This translates to nine months plus the nine months already served, which is the full length of time that the prosecution asked for (probation office asked for 12 months).
Here is how this stacks up against old FARA prosecutions:
One last point I haven’t made, and have seen few other people make, is that relative to the (very few) previous cases of recent US prosecutions under FARA, Butina’s indiscretions were trifling. For instance, in United States v. Samir A. Vincent, the accused was found guilty of acceptions millions of dollars from Saddam Hussein to lobby for the removal of Iraq sanctions (and he had serious contacts, all the way up to former President Carter). His eventual punishment was a fine of $300,000 and community service. The very latest case concerned Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, a pro-Pakistani lobbyist who also received millions of dollars and had high political contacts, until the US clamped down when relations with Pakistan soured following the US raid to kill Osama bin Laden. He was initially sentenced to two years in jail, which was later reduced to one year and a half. However, his crimes also included tax evasion.
18 months is very fair and proportionate. /s
As I noted at that time: “Consequently, if prosecutions under FARA can be considered to be a gauge of American official attitudes, we may consider that the US is more hostile to Putin’s Russia than to Saddam-era Iraq or the country that sheltered a terrorist who killed 3,000 of its citizens.” We can now consider that to be official.
Strictly speaking, she was not indicted under FARA but under Section 951, but regardless, the key issue was the foreign agent registration part. This is furthermore despite the fact that she “fully cooperated” with the government. Doesn’t appear to have done her any good, LOL.
What makes this all the more amazing is that the judge Tanya Sue Chutkan suggested that Butina took part in “Russian interference” in the 2016 elections, despite her name not appearing anywhere in the Mueller report.
Outside court, Butina's lawyer Robert Driscoll pushed back on the judge bringing up Russian interference in the election. He said Mueller's team interviewed Butina, and if she'd been involved, Mueller "would have mentioned it somewhere in his 400 pages" https://t.co/RZcVANnF8Q pic.twitter.com/wPqJSxFsKg
— Zoe Tillman (@ZoeTillman) April 26, 2019
As we pointed out in a petition to free Butina in August 2018, this also sets a horrible precedent by essentially criminalizing Russian-American contacts of a political nature.
However, you don’t exactly have to be a “gun nut” to be concerned about the implications of this case for free speech in the United States, as well as the potential impact on public diplomacy between Russia and the United States – public diplomacy that is arguably needed more than ever, given the current state of relations between the two nuclear superpowers. But given this precedent, how can we reasonably expect ordinary citizens to practice public diplomacy – to learn, network, and exchange ideas with each other – when Russians face the real risk of arrest and imprisonment in the United States for having had associated with officials from both countries?
Some of my articles on Butina:
- US Arrests Russia’s Foremost 2nd Amendment Activist
- Case Against Maria Butina Continues Falling Apart
- Not A Spy, Not Even An Agent. As I Said Hours After Her Arrest.
The first article, written hours after he initial arrest, established that Right to Bear Arms was a legitimate Russian civil society organization, not some false front set up to specifically give Butina cover to infiltrate the GOP/NRA/whatever as was widely claimed. Moreover, its relations with the Kremlin were not entirely cordial, as gun rights is not something that Russia’s rulers much care for.
The second article covered the news that Butina was not trading sex for political access, as the American MSM had claimed (selective American frenzies against “slut-shaming” regardless).
The third article was an extended commentary on the best and most comprehensive article on the Butina Affair to date by James Bamford, The Spy Who Wasn’t.
One revelation of many is that Butina rebuffed a guy who had a national security role in Trump’s campaign, which is the exact opposite of how either a spy or a foreign agent would behave. In the end, even Mueller wasn’t interested in pursuing the case, with it being taken up by a pair of provincial FBI agents with no experience in espionage or organized crime investigations.
A talented Jamaican affirmative action judge.
It could just as easily have been a judge whose ancestors all arrived on the Mayflower. This is about hating Trump and the Russians who put him in the White House, according to respectable society.
If she was an innocent fraternizer, she should be jailed in Russia as well. What sort of innocence is fraternizing with the country’s existential threat? Does anyone else point nukes at Moscow?
He fraternized with opposition forces in the US, who were all kinda sorta Russia-friendly.
The UK and France. Possibly China has it at least as a kind of secondary target for some of its ICBMs, just in case. Israel, too. In other words, basically all major nuclear powers.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/25/jared-kushner-not-maria-butina-is-americas-real-foreign-agent/
What she is guilty of, is visa abuse.
From my view, people which abuse their visa, are very annoying, because they are contributing to increasing the difficulty for normal people, who need visas, and who carefully comply with all regulations when they receive the visa.
To put her in the prison, is insane and was related to the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory. A fair punishment, would be a fine some thousands of dollars and asking her to reapply for the visa, and follow it correctly next time.
Butina is a case of a amateur eccentric woman, with not bad political views, who had unrequited love for Republican aspects of America, was sponsored by a politician.
Today, she said she was very sad because she won’t be able to stay or return in America, and had hoped she would be able to return to America.
I find it hard to feel sorry for her.
What was she thinking?
She believed in the USA so much ?
I feel sorry for her parents having such a child, it must be hard to understand what the hell she was doing in the first place.
And she didn’t even have the strength of character to resist and fight back against her treatment.
She Is a disgrace
Could’ve been, though I’m pretty sure the affirmative action nature of this judge made the situation way worse. A Mayflower-descendant might not have pushed the Russiagate-lie in connection with this case. And might have had the decency to not sentence her for more than the time already served.
She was somewhat idiotic and/or naive, but you are also idiotic if you don’t understand the negative implications of this case Karlin wrote about.
I read that China stores its warheads apart from its missiles…
Butina is a ho. She moved to America to find a husband there like so many Eastern European women do.
Disgusting and outrageous beyond words and makes me completely distrustful and almost fearful of my country’s government. I don’t know what happened to the America I grew up in (a kid in 1960’s-70’s).
Butina, Meng Wanzhou, Assange, … should shatter all rose-colored perceptions of America in the eyes of even the hopelessly idealistic Russians, Chinese, and all others not in U.S. vassal states.
It’s only half-true (she apparently didn’t sleep around with many guys, only one boyfriend), but in any way irrelevant. It has pretty negative implications for anyone trying to mediate between the politicians of the two countries.
Look, man, I love your work here, but let’s be real: the so-called “WASPs” have been pushing bad things on this country for decades now. To suggest a Mayflower-descendant would do any better is a farce at this point.
The Eternal Anglo, the American elite’s blood brother, also hates the Russian. So it runs in the American elite’s blood. It’s a historic ethnic hatred, the one between elitist English and the Russkies.
They hate the Russians alright, but see what Mueller (admittedly not of Mayflower stock) did to Butina: nothing. I think there’s some chance that a competent judge wouldn’t have mentioned a crime which even the prosecution didn’t think she committed.
18 months for doing nothing.
which country is the soviet union again?
Another lamb to the slaughter.
In order to continue concealing Clinton’s crime syndicate, the largest so in the written history of man to date.
At least she is a real person, not some slimy guy on the Internet.
I guess this sorry affair shows where Murricans can start to stick their gun love really soon.
Serious opening for mistrial it would seem.
Being a ho does not place women in prison. Although being an idiot in a foreign country can. She went to America because of political views, which had become her “career”, and had Torshin was her financial sponsor.
She was writing for years, on her blog, on her social media, for articles and on internet forums, thousands of posts on forums like
http://guns.allzip.org
http://forum.guns.ru
Her politics is not very friendly to official views. She loved the ideology of the American Republican Party. She used to travel around in countries like Latvia, Ukraine and Israel – promoting gun rights with unimportant people who are the gun rights activists in those countries.
The problem in America, was that it is important people who are involved in gun rights movement there, and this resulted in her idea of being an unofficial diplomat. For example, Fox’s main presenter Katie Pavlich interviews her already in 2014, and earlier John Bolton had filmed a video for her, to promote guns in Russia, in 2013.
Um, that makes her the exact opposite of a ho. Going to places where you think you might meet a good husband is laudable.
It doesn’t get slimier than her American boyfriend.
https://media1.s-nbcnews.com/i/MSNBC/Components/Video/201809/n_maddow_ebutina_180910_1920x1080.jpg
‘It could just as easily have been a judge whose ancestors all arrived on the Mayflower…’
Mulatto judges are often remarkably bad.
American boyfriend was a just a small criminal.
She was funded and talking all the time (or since 2010) with Torshin, and that is probably how the Americans started reading her private messages, because they would be reading all his messages already (I would guess, they won’t waste time reading private messages of unimportant people, but they read all the private messages in the accounts of more important people).
https://twitter.com/torshin_ru/status/467162837911998464
She probably saw Butina as a Becky from a Beckyland.
But I wonder if she has has any children with her Jewish husband. This sort of thing was common among barren women of any power in Eastern Europe in communist times.
Butina was punished for her naivete (one can put it less charitably, her stupidity). I hope that out of this experience she (and others) get a correct idea about “the rule of law” in the US: there is no such thing, period.
Her case works really well for Putin: it provides hard evidence for everything bad he wants to say about the US and gun activists in Russia. As usual, the US elites degenerated to the point of being unable to see two moves ahead.
But we haven’t seen your picture, so maybe you are slimier still.
I don’t care for this woman, but while having a foreign boyfriend is not to be recommended for nationalists, it’s hardly pathological or disgusting. I don’t really understand why you hate her so much. It’s really not about her person, whether you’d like to fuck her or not. (She’s not fat or repulsive, but no exceptional beauty either.)
Try to focus on the important aspects of the case, which is that a Russian citizen trying to network with American and Russian political personalities (and in a rather amateur, non-spook-like way) gets a very severe prison sentence, more severe than illegally lobbying for Saddam was worth back then.
While on first glance the judge looks Black, I note that “Chutkan” is a Hindu name:
Are Judge Tanya Chutkan (b.1962, Jamaica) and presidential candidate Kamala Harris (b.1964, California) of the same ethno-blend — Jamacian+Hindu?
On second glance and browsing various pics, there is (what I think is) a plausible South Asian racial influence in Judge Chutkan’s visage.
Mulatto judges are especially bad when handling cases involving “an attack on America” and the public shaming of America’s ruling class? No, the odds would have been heavily stacked against Maria Butina even if the judge had been selected from a pool of Whites whose great-grandparents were all born in America.
I feel sorry for this naive lady who basically was found guilty of being Russian when anti-Russian hate hysteria is at an all-time high in the US.
No doubt, but I never said they wouldn’t. It’s just that her sentence would’ve been somewhat more reasonable, i.e. lighter.
A few more things Tanya S. Chutkan and Kamala Devi Harris have in common:
Both are law school graduates (Harris: California, ’89; Chutkan: Pennsylvania, ’87);
Both were politically involved on the close-in margins of Obama administration and were name-dropped often as potential appointees by the early 2010s (Chutkan was eventually nominated in Dec. 2013 to DC Circuit Court);
Both have Jewish husbands; Harris has made at least two Holocaust trips to Israel with her husband;
And two significant differences:
Harris has no children (and some speculate married her Jewish husband mainly for political leverage), while it appears that Chutkan has two sons with her Jewish husband Peter Krauthamer: Nicholas (born ca. 1997) and Max (born ca. 1999) Krauthamer. (Note one ‘n’.)
Here is Judge Chutkan’s husband, Peter A. Krauthamer, speaking on Nov. 8, 2011, before the Senate confirmation committee during his own appointment as Superior Judge of the District of Columbia:
If you search around for images of the two (Max and Nicholas), you’ll find images that do indeed look like plausibly part-Black, part-Hindu, part-Jewish males.
Edit: Is Peter Krauthamer himself a mulatto?
Do you guys know about a long tradition of Russophobia in the Caribbean Mulatto community that the rest of us haven’t heard about?
I would tend to agree with rT.
Love or hate the Anglo, but they have been pioneering rule of law since the time of the Magna Carta.
I don’t really get why Butina triggers Felix so hard either. 🙂
For my part, I really started sympathizing after reading her article for Sputnik & Pogrom – a demographic analysis of what Russia’s population size would be without Communism: https://sputnikipogrom.com/ussr/22363/soviet-demographics/
At this point Felix would call me a cuck, a beta orbiter etc, but the irony is it’s the precise opposite, she seems to be an intellectual tomboy (guns, politics, demographics, anti-Communism – all “masculine” topics), and I find that to be rather interesting and unusual. I suspect she would do very well on the Unz forum.
Remember Alger Hiss. And others.
That doesn’t mean a genuine WASP judge wouldn’t be any less likely to give Butina the prison time the prosecution requested. Judges are upper middle-class normies with enforcement powers. For a PBS watching, New York Times reading person of that class, Putin and Trump are disturbing their peace to a level that’s off the charts. A Mayflower descendant as pale as a cave newt would just as likely have handed down this sentence as was the magical Mulatto judge you guys have fixated upon.
The Unz Review‘s Philip Giraldi on the Maria Butina case:
https://twitter.com/KevinRothrock/status/1121910127748157441
What would you say to this:
People with such relatively weak ties to the (organic) American nation as Judge Chutkan (despite [or because of?] achieving high status within the American state apparatus) are more likely to dive into political causes du jour, as long as those cause(s) don’t conflict with some tribalist inclination or grievance held by their ancestral identity(ies) (and even in that case, such conflicts can often be overcome).
Since no Jamaicans or Hindu-diaspora people (if I am right on the judge’s surname) care about Russia one way or another, Judge Chutkan is an ideal candidate to go for malicious political prosecution against some Russian nobody in today’s climate.
Maria Butina has done a great service to the Rodina; her situation shows to Russians that being pro-American (in this case American gun culture) gets you rewarded with an 18-month sentence by those very same Americans.
Can’t wait to see how her attitude towards the USA changes the second she is deported when her sentence is completed.
CSPAN appearance, Feb. 1998:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?100635-1/teens-law&start=75
So a little twist-back to the Kamala Harris story is that Judge Chutkan’s husband, apparent black-Jewish mulatto Peter Krauthamer [Brandeis, ’79; Boston JD, ’82], is also associated with Howard, where he taught from 1995 to 2000 [Kamala Harris was Class of ’86]. No overlap, but a sign of the tight circles in which the mulatto elite travel.
Interesting (though not surprising) what Kevin Rothrock – who is literally paid by Khodorkovsky, last I checked – chooses to highlight about this “trial.”
Not to mention his sordid “speculations” about Katya Vinukurova in the next Tweet.
Realistically speaking, that is the only way for her to avoid becoming a non-entity upon returning to Russia.
I hope she can suppress her Americanophilia (if she hasn’t already) enough to do that.
Of course, should the Western media ever mention her again, it would just go to confirm the fundamental veracity of the spy story. “She hated our freedumbs all along”.
Am I right to understand that she’ll be released in early 2020?
February 3, 2020: Iowa caucus
February 11: New Hampshire primary
February 22: Nevada caucus
February 29: South Carolina primary [make-0r-break day for Kamala Harris]
March 3: Super Tuesday (12 primaries)
As far as I can tell, Enjoykin still hasn’t made a YouTube video like this about her.
People should read through the tweets below this:
https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1121795850441613313
Or the /r/worldnews (and, I imagine, /r/politics) thread on this.
Demented freaks who believe they are more intelligent and sophisticated than the gay frogs people for some reason. At least some of the latter do it for a lark.
Somebody’s tweet and a reply:
Another entertaining tweet-chain:
LOL.
LOLs
Yes, the US should declare war on Russia so Butina can be held longer than nine months for her crimes. Whatever it takes, man.
A burned “spy” returning to Russia. You think she has a long life expectancy?
Putin will likely kill her himself on live television.
There are plenty of “organic American” judges who would have hit Butina hard as well. Trump bad, Russia help Trump, therefore Russia bad…we punish Russian. Butina is one they happened to get their hands on. The “public” demands a sacrifice and they got it. I thought a female judge might be a little harder on the prosecution after the bogus sex-for-access accusations, but I was wrong.
“Prison reform” is the hot phrase amongst American progressives at the moment, but in practice that only translates into not prosecuting black and Hispanic people who break the law. When the justice system gets its hands on a white person American so-called “progressives” want blood, especially if the “crime” a white person is charged with with is in some way a product of their supposed “privilege” or otherwise offensive to “liberal” values. It’s the emotional content that matters, in other words. This is also why I expect Lori Loughlin to get nailed to the wall at her inevitable sentencing.
Will be interesting to see if there’s any further retaliation from Putin, and what form it might take. My guess is that he’ll defer for now but if there’s another Butina-type incident more Americans in Russia will be arrested.
Yes, though she still fucked the American boyfriend rather than our Felix, which is bad.
By the way, have you guys seen Paul Erickson’s Wikipedia page? It’s title and subtitle look like:
Pretty funny.
Yet Mueller somehow didn’t pursue her at all.
Karlin even wrote an article about the affirmative action Russia-haters. Precisely because they had zero previous knowledge of Russia and were overall dumb, they swallowed the Russiagate nonsense even more thoroughly and their anti-Russian propaganda was even more primitive. Compare that to Masha Gessen, who was actually more nuanced than that.
Maybe, but I’m pretty sure that her chances were the worst with a dumb incompetent judge, similarly to how the affirmative action Russia-“experts” are the dumbest and most extreme.
Because Mueller is not a Mulatto? Are you kidding?
I think AK’s and RT’s faith in non-minority US judges is truly touching (pioneers in the rule of law, etc.), but way off base. There are few judges of any ethnic background in the US who will go against the Government in a “national security” case. Moreover, one of the few I can remember in recent years, in some Guantanamo cases, was a DC District Court Judge who was black.
Compare with the judge who handled Manafort’s case, an old school English Virginian. Chutkan handed out Jamaican justice to protect her fellow mulatto Obama. Russians are just another white enemy.
LOL.
Sure those neocon (((WASPs))) are just obsessed by all things Russian. The Culture of Critique well documents their far left activism from the moment (((WASPs))) arrived in America.
MB wanted America, and she got it good and hard.
Sad story, sadly not as sad as story of some young idealistic communist in the Thirties, who came to Soviet Union to learn about building socialism, and came to sticky end.
Russians do not want the Blue American poison of anti racism, diversity and LGBTQWERTY, and they want the Red American poison of libertarianism, evangelicalism, militarism, zionism and gunnuttery even less.
Stay out of Russia, both Blue and Red.
Giving somewhat less than the prosecution asks for is “going against the Government?” I don’t think so. I don’t think that Butina’s sentencing to anything more than a small fine was just, and I agree there were very few if any judges who would have acquitted her, or even given her less than the time already served. But I think the affirmative action judge was probably the worst Butina could get.
Who? Whom?
If I were a Muslim detainee arrested by the Dubya Government, I’d probably want a black judge. But being a white Becky from Russia, supporting Republican causes like the NRA, and helping them defeat the Democrats?
There must’ve been a convergence of Democratic resentment of redneck Republicans, black racial resentment of whites, normie Russiagate resentment of Russians, and feminist resentment of a prettier and younger woman here.
We’re talking about hypotheticals anyway, but I’d think there’s something to it:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/affirmative-action-kremlinology/
Yes. It is the difference between this:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-hustlers-and-swindlers-of-the-mueller-report
And this:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/affirmative-action-kremlinology/
While I don’t think Gessen likes Russia any more Joy Reid or Tyrrell Starr, she is probably less likely to write stupid shit that (obviously) discredits her.
https://twitter.com/Bershidsky/status/1121796037931175936
No one can excuse the needless prosecution of Miss Maria Butina.
Nonsense on the subjective, the issue is that many US officials believe that Russia is a menace as of the old days of the Soviet Union. This is politics and one to which even the Pres. of the US has succumbed tanking his foreign policy agenda.
A needless and valueless prosecution. I don’t need the comparisons with other cases. Our criminal justice system routinely snatches up people for senseless prosecutions. And if color is any reflector, based on some of the intimations, US blacks get far more of their share of the same and they are not foreigners.
Isn’t the biggest difference between Gessen and the others is that she knows Russia? She knows Russia is a country filled with a mixed bag of fallible people, rather than being some imagined evil empire. Gessen is a relative moderate compared to her American-American colleagues in the same way Julia Ioffe is. Over the years, I’ve repeatedly seen Ioffe try to cool down the more hardline assumptions of other people on her side:
Now we can debate whether Lawrence O’Donnell is really White…..
The WASP is traditionally obsessed with Old World monarchs, “tyrants” and “despots”. They are equally obsessed with European nationalism (it’s dangerous) and any branches of Christianity that appear to take God seriously. America is a Dissenter Protestant republic that defined itself against the Tories and the Old World monarchs and popes. This has been true about the dominant Yankee culture long before the restrictions and quotas against Jews were lifted in the middle of the last century.
What’s this got to do with Maria Butina’s judge? Because the most high-minded and old school Yankee judge, being true to his Yankee forefathers and upbringing, could easily have given the same sentence. To him, Maria Butina would been seen as a temptress sent by an Old World despot to corrupt his Republic.
Maybe managerial states come to resemble one another? Maybe judges and bureaucrats of different countries have more in common than we’d like to think?
A Jewish (even American Jewish) judge would also have been better. I’m not even sure a Jewish judge would have been worse than a WASP judge. Maybe better.
But a black judge is probably the worst.
The best thing would have been a Chinese-American judge who loves Russian music but who couldn’t become a professional pianist because of his stubby fingers. That’s my best case hypothetical scenario.
She has gotten good coverage on RT, Putin spoke about her recently, she will get a good position in Russia like Anna Chapman
Once she was in the US, I don’t think Torshin sent her any money. Her open communication with him appearing to be a report of her contacts in America was the whole case against her. It’s particularly incomprehensible they would do this because she had already been denied a visa twice, and coming to America after that would have been a foolhardy risk even she was going to be helping sick children’s charities. If the FBI were uninterested and not reading her mail, the mention of “Anna Chapman” in a message to Butina by the idiot Torshin would certainly have triggered an automated surveillance system alert.
They stack up charges and offer to reduce them if you plead guilty, which means the maximum for those remaining charges is what you can more or less expect, because you have already got your reduction before the judge has anything to say. Time served would be extraordinary and I am sure her lawyer told not to expect that. A judge cannot determine what kind of Federal prison she will get sent to, which means the Feds can give her 9 months of very hard time. Women’s are different but there is still a risk of being assaulted. Though that would look bad so I expect she will continue to be held in isolation.
John Kiriakou of the CIA (jailed for giving classified info to a journalist) had a judge’s recommendation to be sent to a work camp, but to his shock ended up in a low security though still very real prison with violent criminals,, where he saw a couple of severe beatings. The prisoners ask to see your paperwork in those places and if you have cooperated with investigators against yourself there is a code on the paperwork that is the same as a someone who has been a snitch against others gets. Had Kiriakou been sent to a medium security with younger and tougher inmates at the start of long sentences he would probabally have got his face rearranged.