Accused Russian spy pleads guilty.
WASHINGTON » A Russian gun rights activist pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring with a senior Russian official to infiltrate the conservative movement in the United States as an agent for the Kremlin from 2015 until her arrest in July.
Maria Butina, 30, became the first Russian national convicted of seeking to influence U.S. policy in the run- up to the 2016 election as a foreign agent, agreeing to cooperate in a plea deal with U.S. investigators in exchange for less prison time.
Butina admitted to working with an American political operative and under the direction of a former Russian senator and deputy governor of Russia’s central bank to forge bonds with officials at the National Rifle Association, conservative leaders and 2016 U.S. presidential candidates, including Donald Trump, whose rise to the White House she presciently predicted to her Russian contact.
“Guilty,” Butina said with a light accent in entering her plea with U. S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Thursday in federal court in Washington.
As part of her plea, Butina admitted seeking to establish and use “unofficial lines of communication with Americans having inf luence over U. S. politics” for the benefit of the Russian government, through a person fitting the description of sanctioned Russian central banker Alexander Torshin, prosecutor Erik Kenerson said.
Butina’s case is a vivid “part of a larger mosaic of Russian influence operations” laid out in part by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference, said David Laufman, a former Justice Department official who headed the National Security Division’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section until earlier this year.
“This case shines important light on the nature and aggressiveness of Russian influence operations targeting the United States, a threat that we need an unequivocal U. S. government commitment to counter, including the president of the United States, and both houses of Congress,” he said.
In plea documents read by prosecutors in court Thursday, Butina admitted undertaking a multiyear influence campaign coordinated through Torshin, a top Russian official, that she proposed in March 2015 as multiyear “Diplomacy Project.”
Requesting $ 125,000 from a Russian billionaire and citing the NRA’s influence on the Republican Party, Butina traveled to conferences to socialize with GOP presidential candidates, host “friendship dinners” with wealthy Americans, bond with NRA leaders and organize a Russian delegation to the influential National Prayer Breakfast in Washington.