Maria Butina confesses her connections to Donald Trump campaign and transition team
The saga of Russian operative Maria Butina, the NRA, the Republican Party, and the Kremlin just took a very ugly turn – and for the first time, she’s been directly connected with the Donald Trump campaign. Butina is currently in jail awaiting trial on charges of working as a foreign agent of the Russian government, but her connections to conservative American politics continue to get fleshed out. This time it involves a familiar name from Team Trump.
We long ago learned that during the Republican National Convention, top members of the Donald Trump campaign secretly met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, and that by the time the convention was over, the party platform had been rewritten to favor Russia. One of the Trump campaign advisers who met with Kislyak was J.D. Gordon, who ended up resigning not long after. But it turns out that wasn’t the end of the road for him and the Trump campaign – and that’s where Maria Butina came in.
We’re now learning that the month before the election, J.D. Gordon expected to be given a job on the Donald Trump transition team. This means, of course, that he never really left the campaign. It raises new questions as to why he “resigned” from the campaign right after meeting with the Russians, yet somehow managed to remain in favor with the campaign until the end. In any case, the more pressing new revelation is that just before election day, Gordon and Butina began socializing with each other. But the biggest revelation here is that Butina is the source of this information.
WaPo reports that its source on this is Maria Butina’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which took place in April, but didn’t become public knowledge until around the time of her arrest last month. In other words, Butina has confessed her connections to the Donald Trump campaign and transition team. This raises a number of questions about why Gordon met with the Russian Ambassador, why he really “quit” the campaign, why the campaign wanted to bring him back, and what Butina was looking to accomplish by cozying up to him. More importantly, was Butina doing this with other Trump advisers? If so, she presumably gave them up to Senate Intel as well – which means Robert Mueller has it all.
