Re: POTUS 45.38: Truth! Justice! And the American Way!!
This Russian spy case of Butina may be both smoke and fire. The best article I've found on the topic outlines some pretty crazy stuff and is from a year ago at inauguration time.
Here's a couple of quotes:
On Nov. 12, 2016, shortly after the election of President Donald Trump, Butina held a birthday party at Cafe Deluxe near American University, where she attends graduate school classes. As chilled vodka flowed, she took some time to brag. She brazenly claimed that she had been part of the Trump campaign’s communications with Russia, two individuals who were present said. On other occasions, in one of her graduate classes, she repeated this claim. “She said so in my class. And she said so several times in the last semester,” Svetlana Savranskaya, Butina’s former American University professor.
Two of Butina’s friendships in particular have raised eyebrows. She started a business with Paul Erickson, a decades-long Republican Party activist. And she served as a special assistant to the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank, Alexander Torshin, a former Russian senator belonging to Vladimir Putin’s political party with identified ties to the Russian mob world. Despite his ties to Russia, Torshin is still welcome in conservative circles. In May 2016, he returned to the NRA’s annual convention and shared a dinner table with Donald Trump Jr., according to the same Bloomberg report.
At one gathering in the fall of 2016 Erickson bragged that he was advising the Trump transition team, according to two sources who were present. “Erickson had participated in every GOP presidential primary campaign since 1980 and was Pat Buchanan’s presidential campaign manager in 1992,” an article in Forbes in December 2016 reads. “He is a sort of ‘secret master of the political universe’ known almost exclusively to the cognoscenti.” Butina’s group hosted Erickson at its Moscow headquarters. The event advertised Erickson as a veteran of six presidential campaigns who had worked in the Reagan White House.
All this public, a year ago.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-kremlin-and-gop-have-a-new-friendand-boy-does-she-love-guns
