The Maria Butina fiasco

This recklessness concerning a woman’s reputation is inexcusable. In the aftermath of #MeToo, one would hope that accusations of prostitution would not be bandied about loosely, least of all by the federal government. Having repeated the claims — which, to their credit, they had no reason to doubt — it would be a good thing if more journalists went out of their way to acknowledge this crude prosecutorial slander. Slut-shaming should not be okay just because the R word is involved.

It has also become clear that if Butina’s projects are evidence of “collusion” between the Russian government and American conservatives, there is virtually no sphere of activity, in heaven or on Earth, that would not answer to that description. The highest Russian official with whom Butina appears to have been in contact was Alexander Torshin, a recently appointed deputy of the Central Bank of Russia and former Russian senator. The extent of her contact with the Putin regime extends not much further than having once contacted the Kremlin press office via a generic public email address in the hope of persuading the Russian president to appear in one or more programs on the Outdoor Channel, which agreed to pay her some $20,000 in exchange for this vital lobbying. The cable entity eventually suspended its payments to Butina when it became clear that, pace her claim that “[n]o Western media company (or even news organization) has EVER had this much access to President Putin,” she had no useful channels of communication with the Kremlin. It is clear that Butina was a transnational dissembler, but on whose ultimate behalf beyond her own she worked and lied remains unclear. She is certainly no Alger Hiss.