Russia’s Butina tells judge she wants to change not guilty plea

Bloomberg

Maria Butina, the Russian gun-rights activist who befriended leaders of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Republican Party and then was accused of acting as an undeclared agent of the Kremlin, has decided to change her plea of not guilty to at least one of the two charges she faces.
In a court filing, Butina’s lawyers asked a federal judge to convene a hearing as soon as Tuesday at which Butina would change her plea, signalling she might plead guilty. She pleaded not guilty in July following her arrest on charges of conspiracy and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.
According to an FBI affidavit filed as part of her arrest, Butina spent several years working to cultivate relationships with key members of the NRA along with national figures in the Republican Party.
While she was studying in the US in 2016 and 2017, the FBI said, Butina was actually working to advance the interests of Russia, reporting in with an unnamed senior government official, believed to be Alexander Torshin, who was deputy governor of Russia’s Central Bank.
In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, Butina emerged as a kind of gadfly, chatting with Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin at an NRA convention in 2015 and attending the launch of his presidential campaign months later.