Funny, we just got done talking about Julia Davis’ grifting career.
Good for Butina- her treatment here was a disgrace. We’d do the same thing if an American was wrongly imprisoned over there. She was an ambitious, postgrad gun nut and that’s all she was. She was held in solitary confinement for months, a practice widely condemned as torture. Read this
piece by James Bamford, she was no spy. The Russian government opposed her push for relaxed gun laws. FSB agents routinely kept tabs on her organization. Opposition leader Alexiy Navalny endorsed her.
The Butina story became chum for people’s weird trumprussia fixation, despite having zero to do with the alleged election meddling campaign. The media had its ‘sexy secret agent’ lede and that was that. Had she simply filed the correct piece of paper with the correct bureaucrat, everything she did would have been entirely legal.
One of the worst cases of media malpractice in this whole thing, up there with the Cuban/Russian-trained sonic mindbeam crickets.