MARIA BUTINA IS A RED SPARROW WHO WAS DOING SERIOUS FINANCIAL HUSTLES...A GODDAMN SUPER SPY...
Wife of Former N.R.A. President Tapped Accused Russian Agent in Pursuit of Jet Fuel Payday
Wife of Former N.R.A. President Tapped Accused Russian Agent in Pursuit of Jet Fuel Payday
Sept. 2, 2018
Maria Butina’s efforts to deal in Russian jet fuel were detailed in hundreds of pages of previously unreported emails.Press Service of Civic Chamber of The Russian Federation/EPA, via Shutterstock
WASHINGTON —
For the young Russian gun rights activist studying in the United States, it would have been an unimaginably rich payday: $1 million to help broker the sale of Russian jet fuel to an American middleman. All she had to do was secure the fuel.
So the activist, Maria Butina, whom American prosecutors
now accuse of being a covert Russian agent, reached out to contacts in her homeland — and turned on the charm. In a July 2017 email, she told one man that his passport photo was “a handsome one.”
The following month, she told another Russian contact that she had labeled him in her phone as “the lovely Shakhov.” Every time he called, she was notified that “‘the lovely Shakov is calling you,’” Ms. Butina wrote. “Good feelings.”
A year later, Ms. Butina, 29, is in a jail cell outside Washington, awaiting trial.
Federal prosecutors have depicted her as a character out of “Red Sparrow,” the spy thriller about a Russian femme fatale. Ms. Butina, supported by Russian intelligence, managed to infiltrate conservative groups and advance Moscow’s interests in the United States, prosecutors say.
In their telling,
she used gun rights — Ms. Butina had started a pro-gun group in Russia — to gain a toehold in American conservative circles, and then
struck up a romance with a far older Republican operative to open doors further. She has denied the allegations.
Ms. Butina’s efforts to deal in Russian jet fuel, detailed in hundreds of pages of previously unreported emails, were notable not just for their whiff of foreign intrigue but for who they involved: David Keene, a former president of the National Rifle Association and a prominent leader of the conservative movement, who has advised Republican candidates from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney.
They also involved Mr. Keene’s wife, Donna, a well-connected Washington lobbyist, and Ms. Butina’s boyfriend, Paul Erickson, who ran Patrick J. Buchanan’s 1992 presidential campaign and who moved in rarefied conservative circles despite allegations of fraud in three states.
Their attempt to secure the fuel deal illustrates a reality that investigators have had to navigate in bringing a federal case against Ms. Butina. During her time in the United States, she surrounded herself not only with high-profile American conservatives but also with dubious characters who seemed bent on making a fast buck — and it was not always easy to tell one from the other.
In the emails, and in interviews with people involved in the fuel negotiations, Ms. Butina seems as naïve as she is cunning.
She had no experience in the oil business, yet jumped into a scheme that hinged entirely on her securing a supply of huge amounts of jet fuel — nearly double what all of Russia’s refineries export in a month.
The driving force behind the jet fuel negotiations appears to have been Mr. Erickson, 56, a former board member of the American Conservative Union who was accused of defrauding investors in California, South Dakota and Virginia.
The other major players were the Keenes, who first raised the idea of brokering a sale of Russian jet fuel and then put Ms. Butina and Mr. Erickson in touch with prospective buyers.
The dealings also involved a pair of Pakistani-American businessmen, an Israeli-American salesman for a Virginia-based lawn care and sprinkler equipment company and a purported international fuel broker with no record of successful deals. Mr. Erickson described this person in an email as a “tough, crotchety, sixty-ish divorcee who has spent his life in various energy transactions but now seems intent on using his small wealth to pursue age-appropriate women of a certain flair.”
Russia has used oil and gas deals to build influence, deploying companies like Gazprom to cut sweetheart deals for pro-Moscow politicians in other countries. But Ms. Butina did not connect with the likes of Gazprom or other major Russian oil companies. Instead, she relied on a Russian coffee bean trader and a public relations consultant with loose ties to the political party of President Vladimir V. Putin.
All of them seemed out of their depth, each projecting confidence and deep knowledge of the jet fuel business while seeming not to grasp the basics. None appeared to have any idea how to pull off the deal they were negotiating — or the money with which to do it.
It did not take an expert to spot serious flaws in the plan.
“I knew they didn’t have any clue, because there’s no port in the world that could hold the amount of oil they were saying they could sell,” said Yoni Wiss, the Israeli-American who briefly met with Ms. Butina and Mr. Erickson in June 2017.
Later that summer, Mr. Erickson seemed to acknowledge the absurdity of it all. “It might be a novel someday,” he wrote to Ms. Keene, the wife of the former N.R.A. president.
Yet he also acted bullish about their prospects. Ms. Butina “has now created a Russian supply side juggernaut that is searching for a buyer,” Mr. Erickson added, assuring Ms. Keene that she and her husband would get a cut of any deal that went forward.
Mr. Erickson did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Keenes.
Ms. Butina’s lawyer, Robert Driscoll, said the fuel deal was “just further evidence that she wasn’t here on any mission on behalf of the Russian Federation. She was essentially operating on her own account.”
A plant that produces pipes for the Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom. Ms. Butina was unable to connect with Gazprom or other major Russian oil companies.Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters
Before she waded into the fuel trade, Ms. Butina had made a minor splash among American conservatives as an ebullient graduate student at American University with a knack for meeting influential Republicans. She snapped photos with Donald Trump Jr., befriended Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, and accompanied J.D. Gordon, a Trump campaign aide,
to see the band Styx.
To support herself in the United States, she relied in part on a Rockefeller heir, George O’Neill Jr., who has used his wealth to advocate better relations with Russia.
Government officials have said the charges against Ms. Butina stemmed from a counterintelligence investigation predating the 2016 election. The investigation has in part focused on a Russian official, Aleksandr P. Torshin, who worked closely with Ms. Butina for years. Mr. Torshin, a politician close to Christian conservatives in Russia, has been attending N.R.A. conventions in the United States since 2011.
Ms. Butina worked as an unpaid assistant for Mr. Torshin in Russia. Through him, she met Mr. Erickson, who twice visited Moscow, and leading members of the N.R.A., including the Keenes.
In March 2017, emails show, the couple met a man in Virginia who said he was seeking five million barrels of jet fuel. He offered to pay a finder’s fee of $1 million if they connected him with a Russian refinery.
In a series of terse, businesslike emails, Ms. Keene enlisted Ms. Butina’s help.
On April 15, 2017, she pressed the young Russian to secure a “soft corporate offer” from Gazprom for the fuel. “I will NOT reveal the source at this point,” Ms. Keene wrote.
Instead, Ms. Butina responded that she could cobble together needed fuel from a number of smaller refineries. She also pushed for a payment of $25,000 as a “good faith gesture” for potential suppliers.
She did not come up with the idea on her own. Emails show that Mr. Erickson was coaching Ms. Butina through nearly every step, drafting long responses that Ms. Butina would copy and paste before sending them to Ms. Keene as her own.
The insistence on an upfront payment appears to have killed the first deal by April. But less than two months later, Ms. Keene was in touch again, this time offering up a contact with a jet fuel broker in Arlington, Va., named Roger Pol — whom Mr. Erickson would later describe as “crotchety.”
“A LOT of people waste a LOT of time on unexclusive deals, I am not into ‘getting to know’ people to broaden my Rolodex,” Ms. Keene cautioned, “but this sounds worth pursuing.”
She arranged for Mr. Erickson and Ms. Butina to meet Mr. Pol at a restaurant outside Washington in late June and then apparently bowed out of the deal. Mr. Wiss, the Israeli-American who knew Mr. Pol, and another associate joined them.
“After five minutes, I said, ‘I’m done. They don’t know what they’re talking about,’” Mr. Wiss recalled. “It just didn’t smell right.”
Mr. Pol pressed on, but he soon proved to be a source of frustration for Mr. Erickson, who complained in an email that “he seems to lack any operating history in his own name or that of a company he controls.”
As the deal with Mr. Pol was unraveling, Ms. Butina was still working her contacts in Russia — Sergei V. Shakhov, a public relations consultant and fellow gun rights activist, and Aleksandr Y. Nevmitulin, a coffee bean trader who said he had previously worked in the oil and gas industry.
In the emails to the Russians, Ms. Butina takes on a central role, keeping the identities of the Russians and the Americans secret from one another until they signed a nondisclosure agreement and a separate agreement to work exclusively through her.
“I keep the details of all sides,” she wrote.
It was all for naught. Soon it became clear that Mr. Pol, who died of heart problems in February, could not prove that he had ever successfully brokered a fuel deal. Ms. Butina and Mr. Erickson went looking elsewhere.
They had at least one more meeting in mid-August with another set of potential partners. Again, it was Ms. Keene who used her Washington contacts to make the connection.
But a person familiar with the meeting said the potential partners feared it was some kind of scam. Instead of dealing with the couple, they reported them to the F.B.I., which by then was already tracking Ms. Butina’s dealings in the United States.
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Matthew Rosenberg reported from Washington, Michael LaForgia from New York and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow.