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 U.S. 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."
A year later, 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. 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 -- Butina had started a pro-gun group in Russia -- to gain a toehold in U.S. conservative circles, and then struck up a romance with an older Republican operative to open doors further. She has denied the allegations.
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 whom 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 Keene's wife, Donna, a well-connected Washington lobbyist, and Butina's boyfriend, Paul Erickson, who ran Patrick Buchanan's 1992 presidential campaign and who moved in rarefied conservative circles despite allegations of fraud in three states.
The driving force behind the jet fuel negotiations appears to have been 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 Butina and Erickson in touch with prospective buyers.
Russia has used oil and gas deals to build influence, deploying companies like Gazprom to cut deals for pro-Moscow politicians in other countries. But 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 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.
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, an Israeli-American who briefly met with Butina and Erickson in June 2017.
Erickson did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the Keenes.
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."
Government officials have said the charges against Butina stemmed from a counterintelligence investigation predating the 2016 election. The investigation has in part focused on a Russian official, Alexander Torshin, who worked closely with Butina for years. Torshin, a politician close to Christian conservatives in Russia, has been attending NRA conventions in the United States since 2011.
Butina worked as an unpaid assistant for Torshin in Russia. Through him, she met Erickson, who twice visited Moscow, and leading members of the NRA, including the Keenes.
In March 2017, emails show, the couple met a man in Virginia who said he was seeking 5 million barrels of jet fuel. He offered to pay a finder's fee of $1 million if they connected him with a Russian refinery.
Donna Keene enlisted Butina's help. On April 15, 2017, she pressed the young Russian to secure a "soft corporate offer" from Gazprom for the fuel.
Instead, 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.
The insistence on an upfront payment appears to have killed the first deal by April. But less than two months later, Keene was in touch again, this time offering up a contact with a jet fuel broker in Arlington, Va., named Roger Pol -- whom Erickson would later describe as "crotchety."
It was all for naught. Soon it became clear that Pol, who died of heart problems in February, could not prove that he had ever successfully brokered a fuel deal. Butina and Erickson went looking elsewhere.
They had at least one more meeting in mid-August with another set of potential partners. Again, it was 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 FBI, which by then was already tracking Butina's dealings in the United States.
A Section on 09/03/2018