Butina, the Russian citizen arrested in July and accused of acting as a foreign agent within the US, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy.
According to reprots, she was accused of acting as a Russian agent to infiltrate the US National Rifle Association (NRA) lobby group which is linked to some of Republican politicians close to US President Donald Trump in order to sway US policy toward Moscow.
The New York Times reports (source):
As part of the deal, Ms. Butina admitted to being involved in an organized effort, backed by Russian officials, to open up unofficial lines of communication with influential Americans in the N.R.A. and in the Republican Party, and to win them over to the idea of Russia as a friend, not a foe.
Ms. Butina’s guilty plea now casts a spotlight on the Americans she worked with, including prominent members of the N.R.A. and her boyfriend, Paul Erickson, 56, a longtime Republican operative who ran Patrick J. Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign and who now faces accusations of fraud in three states. Officials have said federal investigators are examining what Mr. Erickson and others who helped Ms. Butina knew about her links to the Russian government.
Ms. Butina agreed to cooperate with the investigators as part of her deal. In exchange, she will most likely get a short prison term, or possibly be released after having already spent five months in jail. She will probably then be deported, according to court papers laying out the agreement.
At the hearing to change her plea on Thursday, the judge said Ms. Butina would remain in custody while she was cooperating with federal investigators. A hearing to consider when she should be sentenced was set for Feb. 12.
Yet even as prosecutors secured Ms. Butina’s conviction and cooperation, they faced questions about their initial portrayal of Ms. Butina as something like a character out of “Red Sparrow,” the spy thriller about a Russian femme fatale.
Prosecutors had already been forced to back off the most salacious accusations against Ms. Butina — that she used sex as spycraft — and acknowledged in court filings this week that she genuinely wanted a graduate degree, and was not simply posing as a student to live in the United States. They also dropped accusations of her being in contact with Russian intelligence agencies, and that she was only using Mr. Erickson to gain access to other influential Americans.
Ms. Butina’s lawyers had strenuously objected to the earlier portrayal of their client, and the plea deal was likely to provide her defenders with new fodder to argue that her activities look sinister only to those who see the world through the outdated lens of the Cold War. For all of the headline-grabbing talk of a flame-haired Russian spy seducing unwitting Americans that followed her arrest, they say, Ms. Butina hardly lived her life in the shadows.
