RUSSIAN TO JUDGMENT
Not a spy, says spy
From Russia with love — and then some.
Admitted Russian agent Maria Butina is now claiming she wasn’t a spy at all, just a gunloving student with a “weakness” for smart and powerful men.
Butina, who served 15 months behind bars for breaching conservative circles to influence US Republican politics, was interviewed from a Virginia jail for a six-part series, “Spy Affair,” set for release by the US-based podcast company Wondery on Tuesday.
In the first two episodes, previewed by The Post, Butina, 32, casts herself as an innocent peacemaker — trying to learn from the National Rifle Association and conservatives to promote gun rights in the motherland, and build a “relationship between two countries [she] loved.”
Wondery, owned by Amazon Music, is known for the hit podcasts “Dirty John” and “the Shrink Next Door.”
“Look, I romanticized the NRA. They have the biggest lobbying group, and I wanted to learn how they do it,” Butina tells narrator Celia Aniskovich.
That Butina just so happened to have affairs with powerful, twice-her-age men who facilitated her ruse was simply the luck of the draw, she insisted.
“I have one weakness as a woman — I really like smart men,” she says of her romance with former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne. “That’s my biggest weakness, and that I guess gets me in trouble all the time.” Butina came on the scene as a student at American University when the US and Russia were locked in a fierce sanctions battle ahead of the 2016 election. And so her relationship — and allegiance — to Alexander Torshin, a prominent
Russian politician and banker, raised red flags within the FBI, which suggested her motives went far beyond glasnost.
“She’s not trained as a spy, but she’s being used by elements of the Russian government in a way that is advancing Russian interests and that is what squarely put her on the radar,” former FBI agent Peter Strzok says in the series.
Butina, however, chalks up her relationship with Torshin to her desire to cozy up to the rich and powerful.
“For me he is not a government official, he has become my gunloving friend,” she says of Torshin.
Byrne insists he kept up the relationship for Uncle Sam: to get to the bottom of Butina’s real motives in the US.
“My attitude to her was, ‘Look, I know these Republican guys are duds. When you really want to come and get, you know, a worldclass shagging and have a great weekend, give me a call,’ ” he recalls telling Butina.
Eventually, he claims, he was instructed to spy on her.
“‘We do not ask citizens to sleep with people to get information, but you are being asked to rekindle your romantic relationship with Maria and get to the bottom of what she is doing here,’ ” he says he was told by the US government, a claim that has been denied by FBI agents.
Butina was arrested in July 2018 and deported home in October 2019.