As if weren’t enough that Donald Trump waffled about whether Russia has been interfering with U.S. affairs as Vladimir Putin stood next to him on Monday, his dissembling came on the same day a Russian woman was charged in a U.S. district court with interfering in U.S. affairs.
The woman, Maria Butina, came to the United States in August 2016, according to the criminal complaint, which was filed by the Department of Justice. She “entered the United States on an F-1 Student Visa, for the purported purpose of attending university full time in the District of Columbia, when in truth and in fact, BUTINA continued to act as an agent on behalf of the Russian Federation…”
While in the United States, she answered to someone identified in court documents only as “an official of the Russian Federation.” Anyone who has been paying attention to the Butina affair will recognize this official as Putin pal Alexander Torshin. As NBC News reports, Torshin was “sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in April 2018 and has been accused of links to organized crime.” “Conspiring together,” according to the FBI, “BUTINA and the RUSSIAN OFFICIAL took various overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy and to effect the illegal purpose thereof.”
The allegations are that Butina attempted to build “back channel lines of communication” between Russian officials and American influencers and that she acted as a Russian agent “without prior notification to the Attorney General.” In other words, it wasn’t that her activities were illegal per se, but that she had failed to sign up under the requirements of Title 18 of the United States Code, section 951, which has to do with “Agents of Foreign Governments.”
The FBI says that Butina worked “to arrange introductions to U.S. persons having influence in American politics.” What has drawn the most attention is that she is said to have, “for the purpose of advancing the agenda of the Russian Federation,” ingratiated herself and her boss with “an organization promoting gun rights.” That’s almost certainly the NRA. One of the credentials Butina used was to describe herself as “founding chairman, The Right to Bear Arms, a Russian version of the NRA.”
The most serious questions asked about Butina and Torshin have been whether they somehow arranged for millions of dollars to be funneled from Russia through the NRA to be spent promoting the Trump campaign. But neither the FBI affidavit nor the federal criminal complaint allege any such thing.
Then again, not everything known about Butina and Torshin is in the two-and-a-half pages of the criminal complaint, or even the more expansive 17 pages of the FBI’s affidavit. For example, it has been reported that Butina was involved in an outreach by conservative American friends of hers in the spring of 2016 to get then-candidate Trump to have a private dinner with Torshin. It has also been suggested that she was trying to engineer a Trump-Putin summit.
The closest thing to a suggestion of organizing a Trump-Putin meeting hinted at in the court documents comes from an email Butina sent to a Prayer Breakfast organizer. She said that Torshin “suggested to President Putin that he consider coming to the Prayer Breakfast next year, Feb 2017, and Pres. Putin did not say ‘no’!” The email was sent March 30, 2016.
Butina wasn’t particularly good at maintaining her cover as someone unaffiliated with official Russia. When in the U.S. she had the opportunity to be “introduced to POLITICAL PARTY 1 leaders” (that would be some Republicans). The FBI reports she presented herself as a “representative of informal diplomacy” for Russia. Nor did she keep it a secret that she was looking to make nice with the GOP. The year before she came to the U.S. she published an article in the National Interest titled, “It may take the election of a Republican to the White House in 2016 to improve relations between the Russian Federation and the United States.”
Butina’s efforts, according to the FBI, were “diverse and multifaceted.” Not only did she try to organize some “friendship and dialogue” dinners and proposed a conference that never got off the ground, she attended “two National Prayer Breakfasts in the District of Columbia.”
The FBI’s affidavit devotes several pages to the National Prayer Breakfast. Among the surreptitious activities Butina is alleged to have undertaken: She reserved rooms at the Washington Hilton for the Russian delegation to the breakfast. Leading the delegation was Torshin, Butina’s undercover boss. But again, Butina seems to have forgotten that her role was a hush-hush one. The FBI alleges that “On January 26, 2017, BUTINA and the RUSSIAN OFFICIAL communicated via Twitter direct message about the RUSSIAN OFFICIAL delivering a speech the night before the National Prayer Breakfast.” The FBI continues: “BUTINA told the Russian Representative that ‘[t]he only thing I ask is to somehow mention me. They need to see me not as the delegation ‘organization committee’ but as your partner and colleague.’ The Russian Representative agreed as to the ‘need to stress [BUTINA’s] status as a key figure.’”
So, let’s get this straight: Butina is surreptitiously answering to Torshin, and yet she organizes a speech for him to give in Washington, and insists that she be publicly acknowledged as Torshin’s “partner and colleague.” Torshin had his own problems with keeping his operative on the Q.T.: In February 2016 he tweeted (in Russian) “Maria Butina is now in the USA. She writes to me that D. Trump (NRA member) really is for cooperation with Russia.”
Butina and Torshin may or may not have intended to bamboozle American politicos. But one thing is for sure: They have a lot to learn about the covert part of being “covert agents.”
