Maria Butina, the Russian operative who infiltrated conservative groups around the 2016 presidential election, said she has been “expelled” from the National Rifle Association.
“I was expelled from the NRA. An official notification was sent to me — to my lawyers — saying that now that I have a criminal record, the NRA charter requires to discontinue my membership, so I was officially expelled. So, the NRA dodged that bullet,” Butina told RT, a Russian state media television network over the weekend.
“Overall, the NRA is a great organization, I mean … I’ll put it this way: It’s very successful in terms of campaigning for gun rights. But there is one thing I want to say — and the fact that I was expelled speaks to that, too — it has become overly politicized,” she said.
Butina was released from a Florida prison on Friday morning and deported from the U.S. via an Aeroflot flight from Miami to Moscow. Butina, 30, arrived in her native country Saturday morning.
Federal prosecutors argued that Butina, a gun rights activist, was leading a double life while studying in the United States. They said she covertly worked with Alexander Torshin, a longtime figure in Russian politics, to cultivate relationships with conservative politicians while trying to infiltrate the NRA.
She was not charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and her name did not appear in the unredacted version of his report.
The U.S. government 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.”
Butina, who pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent of the Russian government, denied she was a spy.
“They just took some Hollywood clichés and made me the scapegoat. The color of my hair and my features served as proof of guilt. That’s the way it should be, because we see it this way in the movies,” she said.
The Washington Examiner has reached out to the NRA for comment.
