JOHN KIRIAKOU: In Search of a Russiagate Scalp: The Entrapment of Maria
Butina
August 28, 2019
In need of a "collusion" connection, top FBI officials have now been shown
to be behind the false portrayal of an unregistered agent as a spy.
By John Kiriakou
Special to Consortium News
Much has been written about Maria Butina, the Russian "spy" who was accused
of seeking to infiltrate the National Rifle Association and other
organizations to try to gain a foothold in the Trump campaign and, later, in
the White House. Much of it turned out to be nonsense. Butina wasn't a spy.
She wasn't charged with spying. She wasn't accused of being a spy. But
that's how the media branded her. The important thing is that there actually
were spies around her. And they weren't who you might have thought.
In the Butina case, the FBI and the Justice Department needed a scalp in the
midst of the frenzy about the ultimaely unproven collusion theory of
"Russiagate," and so Butina was charged and convicted of "conspiracy to fail
to register as an agent of a foreign government." Seriously. Let me explain
what that means. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) was passed into
law in 1938. It "requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in
a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure
of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities,
receipts, and disbursements in support of those activities." The law, the
registration, and the database are meant to keep track of foreign lobbyists.
Nothing more.
Butina: Unregistered agent falsely portrayed as a spy.
In realistic terms it means this: In 2008, I was hired by the Abu Dhabi
Chamber of Commerce to write a series of op-eds in support of doing business
in the city. I wrote four op-eds and they paid me a fee. But I had to go to
the Justice Department's FARA website and register as a "foreign agent,"
meaning that I was being paid by a foreign government. No problem. It didn't
mean that I was a "secret agent" for Abu Dhabi. It just meant that I was
temporarily in the employ of a foreign government.
Washington attorneys and lobbyists do this kind of thing every day. And more
often than not, they don't register, either because they are too busy, they
don't realize that they have to, or they don't believe, as in the current
case of Washington super lawyer Greg Craig, that they have to. They are very
rarely prosecuted.
Anybody can go to the FARA website and do a records search. I did one for
the purpose of this article to search for people I know-attorneys, friends,
acquaintances-and found many of them taking money from the governments of
Libya, Chad, Jordan, Saudi Arabia (lots of them), Greece and other
countries. It's no big deal. It's just a paperwork exercise.
In the case of Maria Butina, though, the paperwork was the hook to arrest
her and to use her failure to register under FARA as leverage to get her to
testify about her "work." The problem, at least for the FBI, was that she
wasn't a spy. As things turned out, she really was just an overly-aggressive
Russian grad student at American University who really, really loved guns
and was trying to ingratiate herself with the NRA. But the Justice
Department came down on her like a ton of bricks, forced her into taking a
plea, and sentenced HER to 18 months in a federal prison: for conspiring to
fail to fill out a form. The federal sentencing guidelines for a first-time
offender violating this law is 0-6 months in a minimum-security work camp
and a fine of up to $5,000. That, apparently, was never an option for
Butina.
Forgive me if this is burying the lede, but I also want to talk about how
Maria Butina got into this predicament in the first place. We know that she
was very active in the gun rights movement in both Russia and the U.S. and
that she sought to improve contact between gun groups in both countries. We
also know that she met and began dating Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO
of Overstock.com. We learned recently, thanks to Byrne himself, that he was
a longtime FBI source and that the FBI directed him to begin dating Butina.
He did so. And he reported back to the FBI that she was simply a graduate
student. That wasn't good enough for the FBI, though and, according to
Byrne, he was instructed to go back to Butina, to begin a sexual
relationship with her, and to again report back to the FBI. He did that,
too.
In the end, the Justice Department accused her publicly of "trading sexual
favors" for access, an accusation that prosecutors had to withdraw. It was
patently untrue. But that didn't stop them from accusing her in the press of
being a Russian spy, which she was not. And it didn't stop the judge from
giving her three times the maximum sentence called for by the sentencing
guidelines.
I will ask your forgiveness again if I sound like a broken record. But this
is how the FBI makes their cases. They entrap people. I've written
extensively about how the FBI brazenly carried out a sting operation against
me (unsuccessfully) that could have resulted in an espionage conviction and
as much as 30 years in prison. They did the same thing to Butina.
Butina wasn't committing a crime, so they just made something up, leaked it
to the press, allowed it to influence the public and the judge, and hoped
she would cave and take a plea. She did. Byrne went on CNN last week to say
that two of the three people who instructed him to do all of this were James
Comey, Peter Strzok, and another as-yet-unnamed individual. The operation
was hatched at the top. The whole story sickens me.
With the deck stacked the way it was, there was probably nothing that Butina
or her attorneys could have done to save her. The fix was in. I wish I had
been able to convey to her something that one of my attorneys said to me on
the day that I finally took a plea to a greatly reduced charge in 2012: "Do
you know what your problem is? Your problem is that you think this is about
justice. It's not about justice. It's about mitigating damage." Nice system
we have.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior
investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the
sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage
Act - a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a
result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture program.