U.S. officials last week charged Maria Butina with working from 2015 until at least February 2017 as a covert Kremlin agent under the direction of a top Russian government official and central banker. | STR/AFP/Getty Images Sex-for-access claims are baseless, argues accused Russian agent's lawyer U.S. officials have accused Maria Butina of working as a covert Kremlin agent as part of a plot to push conservative American political leaders toward more Kremlin-friendly positions.

Accused Russian agent Maria Butina never offered to trade sex for professional favors, her lawyer said Wednesday, rebutting a key element of the Justice Department case that she was part of a Kremlin operation to push conservative American political leaders toward more Kremlin-friendly positions.

“We have no idea what the government is talking about,” lawyer Robert Driscoll told a federal judge in Washington at a status hearing for the 29-year-old Russian gun-rights activist. “We don’t believe it’s true.”


U.S. officials last week charged Butina with working from 2015 until at least February 2017 as a covert Kremlin agent under the direction of a top Russian government official and central banker. Her efforts allegedly included offering sex in exchange for a job at an unnamed U.S. special-interest organization.

At Wednesday’s hearing about the case, Butina sat motionless, in an orange jail jumpsuit, as Driscoll asked Judge Tanya Chutkan to order prosecutors to provide the defense with as much as 12 terabytes of data that he says were seized from her computers, phones and other devices during two recent FBI searches. The data, which Driscoll said amounted to potentially 3 million documents, should be provided to the defense — along with Butina’s personal diary and other material — in order to rebut the sex-for-access claim and other “overblown” accusations made by prosecutors, he argued.

Prosecutors so far have refused to hand over the documents, because, they said, Driscoll insists on having “free rein” to use them however he wants, and has already provided too much detail about the case in several recent TV interviews.

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“Our concern is in protecting the ongoing investigation,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Saunders. “Not just this case but, potentially, other cases."

Driscoll, who also opposed a U.S. petition for a gag order in the case, said he was only trying to defend his client, who has pleaded not guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent. His comments amounted to “an eyedropper in a negative tsunami of press” about Butina, he said, including that she used sex and deception to infiltrate the National Rifle Association and other prominent conservative organizations.

The judge gave prosecutors two weeks to submit a compromise proposal about what documents to release and what kind of gag order she should impose. She gave Driscoll another week to respond, but added, “There is going to be a protective order in this case.”

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