(CNN) — The accused Russian spy who infiltrated Republican politics used a life “predicated on deception” while she attempted to exchange sex for political access and communicated with Russian intelligence during her years in America, prosecutors said Wednesday. While posing as a graduate student, Mariia Butina, 29, also known as Maria Butina, used state-sponsored spies in Russia for guidance and oligarchs for support and funding, and exchanged sex with an American for political access, prosecutors added. She pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in federal court in Washington on Wednesday. She will be jailed without bond until her trial, after a judge found the risk too great that she could flee back to Russia. Though her court case coincides with an intense period of the Justice Department’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election, Butina should not be grouped into recent developments in US-Russian relations, her defense attorney said. “Ms. Butina is not a proxy for any serious and substantial issues our country has with Russia right now,” defense attorney Robert Driscoll told the judge Wednesday. Throughout the almost two-hour hearing, Butina flipped her long red hair a few times but generally sat stoically. Despite her attorney’s request to let her appear in street clothes, she wore the orange uniform of an inmate – but no ankle or wrist restraints. To secure her jailing, federal prosecutors laid out conversations and photos the former American University student had with Russian politician Alexander Torshin and other powerful Russians. When she texted Torshin a photo of herself smiling in front of the US Capitol on President Donald Trump’s inauguration day, prosecutors said, Torshin texted his mentee back: “Daredevil girl!” Butina’s attorney had argued for her to be released after she was held for three days following her arrest Sunday. He suggested she could stay in DC and provide weekly check-ins with law enforcement. Driscoll stressed that the 29-year-old was like any other foreign master’s student in the US over the past several years. Yet Butina now faces two criminal charges of conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent in the US – charges built around the photos, texts, private Twitter messages and other communications she had with Russians discussing her aims to infiltrate the Republican Party through the National Rifle Association. If found guilty, she could face up to 15 years in prison. Butina’s arrest and court hearing came two days after the Justice Department’s Special Counsel’s Office indicted 12 Russians for hacking the presidential election and the day before President Donald Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland. Driscoll specifically cited the Russian hacking case in court as separate from her matter. A different section of the Justice Department than the Special Counsel’s Office is handling her investigation and prosecution. Aiming for politics Butina allegedly spent years aiming to set up back-channel communications between Russia and the Republican Party through the NRA, as well as between Russia and the Trump campaign, according to prosecutors and CNN reporting. Her ultimate goal was to make American leadership more sympathetic to Russian interests, according to court filings. Prosecutors said Butina kept in touch with employees of the Russian FSB, the spy agency that succeeded the KGB. Oligarchs corresponded with her, including a billionaire who was called her “funder,” prosecutors said. She also had a private meal with a Russian diplomat – a suspected intelligence officer who left the US in March 2018, around the same time several Russian agents were purged from the country following the poisoning of a Russian former spy in England. Prosecutors in court Wednesday showed a photo of Butina and the Russian diplomat dining at a restaurant in DC just north of the Russian Embassy. When prosecutors revealed the photo, two men from the Russian consulate who were watching the proceeding from the front row nodded and spoke to each other quietly. Butina also took several still-unreleased photos with former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at a movie screening in Washington, according to lawyers at the court hearing. Her exchanges with Russians were “not the language of someone here just to study,” Erik Kenerson of the DC US Attorney’s Office said in court. Aside from her alleged intelligence contacts, Butina worked most closely with Torshin, a former Russian Parliament member. At one point in their conversations that investigators collected, he “likened Butina to one member of a ring of Russian covert agents who were arrested in 2010.” Sex and guns “You have upstaged Anna Chapman,” Torshin allegedly wrote to her, referring to the woman who is often called a Russian honey trap and whom the US deported in a prisoner swap in 2010. Torshin applauded Butina’s public image and apparent success at building relationships following media coverage of her ties to powerful Americans in the US last year. According to prosecutors, Butina appeared to be operating in the same mold as Chapman. People who knew her described her as smart, aggressive and attractive, qualities that helped her expand her network of American contacts. As a founder of a Russian gun rights organization, she posed in stilettos and leather while brandishing guns for a Russian GQ Magazine spread. Butina treated the relationship with the 56-year-old American, whom CNN has identified as Paul Erickson, as “simply a necessary aspect of her activities,” prosecutors said. She secretly complained about the living situation with Erickson, prosecutors said. At one point she offered sex to another person “in exchange for a position within a special interest organization,” prosecutors said. The Russian ‘celebrity’ Butina had been in touch with several US authorities and had been surveilled over the last year – and never tried to flee before, her lawyer said. The “celebrity in Russia,” as Driscoll called her, had voluntarily testified for eight hours before the Senate Intelligence Committee this spring and had given them 8,000 documents. She fielded investigative requests from the Senate Finance Committee, which was looking into Torshin, Driscoll said, and from the Federal Election Commission, which inquired about donations made to political candidates. FBI agents with guns and tactical gear also raided her house. Amid it all, “What did she do?<doc-sep>Suspected Russian agent Maria Butina appeared before a US federal judge in Washington, DC, on Wednesday for the first court hearing following her arrest three days earlier. The court ordered the woman to remain in jail until the start of her trial. The 29-year-old Butina faces charges of conspiracy and acting illegally as an agent for the Russian government. Specifically, prosecutors claim Butina was working with an influential Russian official and two Americans, trying to infiltrate a pro-gun rights organization and influence Washington's policy on Russia. During the Wednesday hearing, lead prosecutor Erik Michael Kenerson said Butina was engaged in the "covert influence campaign" at least as early as 2015. The prosecution showed a photo of Butina, who had attended American University in DC, meeting a suspected Russian intelligence agent in a restaurant in the city. Also, the prosecution displayed a copy of a handwritten note found by the FBI, allegedly by Butina, in which she asks how to respond to an employment offer by a Russian intelligence agency. Butina was a gun advocate in Russia and a member of the NRA in the US Read more: Maria Butina: NRA member, lobbyist, and Kremlin spy? 'Not a spy case' Butina showed up in court wearing an orange prison jumpsuit and entered a not-guilty plea through her lawyer, Robert Driscoll. Addressing reporters after the hearing, Driscoll protested the court's decision to keep Butina jailed and told them she posed no flight risk. "While we respect the court, we strongly disagree that there were no conditions of release short of incarceration to detain an innocent student before trial," he said. He added that the trial was "not a spy case." "The government is speculating that someone is a Russian spy, but thousands of Russians met intelligence operatives" in the US, he said. According to Driscoll, Butina has cooperated with the government and testified voluntarily about her activities before US Senate Committee on Intelligence. Separately, a Russian official described Butina's arrest as a political move aimed at undermining positive effects of the meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. "There is an impression the FBI is simply carrying out a clearly political order," said Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova. dj/rc (Reuters, AFP, Interfax)<doc-sep>In this photo taken on Sunday, April 21, 2013, Maria Butina, leader of a pro-gun organization in Russia, speaks to a crowd during a rally in support of legalizing the possession of handguns in Moscow, Russia. A U.S. judge Wednesday ordered an alleged Russian agent to be jailed pending trial shortly after federal prosecutors warned in court filings that she posed an "extreme risk of flight." Mariia Butina, 29, pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government in Washington, D.C., district court. During the same court proceeding, U.S. prosecutors revealed that there is a separate fraud investigation being conducted into an unidentified American who is referenced in prior court documents in Butina's case. In court documents filed earlier on Wednesday, prosecutors also alleged that Butina, who said she was a gun-rights activist and developed ties to an "extensive network of U.S. persons in positions to influence political activities," offered to exchange sex for a job with an interest group. The charges against Butina have exploded into a news cycle already thick with intrigue about ties between Vladimir Putin's Russia and U.S. political figures. Last week, 12 Russian agents were indicted in special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Moscow's interference in the 2016 election and possible links between President Donald Trump's campaign and the Kremlin. Trump, meanwhile, was forced to walk back a statement that indicated he accepted Putin's view that Russia didn't interfere in the election, which contradicts the findings of U.S. intelligence agencies. Butina's case isn't related to the Mueller investigation. In arguing that Butina ought to be detained before trial, prosecutors said "her history of deceptive conduct" and "extensive foreign connections" posed the risk that she would flee the country beforehand. Butina is charged with conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government. She is accused of conspiring with Russian agents to infiltrate a U.S. gun rights organization as part of "a covert Russian influence operation." An FBI special agent had previously described in court documents Butina's connections to an unnamed "high-level official in the Russian government," arguing that Butina had acted at the direction of that official. Prosecutors revealed in the filing on Wednesday that Butina lived with a 56-year-old American, identified only as "U.S. Person 1," during her time in the U.S., although she appeared to "treat it as simply a necessary aspect of her activities" according to papers seized by the FBI. Butina "complained about living with U.S. Person 1 and expressed disdain for continuing to cohabitate with U.S. Person 1," prosecutors say the seized papers show. News outlets including The Washington Post have identified the unnamed person as Paul Erickson, a Republican activist and National Rifle Association member whose connections to Butina have been previously reported. Erickson is 56 years old, recent news reports show. The filing also alleges that "on at least one occasion, Butina offered an individual other than U.S. Person 1 sex in exchange for a position within a special interest organization." Prosecutors also say Butina had strong connections to a Russian billionaire with "deep ties to the Russian Presidential Administration." The unnamed oligarch, referred to in Butina's correspondence as her "funder," was "listed in Forbes as having a real-time net worth of $1.2 billion as of 2018," prosecutors said in the filing.<doc-sep>The woman charged with spying for Moscow in the US met previously with the former Russian ambassador to Washington whose contacts with Trump advisers have raised concerns among investigators. Photographs of Maria Butina with Sergey Kislyak were among the files taken from Butina’s electronic devices by FBI agents, according to prosecutors. The date of the photographs was not specified. Erik Kenerson, the assistant US attorney, has cited Butina’s encounter with Kislyak as proof that she was in touch with diplomatic or consular officials and must be detained while awaiting trial. “If Ms Butina decides to go to any sort of embassy, diplomatic mission, gets put in a diplomatic car that has been so registered with the department of state, there is nothing at that point anyone in law enforcement can do to get her,” Kenerson told a court in Washington on Wednesday. Robert Driscoll, an attorney for Butina, tried to play down the significance of the meeting, which he said took place at “a movie screening hosted by a Russian cultural group in Washington”. He suggested Kislyak, whose US posting officially ended in August last year, had already stepped down as ambassador. 01:30 Maria Butina, accused Russian spy, poses with politicians and questions Trump - video Judge Deborah Robinson agreed with prosecutors and ruled on Wednesday that Butina be jailed pending trial. The charges against the 29-year-old carry maximum prison sentences totaling 15 years. Butina denies any wrongdoing. Prosecutors also disclosed in court that Butina had offered to cooperate with a federal fraud investigation into her 56-year-old American boyfriend, Paul Erickson, a Republican operative based in South Dakota. Erickson did not respond to calls. The possibility that Kislyak played a role in Russia’s interference in US politics has been examined by the special counsel Robert Mueller and congressional committees, after it emerged that the envoy had contact with several senior Trump aides. Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser in February last year after it was revealed that he discussed economic sanctions with Kislyak shortly before Trump’s inauguration. The following month, Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, recused himself from justice department inquiries into Russia after admitting he had failed to disclose two meetings with Kislyak during 2016. In May last year it was reported that Kislyak had been heard by US spies telling Moscow that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, had proposed setting up a back channel for private conversations between Russian officials and Trump’s team during the final weeks of Barack Obama’s presidency. US authorities allege that Butina worked to infiltrate the National Rifle Association (NRA) as part of an operation to influence the Republican party and set up secret communications with American politicians. They have pointed to emails and other electronic messages in which Butina allegedly described her efforts in detail. In court on Wednesday, prosecutors said another file had been found that laid out what was described as the “groundwork” for the alleged influence campaign by Butina and a senior Russian government official accused of being her handler. The official was not identified but appears to be Alexander Torshin, a state banker. Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s former ambassador in Washington. Photograph: Cliff Owen/AP “During the last five years, [Torshin] and Butina have constantly worked on a establishing unofficial contact based on common views and a system of conservative values with a number of key political party organisations,” Kenerson said the document stated. The document was said to have been found on a thumb drive at the home of the boyfriend who appears to be Erickson. Prosecutors say Butina was using Erickson to gain access to conservative politics and offered sex to another person in return for a role at an activist group. Driscoll, Butina’s attorney, revealed to court that one of the search warrants used by FBI agents to search her home in April related to a criminal fraud investigation in South Dakota into her boyfriend. “We called the South Dakota US attorney and we said: ‘Let’s go in and explain everything you have questions about,’” said Driscoll, who filed to court a 29 May letter to Butina from the prosecutor. Robinson, the judge, noted that the letter said Butina had offered to assist inquiries into “the illegal activities of others”. Kenerson on Wednesday also said more about the role of an unidentified wealthy Russian businessman in Butina’s alleged activities. Kenerson said that during a text exchange about US visas, the businessman told her in December 2014: “I want you to go work with the US, not go on a tourist trip.”<doc-sep>
WASHINGTON -- A Russian woman has pleaded not guilty in a U.S. federal court to charges that she violated the U.S. foreign-agent law as part of a Russian effort to infiltrate the U.S. political system. Judge Deborah Robinson ordered the 29-year-old woman, Maria Butina, to be held without bail until a trial is held, citing U.S. prosecutors' arguments that the risk she might flee the United States was too great. No date has been set for the trial. During the July 18 hearing at U.S. District Court, prosecutors also disclosed that a separate fraud investigation is being conducted into one of two U.S. citizens referred to in the complaint against Butina. Butina, who recently received a graduate degree from American University, was engaged in a "covert influence campaign," the lead U.S. prosecutor, Erik Kenerson, told the court. "We do not believe she was here...just to attend American University," he said. Defense lawyer Robert Driscoll entered the not-guilty plea during a two-hour hearing, in which U.S. officials laid out some of the evidence for the charges, which included conspiracy and failure to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a decades-old law passed originally to curb Nazi propaganda. Driscoll denied Butina was a Russian agent and that she was a flight risk. Dressed in a standard orange prison jumpsuit, Butina said nothing during the hearing and had no reaction when the judge refused pleas for her to be released pending trial. The hearing came a day after U.S. prosecutors filed the additional conspiracy charge against her, raising the possibility that others might face connected criminal charges. Moscow on July 18 condemned Butina’s arrest and claimed it was aimed at undermining the summit between Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki. At a briefing in Moscow before Butina's court hearing, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova asserted that the charges were baseless and stemmed from "Russophobic hysteria" in Washington. "You have the impression that someone must have grabbed a watch and a calculator to determine when the decision on Butina's arrest should be made in order to undermine the outcomes of the summit," she said. "It was deliberately timed." In court filings, U.S. prosecutors accused Butina of cultivating ties with U.S. politicians and political organizations at the direction of a Russian lawmaker and government official identified as a deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank. Court records did not name the official, but the description matches that of Aleksandr Torshin, a member of the ruling United Russia political party. Butina has appeared in numerous photographs on her Facebook page with Torshin, who was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department. Torshin is also under investigation in Spain as part of a wide-reaching probe into Russian organized crime there. In an interview with Russia's state-owned Interfax news agency, Andrei Kolyadin, a Kremlin official and former member of the presidential administration, said he hired Butina as an interpreter last year when he attended a National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. The event attracted leading U.S. conservative politicians. The Justice Department said in its complaint that Butina worked with two unnamed U.S. citizens and her boss in Moscow to try to influence American politics and infiltrate the National Rifle Association, a powerful U.S. gun rights organization, to establish "back-channel" lines of communication with U.S. politicians. Nikolai Kovalyov, a State Duma lawmaker who used to head Russia's main intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service, said authorities announced the charges during Trump's summit with Putin on July 16 to undermine the leaders' efforts to improve Russian-U.S. ties. The U.S. charges were filed under seal on July 14, and Butina was detained the following day. The charges were announced publicly on July 16, following the conclusion of the Helsinki summit. Kovalyov was quoted by Russian state-run media as saying that U.S. security agencies are "working against their own president by interfering in politics." Mikhail Fedotov, chairman of the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council, also was quoted by Interfax as saying that Butina's arrest was intended to undermine the Putin-Trump summit and sets a "bad example." With reporting by Reuters, Interfax, and TASS