prosecutors in court filings did say she believed she was russian intelligence or had connection toss russian intelligence. that is significant because just to complete the loop of what we wrote about in russian roulette, butina goes to las vegas when trump shows audiotape few weeks after he announces his candidacy, asked the question on the floor about sanctions. get trump on the record in a five-minute answer saying if i m elected you won t need sanctions. can i get along with putin, very significant. months later, 2016, 2016 campaign, steve bannon and reince priebus watching the video of that event and scratching their heads. why is that woman in the audience? why did he call on her? why did he have a fully baked answer as soon as it was asked. it raised a lot of questions and clearly the mueller team as well. i m curious on new york times reporting russia started
quite the social media campaign to call for the release of butina. that is going to be effective in any way? yeah. no, it s not going to have any effect on federal prosecutors or the u.s. judicial system but it is a very clever propaganda ploy. basically yesterday the russian foreign ministry was posting on its facebook page maria butina with her picture on the official facebook page of the russia foreign ministery. clearly the russians plan to use this as some sort of example for them of american overreach going after russian citizens in the united states. she was just a graduate student trying to pursue her studies and the evil americans accuse her of being a spy. michael, doesn t it strike you as odd they would go to such extremes to product someone who
spain. actually the spanish national police had wiretaps of torshin talking to one of the gang leaders in which he s referred to as el pad rino, the got father, they had plans to arrest him this. struck me as a potentially significant set of relationships. on the one hand butina and torshin are flying into the united states meeting with nra members, meeting with conservative activists while this investigation into suspected money laundering was going on. you have described torshin as her handler, perhaps. i m going with your pronunciation butina. i m curious, what are the charges with her? do you think there are more maria butinas out there? that is a very good question. the charges have escalated a bit. first we had the criminal complaint earlier in the week and then the indictment.