Russian agent Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison Friday for conspiring with a senior Russian official to infiltrate conservative American political circles and influence U.S. relations with Russia.
Her time behind bars will be closer to nine months, with time already served factored in. The 30-year-old will be deported to Russia after her sentence.
“You are not the worst thing you’ve ever done,” Judge Tanya S. Chutkin told Butina after handing down the sentence. “You are smart, hardworking. I wish you the best of luck.”
Butina’s lawyer Robert Driscoll told the Washington Examiner her immediate deportation would have been the best case scenario. He said Butina, who has been in jail since her July arrest, was hopeful ahead of Friday’s hearing and looking forward to seeing her family again.
Before she was sentenced, the Russian national stood at a microphone before Chutkin to ask for forgiveness.
“I’ve destroyed my own life … now nothing remains,” she said, dressed in a forest-green prison jumpsuit. “If I had known to register as an agent, I would have done so without delay.”
“Just an apology will never be enough,” Butina continued, “because instead of creating peace, I created discord.”
Butina has said in court filings she does not expect torture or prosecution for cooperating with the U.S. government when she returns to Russia.
“People have taken in interest in her case in Russia. I think she expects to be treated well,” Driscoll said Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors made the case Butina was a national security threat who worked to find Americans who could eventually provide intelligence to the Kremlin. Butina’s lawyers painted her as simply a gun rights activist who came to study in the U.S. and wanted to improve relations between Washington and Moscow and loosen Russian gun laws.
Chutkin appeared sympathetic at times to Butina’s defense, telling her several times she was an intelligent, kind, educated young woman with no prior convictions. The judge said she had “no doubt” Butina has suffered greatly by sensational headlines since her arrest. But, Chutkin said, “this was no simple misunderstanding by an overeager student.”
“She was seeking to collect information that could be helpful to the Russian government,” Chutkin said, noting that Butina’s actions came at a time when Russia was interfering in the presidential election.
She has been the only Russian national arrested to date in the U.S. government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, though charges were not brought against her by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Mueller brought charges against 25 Russians, including 12 intelligence officers, and three Russian companies over the course of his investigation, though none have been arrested by the U.S.
Speaking to reporters after the sentencing, Driscoll said he believes Butina would have received a different outcome had she not been Russian.
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” Driscoll said in response to whether he would characterize Butina as a political prisoner. “I don’t think she’s in jail solely because of politics. But I think anyone who thinks that someone who wasn’t Russian would be in this situation is fooling themselves.”
Butina, who had been living in the U.S. while attending American University in D.C., pleaded guilty in December to failing to register as a foreign agent with the Justice Department while she acted at the direction of Alexander Torshin, a longtime figure in Russian politics, since at least 2015.
In the government’s sentencing memo, filed last Friday, prosecutors said Butina “was not a spy in the traditional sense of trying to gain access to classified information to send back to her home country. She was not a trained intelligence officer … [but her] actions had the potential to damage the national security of the United States.”
Robert Anderson, the former assistant director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division and the Justice Department’s expert witness in the case, said the Kremlin will be able to use the information Butina passed on to Torshin about the individuals she had access to in Trumpworld and the National Rifle Association “for years to come in their efforts to spot and assess Americans who may be susceptible to recruitment as foreign intelligence assets.”
The sentencing bookends a saga that has been compared to a spy novel — federal prosecutors at one point alleged the red-headed Russian national was a clandestine agent using sex to gain access in the conservative movement. They later admitted they misunderstood her text messages.
She was assisted in her networking efforts by Republican operative Paul Erickson, with whom she had been in a long-term relationship and who is facing his own charges of wire fraud and money laundering in South Dakota. Erickson did not return calls from the Washington Examiner.
Driscoll said Butina and Erickson have been in contact since her arrest, but he cast doubt on whether their romantic relationship would continue, acknowledging Butina will be unable to return to the U.S. after she’s deported.
“I think she carries a lot of charity for him,” he said.
