Butina defiant after being deported to Moscow
MOSCOW >> Maria Butina, the gun-loving Russian who befriended prominent Republicans during the 2016 presidential campaign and ended up imprisoned in Florida, landed in Moscow on Saturday, a day after she was deported.
She was welcomed with flowers off a flight from Miami at Moscow’s main international airport by her father, Valery, and Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Butina, who became embroiled in accusations of meddling in the 2016 U.S. election and was imprisoned after pleading guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent, thanked Russian officials and local news media for campaigning for her release.
“I am very, very happy to be back home,” she told a throng of waiting journalists, adding, “As you know, Russians don’t give up.”
Her return to Russia was the top item on state news broadcasts, which celebrated her as an innocent victim of what Russia views as Cold War-style paranoia gripping the United States.
Aboard her return flight, Butina complained to Russian news outlets about prison conditions in the United States and said she had kept a detailed diary that she planned to turn into a “creative project.”
She said she had earned some money in prison by washing dishes and teaching fellow prisoners mathematics.
Butina, 30, a firearms advocate, pleaded guilty in December to a single charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent without registering with the Justice Department, as is required by law. But she and the Russian government have strenuously denied that she was ever involved in espionage.
There is no evidence that she had any contact with Russia’s civilian or military intelligence agencies, though she did communicate extensively before her arrest with Alexander Torshin, a former Russian lawmaker and official who shared her interest in gun rights and in cultivating relations with the National Rifle Association.
In a statement, the Foreign Ministry said Butina had “spent 467 long days in American prisons on farfetched accusations” and wished her a “speedy recovery of her strength after all the trials she has been through.”