generalspeaking

Friday, July 20, 2018

Caught In The Net of Furious Symbolism

"We have the impression that [the] FBI, instead of fulfilling its main responsibilities in fighting crime, is fulfilling openly political orders."
"It's coming from those forces that are continuing to fuel Russo-phobic hysteria [in the United States]."
Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman, Russian Foreign Ministry

Maria Butina speaks at a Moscow press conference in 2013.

STR/AFP/Getty

This is a quite impressive woman, Maria Butina, the young Russian woman who apparently enjoyed her freedom to bounce back and forth from Russia to the United States in pursuit of an agenda that, incredibly, revolved around the right to gun ownership. Doubtless she made quite an impression with the National Rifle Association. Her one-woman campaign to loosen Russian laws on gun ownership to make it more like the U.S., where people can avail themselves of guns quite readily, accounting in great measure for astonishing incidents of mass shootings, may even be popular in Russia.

What a resume this woman has acquired, not only in establishing her bona fides as an excellent entrepreneur, but as a quasi-political figure who has acquired some interesting contacts at elite political levels, both in Russia and the United States. And all by age 29. It's head-spinning, actually. She was obviously born to intrigue and manifestations of capability leading to trust and an unerring instinct to ingratiate herself with those capable of further advancing her remarkable career.

It is, unfortunately, a career put on hold, for the moment. She and her presence in the United States, have been seized upon as representing the damning issue of a dark power geared to penetrating government agencies and lead players for the unforgivable purpose of spying. Shucks, the United States has no agents installed in the Russian Federation or elsewhere for that matter, acquiring sensitive data useful to U.S. intelligence agencies -- perish the thought!

But relations between the U.S. and Russia are currently at a sensitive pitch of feverish accusations. Not so much Russia since it is held to be the aggressor, but the United States most certainly where denunciations of state interference in the last presidential election that saw the elevation of a most improbable candidate to the presidency, elected by quite a large margin of votes in a contest of two incompetent liars of low-to-absent principles, saw a man with a benevolent attitude toward a Russian president whose actions have been nothing short of alarming globally ascend to power.

Returning to Maria Butina, that enterprising woman of ambition and talent to match; born in the steppes of Siberia, she acquired a university education, opened a furniture store and in short order transformed one store into a furniture empire. But other options to spread her prodigious talent called and she entered the United States on a student visa to further her academic eduction there. In the process she acquired a fascination with guns and mounted a challenge in Russia to relax gun laws.

This young woman has been charged with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of the Russian government to gather intelligence on American officials and political organizations. And get this: to work toward establishing back-channel communication lines for the Kremlin. Facilitating open communications between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin? Oh, dear! The Washington establishment will not, simply not have it! An enemy is not a competitor with whom one consults and exchanges views.

And when the U.S. views their president as having been Trumped by the slick imperturbable manner of a sly fox such as Putin they are enraged. Hatred, not a bland form of nation-to-nation communication is the order of the day this day in Washington. And plucking the presence of a Russian university student into the ambit of an FBI investigation of a woman who publicly posts social network updates on her travels between the U.S. and Russia offers speculative fodder for yet another threat emanating from Russia.

"It's psychosis. A witch hunt", her father stated from her hometown of Barnaul, in Russia. She is on the cusp of graduating from American University with a master's degree in international relations, finishing with a perfect 4.0 grade point average. Smart woman, wrong place, right time.