The wife of David Keene, a former president of the National Rifle Association, enlisted the help of accused covert Russian agent Maria Butina to try to secure a $1 million finder’s fee being offered by an American middleman in exchange for a massive amount of Russian jet fuel, according to a report.
Washington lobbyist Donna Keene suggested in April 2017 that Butina seek a “soft corporate offer” for five million barrels of jet fuel — more than half the total amount Russian refineries export in a month — from a company like Gazprom for the unnamed man in Virginia, the New York Times reported.
But Butina, with the assistance of her older Republican operative boyfriend Paul Erickson, said she would first attempt to source the fuel from multiple suppliers with the aid of a Russian coffee bean trader and a public relations consultant who have loose ties to the industry. Her insistence on getting a $25,000 upfront payment from potential suppliers appeared to dismantle that plan.
Keene again reached out to the couple in mid-2017 and arranged for them to meet an alleged Virginia jet fuel broker, Roger Pol. Pol, however, died in February and there is no evidence that Pol ever signed a successful fuel deal, according to the Times.
Butina and Erickson met with at least one other set of potential partners in August 2017, promising Keene a cut of the possible arrangement, but those contacts reported the pair to the FBI, which was already monitoring Butina, because they thought they were being scammed.
Butina, 29, was arrested in July and charged with working to infiltrate conservative political groups like the NRA as “in an effort to advance the interests of the Russian Federation.”
According to the indictment, she entered the U.S. in August 2016 on a F-1 student visa and was enrolled in American University in Washington where she continued to act “under the direction and control” of a Russian official, assumed to be Aleksandr Torshin, a former Russian senator and close friend of President Vladimir Putin.
Her lawyer, Robert Driscoll, told the Times her misfires at securing a fuel deal was “just further evidence that she wasn’t here on any mission on behalf of the Russian Federation. She was essentially operating on her own account.”
The Keenes and Erickson did not respond to the Times’ request for comment.
