Bon voyage, Maria Butina!
To give you an idea of how long Donald Trump’s Russia scandal has been playing out, convicted Russian operative Maria Butina has already completed her prison sentence, and she’s being released and deported back to Russia today. This raises a whole lot more questions than answers when it comes to what’s already transpired with her, and what will happen next.
Maria Butina got a fairly short prison sentence because she agreed to plead guilty and cooperate against others. What’s not entirely clear is who those “others” are. Butina’s boyfriend and alleged Kremlin co-conspirator Paul Erickson was indicted on fraud charges earlier this year, though it’s not clear how much of the case against Erickson is based on Butina’s cooperation. That said, Erickson is a pawn in all this. Butina’s real value is against the NRA and the Republican Party.
Butina managed to infiltrate the NRA and the GOP, establishing social connections with a number of Republican politicians along the way. It’s unclear how many GOP politicians she may have turned into Russian assets along the way. The NRA’s finances make clear that it’s devolved into little more than an arm of the Kremlin. Butina was surely in position to tell all about this. But we have no idea if the Department of Justice is making a criminal case against the NRA for its Russian funding, because we don’t know how much of the DOJ has been corrupted by Attorney General Bill Barr.
As someone who cut a cooperating plea deal, there is no way on earth that Maria Butina should be leaving the country without first testifying against everyone involved in the Trump-Russia-NRA-GOP conspiracy. One can only hope that she’s already testified before grand juries and helped to bring her co-conspirators down. But either way, once Donald Trump is gone, it’s difficult to imagine that Butina’s co-conspirators won’t take a fall. This won’t end well for anyone involved in the Trump-Russia election conspiracy.
