Tag Archives: Maria Butina

How Far Will They Go? by James Howard Kunstler

Posted on November 4, 2019 | 1 comment

There would be a massive and debilitating case of cognitive dissonance if all the things the mainstream media never say about Russiagate and Ukraine all of sudden came to light for general public consumption. Of course, regular readers of alternative media wouldn’t be surprised, much of the material has circulated through the AM for months or years. From James Howard Kunstler at kunstler.com:

CBS-News carried another bucket of muddy water for the coup team Sunday night with a lead 60 Minutes agit-prop story on Maria Butina, an ambitious Russian cutie who worked the American NRA circuit in the most public manner imaginable to make herself into a sex-bomb celebrity at the exact moment in history when the US Deep State wished to reinforce the fantasy, as Lesley Stahl put it, that “Russia was interfering in our electoral process.”

Of course, Ms. Stahl and her shifty producers left out half the story: how Maria Butina was manipulated by her FBI-handler and sometime-boyfriend, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who had been employed by the Bureau over the years on other undercover assignments. They didn’t mention him or seek to understand his role in the operation. But they gave plenty of air-time to the DOJ lawyer, John C Demers, who prosecuted Ms. Butina, and never bothered to ask Demers why Butina was not charged with espionage — perhaps because nothing remotely like that occurred.

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Why is Maria Butina in Prison? by Ron Paul

Posted on April 30, 2019 | 1 comment

The jailing of Maria Butina is a travesty of justice. From Ron Paul at ronpaulinstitute.org:

Russian gun rights activist and graduate exchange student Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week for “conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without registering.” Her “crime” was to work to make connections among American gun rights activists in hopes of building up her organization, the Right to Bear Arms, when she returned to Russia.
She was not employed by the Russian government nor was she a lobbyist on Putin’s behalf. In fact the Putin Administration is hostile to Russian gun rights groups. Nevertheless the US mainstream media and Trump’s Justice Department are treating her as public enemy number one in a case that will no doubt set the dangerous precedent of criminalizing person-to-person diplomacy in the United States.

The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was passed in 1938 under pressure from the FDR Administration partly to silence opposition to the US entry into World War II. While a handful of cases were prosecuted during the war, between 1966 and 2015 the Justice Department only brought seven FARA cases for prosecution.

Though very few cases have been brought on FARA violations, one of them was against Samir Vincent, who was paid millions of dollars by Saddam Hussein to lobby for sanctions relief without registering. He got off with a fine and “community service.”

Millions of dollars in unregistered payments from Saddam Hussein gets no jail time, while Butina gets 18 months in prison for privately promoting a cause most Americans support! How is this justice?

The US Justice Department is not even as tough on illegals who commit capital crimes in the US!

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Jared Kushner, Not Maria Butina, Is America’s Real Foreign Agent, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on April 27, 2019 | 2 comments

Maria Butina has been sentenced to 18 months in prison with credit for time served because she didn’t register as a foreign agent. Jared Kushner is an unregistered but quite visible agent of Israel’s government. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior advisor to the president.

The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered “the full facts of Russia’s interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president’s cooperation with it.”

Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale and basically ineffective.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Law, Politics

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The Disgrace of Maria Butina’s Prosecution, by Jacob G. Hornberger

Posted on December 21, 2018 | Leave a comment

Federal prosecutors often make defendants an offer they can’t refuse: plea guilty to at least one charge with a comparatively light sentence or spend gobs of money to defend against myriad charges and risk spending decades in prison. From Jacob G. Hornberger at fff.org:

Some anti-Russianites and Trump critics are saying that the guilty plea by 30-year-old Russian citizen Maria Butina confirms that the Russian government was meddling in the 2016 presidential election. It’s true that Russia might well have been helping Donald Trump, who was committed to establishing friendly relations with Russia, defeat Hillary Clinton, who was committed to maintaining a relationship of anger, animosity, and hatred toward Russia. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that Butina’s guilty plea to agreeing to fail to register as a foreign agent establishes that she was knowingly part of a conspiracy within the Russian government to meddle in the presidential election. Anyone who believes that has a genuinely naïve and innocent way of viewing the federal criminal justice system, which is akin to how sausage and congressional laws are made, which many people would rather not see or know about.

Here’s how the federal criminal-justice system works.

When the feds decide to target someone, they charge them with every conceivable crime that even remotely relates to the targeted person’s conduct. The potential time in jail, if convicted on all counts, usually adds up to several decades or even to life in prison.

The reason the feds do this is to coerce a plea of guilty from their target. What the feds do is offer the person an opportunity to plead guilty to one count of the indictment in return for a dismissal of all the other counts.

The deal can include an agreed-upon sentence for the count to which the person is pleading guilty or the sentence can be left up to the judge.

The feds make it clear that if the deal is rejected, they will go to trial on all the counts in the indictment and, if successful in securing convictions, will ask the judge to impose the maximum possible punishment, which could be decades in jail. Federal judges go along with this vicious game by severely punishing defendants who exercise their right of trial by jury but then lose.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Crime, Government, Investigations, Politics

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Two Stories from the Propaganda War, by Philip Giraldi

Posted on October 26, 2018 | Leave a comment

A Russian woman has been in a US federal prison since July basically because she tried to join the NRA. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

Two recent stories about Russians have demonstrated how the news is selected and manipulated in the United States. The first is about Maria Butina, who apparently sought to overthrow American democracy, such as it is, by obtaining a life membership in the National Rifle Association. Maria, a graduate student at American University, is now in detention in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She has been in prison since July, for most of the time in solitary confinement, and has not been granted bail because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a “flight risk.”

Maria, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, is now seeking donations to help pay for her legal defense as the Russian government renews demands that she be released from jail or be tried on whatever charges the Justice Department can come up with, but her release is unlikely as she is really a political prisoner.

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Butina Case: Neo-McCarthyism Engulfs America, By Philip Giraldi

Posted on August 10, 2018 | 1 comment

The anti-Russian hysteria grows ever more demented. From Philip Giraldi at strategic-culture.org:

The United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association (NRA) by having two Russian citizens take out life memberships in the organization with the intention of corrupting it and turning it into a mouthpiece for President Vladimir Putin. Both of the Russians – Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin – have, by the way, long well documented histories as advocates for gun ownership and were founders of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence front organization of some kind and is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.

Maria Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in solitary confinement in a federal prison, having been charged with collusion with Torshin and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. It is unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, but she has not been granted bail because, as a Russian citizen, she is considered to be a “flight risk,” likely to try to flee the US and return home. It is to be presumed that she is being pressured to identify others involved in her alleged scheme to overthrow American democracy through NRA membership.

Indeed, in any event, it would be difficult to imagine why anyone would consider the NRA to be a legitimate intelligence target. It only flexes its admitted powerful legislative muscles over issues relating to gun ownership, not regarding policy on Russia. In short, Butina and by extension Torshin appear to have done nothing wrong. Both are energetic advocates for their country and guns rights, which they appear to believe in, and Butina’s aggressive networking has broken no law except not registering, which in itself assumes that she is a Russian government agent, something that has not been demonstrated. To put the shoe on the other foot, will every American who now travels to Russia and engages in political conversations with local people be suspected of acting as an agent of the US government? Once you open the door, it swings both ways.

To continue reading: Butina Case: Neo-McCarthyism Engulfs America

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, Horseshit, Intelligence

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The Arrest of Maria Butina Is Another Hoax, by Paul Craig Roberts

Posted on July 22, 2018 | Leave a comment

Add another chapter to the voluminous book of Russian non-stories the establishment’s using to keep their concocted Russiagate story alive. From Paul Craig Roberts at paulcraigroberts.org:

The Guardian Neswspaper, which once was an honest newspaper that spoke for the British working class has now been suborned, in my opinion, by the CIA and British Intelligence (sic).

Perhaps you remember a few years ago that The Guardian complied with illegal orders from the corrupt UK government to destroy the Wikileak files that revealed US felonies and deceptions of so-called “allies,” who are nothing but Washington’s vassals.

What disturbs me about The Guardian is that it no longer guards truth and the working class. Instead The Guardian guards the extraordinary lies that serve the agenda of the US hegemonic state.

I cannot understand why any of The Guardian’s original subscribers read apologies for Washington’s crimes and misdeeds or why The Guardian prefers conflict instead of peace with Russia. Why does The Guardian work to increase hostility between nuclear powers that can easily result in the termination of life on earth? Are The Guardian’s editors paid by the CIA and UK “intelligence,” as the German newspaper editor Udo Ulfkotte said in his book, Bought Journalism, or are The Guardian’s editiors threatened with arrest and prison unless they serve the interests of the UK’s overlord in Washington?

Whatever The Guardian is, just like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and the rest of the Western presstitutes, journalism is not present on its pages. What the West has is a Ministry of Propaganda. The public is lied to and brainwashed, not informed.

We can see the total failure of The Guardian, and all the rest as well, in the reporting on the arrest of the alleged Russian spy, Maria Butina by the utterly corrupt US Department of Justice (sic). The principal evidence against Maria is that she met with a former Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak. According to the utterly corrput US Department of Justice (sic), an assistant US attorney, Erik Kenerson, “cited Butina’s encounter with Kislyak as proof that she was in touch with diplomatic or consular officials and must be detained while awaiting trial.”

So, in America if you get your photo taken with a former Russian ambassador to the US it is evidence that you are a spy.

To continue reading: The Arrest of Maria Butina Is Another Hoax

 

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