If Maria Butina was indeed an agent of the Kremlin, as the F.B.I. alleges, she was not good at hiding it. As early as 2017, Washington insiders noticed Butina casually and openly name-dropping her connections with conservative and Russian political figures during cocktail parties, bragging that she’d been in contact with both Donald Trump’s campaign team and the Kremlin. “She said so in my class. And she said so several times in the last semester,” Svetlana Savranskaya, Butina’s former professor and a staffer at the National Security Archive, told the Daily Beast last year. She did not try to disguise her fervent patriotism, either. In the time before her arrest, The Washington Post reports, Butina could not contain how much she loved Russia, a characteristic that alarmed her classmates at American University, where she was obtaining her master’s degree at the School of International Service. “Can you imagine you just moved to D.C. for school from, like, rural Pennsylvania, and you find out a couple months later you’re sitting next to a Russian spy?” one of her schoolmates told the Post.

Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, but it’s still somewhat remarkable that Butina didn’t set off more alarms. Prior to her enrollment, she was a prominent pro-gun activist in Russia with well-publicized connections to the Russian government, and did not tone down her patriotism after enrolling at American University. According to the Post, Butina would vociferously defend even Vladimir Putin’s most outré policies, such as his forcible occupation of Crimea and his potential influence on the U.S. election, oftentimes while sporting a Russian flag pin. “She was trying to justify” Putin’s alleged meddling, a classmate recalled. Several people associated with American reportedly alerted university officials to Butina’s intensely pro-Russian statements, worried that she was a Kremlin agent. The university, according to the Post, was not alarmed, even as Butina’s devotion to the motherland became blatantly evident:

Butina’s cell phone case was emblazoned with a famous photo of Russian President Vladi­mir Putin riding shirtless on a horse. She would buy friends rounds of vodka at the Russia House, the Dupont Circle restaurant popular with the Russian diplomatic set, sometimes challenging male friends to down horseradish-infused shots. She bragged to classmates that she had worked for the Russian government.