Let's play paranoid Hardball! New York Times, you have control of the board.



The statement said that an American identified as Paul Whelan had been taken into custody on Friday on suspicion of spying. The statement implied that he had been caught red-handed, saying that the arrest had occurred “during an act of espionage.” A criminal case has been opened against Mr. Whelan, said the statement from the F.S.B., or Federal Security Service, which gave no other details. The arrest comes during an extended period of tension in relations between Moscow and Washington, particularly over the issues of election hacking and influence peddling...

A Russian citizen, Maria Butina, 30, pleaded guilty this month in Federal District Court in Washington to a single charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent. She admitted to being involved in an organized effort, backed by Russian officials, to try to lobby influential Americans in the National Rifle Association and the Republican Party. She faces six months in prison, most likely followed by deportation. The Russian government, while strenuously denying that Ms. Butina is a Russian agent, has organized a social media campaign to win her release. While there is no apparent connection between her case and Mr. Whelan’s, in the past, Russian authorities have arrested foreigners with an eye toward trading prisoners with other countries.

Scenario 1: This is simply a brutal attempt at a Checkpoint Charlie maneuver. They want Butina back and they grabbed a handy American to trade and will hold onto said handy American until they get the deal they want. The president* is so hopelessly compromised that he has been pushed into a corner where anything he does is wrong. Give Butina back, and more than half the country will believe it to be not only yet another tribute paid to the Volga Bagmen, but also, given Butina's work with the Republican Party in 2016, yet another act in a conspiracy to obstruct justice.

Butina’s mugshot Getty Images

Scenario 2: The Russians have grabbed Whelan so that the president* can flex against Russia, thereby creating for himself a narrative within which he is Standing Up To Putin to throw up against whatever volumes of evidence Robert Mueller has compiled. After a brief period of flexing—which would not seem brief to poor Whelan, god knows—the president* calls upon his internationally famous Art of the Deal and brings Whelan home to such wild clamor that nobody notices that Butina has been shipped quietly back to Russia.

In either case, this latest development illustrates nothing more than the fact that this administration* is hopelessly entangled with the authoritarian goon who is running Russia, and with his various cronies who are bleeding it dry. There is nothing it can do with regard to our relationship with Russia that carries any credibility at all, either here or abroad. And, in the middle of it all, there are two people—Paul Whelan and Maria Butina—both of whom now find their lives in the hands of bungling incompetents (or worse) in this country, and thuggish oligarchs with the power of the Russian state behind them. Helluva way to start 2019.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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