The Maria Butina scandal just got a whole lot stranger

| 10:55 pm EDT September 10, 2018
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With the walls already closing in on Donald Trump, and nearly every aspect of his life under investigation, the last thing he needs is further trouble from Russia. To Trump’s dismay, new reports are coming out about even more connections between Republicans and Russian operative Maria Butina, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of being an unregistered agent of a foreign government and conspiracy to defraud the United States.

While prosecutors admitted in court on Monday that they were mistaken about previous claims of Butina trading sex for political access, she remains in jail without bail after being deemed an “extreme flight risk.” As Palmer Report has documented, Butina has close ties to Sergey Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, and Alexander Torshin, a Russian politician and governor of the Central Bank of Russia. In turn, both these men have close relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While the personal relationship between Butina and American GOP operative Paul Erickson has been known for some time, a new federal court filing indicates that Butina is ready to flip on Erickson. The documents show federal prosecutors stating, “Although the defense contends that the defendant is in a committed relationship with Person 1, she recently offered to provide information to the government about his illegal activities.”

New documents obtained by ABC News consisting of email exchanges between August 2015 and November 2016 show Butina’s role in two separate, and extremely different, goals of the Kremlin. While the first project, an attempt to arrange a meeting between high-ranking NRA members and Lavrov, certainly appears to follow other similar Kremlin operations, the second plan is a bit more strange. According to the documents, it seems that Putin aspired to have his own television show on the Outdoor Channel that would demonstrate his “love of the outdoors.”

While the discovery of Putin’s dream to have his own television show is certainly odd, this is not the biggest bombshell of the emails. In one email exchange with the Outdoor Channel in June 2016, Butina mentioned that she was working to set up a trip for a group of Russian Kremlin cabinet members to travel to America to be present for the 2016 presidential election. “This matters to your project because THEY have already lobbied President Putin to do this show as an example of the kind of relationship Russia could have with America … and with President Trump,” Butina wrote. So not only did Putin want his own American television show, Kremlin members were going to be in the United States to oversee their plan to steal the presidency for Trump.