Maria Butina is a Russian national and gun rights activist who was arrested Sunday and is facing criminal charges for acting as a foreign agent in the US. She studied at the American University in Washington, DC.
WASHINGTON: Maria Butina, the Russian gun-rights activist who was recently arrested by the FBI and charged with conspiracy, was indicted by a grand jury on Tuesday on a second offense of acting as an agent of a foreign government.
Maria appeared in court on Tuesday after being arrested on 15 July, where she was also charged with infiltrating US political organisations at the direction of a senior Kremlin official.
A federal grand jury formally approved a criminal indictment of Maria Butina with two charges, conspiracy and acting as a foreign agent.
The charges taken together amount to a federal case alleging links between Russian attempts to influence US politics and the nation’s preeminent pro-gun rights organization.
The US justice department said in a statement that the 29-year-old Maria is accused of working at the direction of a high-level official in the Russian government who was previously a member of the legislature of the Russian Federation and later became a top official at the Russian Central Bank.
Maria, who is alleged to have been a “covert Russian agent” developing an “influence operation” in the United States since 2015, faces a statutory maximum of five years in prison for the first offense and a statutory maximum of 10 years in prison for the second offense.
Maria denied the charges through an attorney, who called the complaint against her “overblown” and said she “intends to defend her rights vigorously and looks forward to clearing her name.”
According to the affidavit, Maria and the Russian official “took steps to develop relationships with America politicians in order to establish private, or as she called them, ‘back channel’ lines of communication.
The charges against Butina come days after the Justice Department unveiled an indictment against 12 Russian intelligence officers for allegedly conspiring to hack Democrats in 2016 and just hours after President Trump cast doubt on Russia’s involvement in an extraordinary joint news conference with President Vladimir Putin.
