Sunday alleged Russian spy Maria Butina was arrested on charges based in her infiltration of the NRA to advance Russian interests.
The NRA has been extra busy spending for GOP causes lately. By illustration in October of 2016 they financed one of every 8 political ads in Ohio, one of 8 in north Carolina. They financed races in most states and in every battleground spending almost twice their previous record.
One of the major wellsprings for the massively successful NRA spending spree was Russian billionaire Alexander Torshin. Mr Torshin has been described but not named in affidavits filed in the Butina case.
Since buying politicians does no good unless they know who owns them I would bet a donut to a dime (inflation turns old values askew) Ms Butina was in close contact with both senior members of the Trump election campaign and Republican Congressional campaign officials. Getting a wiretap on those heavyweights would be quite hard ordinarily. But if they were caught talking to this spy then no amount of smoke over masking US citizen identities for privacy sake is going to save their worthless hides. Conspiracies to allow foreign money to flow into our political system are not so conveniently protected.
Who knows what Butina will say? We know for sure that her conversations will be retrieved and studied, where possible, at length. I suggest the airports be alerted for some of the many retiring Congressmen (Paging Mr Gowdy) and Trump campaign officials catching flights to Moscow. Perhaps Putin’s stooges haven’t convinced their boss that they can ever reverse sanctions but even so Russia has always given sanctuary to it’s caught stooges. This worm is turning fast.