Maria Butina sex scandal takes surreal new turn
We still don’t know just how deep the Maria Butina rabbit hole goes. She’s currently in prison after having cut a plea deal and having ostensibly given up dirt on every American criminal she’s associated with. Now, in a reminder that the Trump-Russia scandal is going to take down people in ways that go beyond mere indictments, the CEO of a major American company just took a fall because of Butina.
It turns out Maria Butina had an affair with Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, who is now resigning his position as a result of the disclosure, according to a surreal new report from the New York Times. This has turned out to be quite a weird development, beyond the mere fact that a major American CEO was sleeping with a Russian spy, for a couple reasons.
First, although Patrick Byrne has since begun singing the praises of Donald Trump, he’s a libertarian who voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. It’s not immediately clear why the Kremlin would have sent Maria Butina to the “libertarian convention” where she ended up seeking out the affair with Byrne. Was this a Russian attempt at playing up the libertarian vote in 2016, so as to take votes away from Hillary Clinton? If so, it didn’t go according to script.
Second, Patrick Byrne isn’t just resigning, he’s going out in a blaze of completely incoherent conspiracy theory lunacy. He’s insisting that he was forced to participate in a “Deep State” conspiracy against Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Wait, what? Byrne sounds mentally incompetent. In any case, the real concern is this: if the Kremlin’s 2016 spy effort was spread wide enough to suck in the unstable CEO of a major American company, just how wide did it run?
