The real reason Maria Butina was just abruptly moved to Paul Manafort’s jail
Today we learned that Russian political operative Maria Butina, who is already in jail awaiting trial, was abruptly moved last night from her jail in Washington DC to Paul Manafort’s jail in Alexandria, Virginia. The way the mainstream media is reporting it, Butina was moved with so little warning that even her lawyer didn’t find out until after the fact. So what’s really going on here? We can give you a very strong hint.
This has nothing to do with Paul Manafort. It simply doesn’t, regardless of how many wild and unfounded conspiracy theories are flying around about it today on social media. For starters, the Manafort trial is already over, except for the jury deliberations. There is no possible way that Butina has been moved in order to testify against Manafort, or anything of the sort. Furthermore, these two jails are only about fifteen minutes apart from each other.
Nor has the Manafort team somehow magically managed to get Butina transferred to Manafort’s jail so that they can somehow conspire together while the jury is out. For that matter, Manafort is in solitary confinement. In addition, it’s not as if Butina was moved across the country and just happened to land in the same jail as Manafort; she was moved a few miles down the road from one very large jail to another very large jail, both of which commonly house people awaiting trial in DC. Butina is not the first Trump-Russia suspect to land in this particular jail, and she’ll be far from the last. This is not about Manafort, even though some people understandably want to connect dots that aren’t there. So what is this really about?
The relevant piece of information is that Maria Butina was moved a few miles down the road so abruptly that neither she nor her attorney was informed about it in advance. There are two plausible explanations. One is that Butina did something that prompted the Feds to decide she needed to be moved in order to better contain her. The other is that a threat was made against Butina which prompted the Feds to decide she needed to be better protected. We’ll get our answer eventually.
