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GOP Sleeping With Our Enemies

If we had a POTUS with any balls and wasn't owned by Putin, we'd be taking billions of his stolen money from him already. That would get his attention.
 
Butina is the one who visited the White House according to the picture posted a while back by PhDeac, correct?
 
Butina is the one who orchestrated Russian donations to the NRA and was allegedly bringing "gun rights" to Russia. The NRA and RWers are such suckers thinking Putin would ever allow gun rights.
 
National Prayer Breakfast has been sketchy as hell for a while. Some of those people were influential in the anti-gay movements in Uganda and other places.
 
[h=1]Let Me Tell You About My Friend Maria Butina — Who Might Be A Russian Spy[/h]In 2015, my friend and I went to Disney World. Three years later, she went on a solo trip to prison.

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/02/224395/maria-butina-russian-spy-friend-story

This article is fascinating. A family friend of Paul Erickson talks about their relationship and her friendship with Butina, including of all things a trip to Disney World in 2015.

Paul and Maria met in Moscow at a meeting of the Right to Bear Arms in November 2013, then reunited in Israel a few weeks later to be together on New Year’s Eve. It was all very fast and very romantic. In my head, I pictured a Russian starlet with deep red lipstick and a past of which she did not speak.


But that was not who I saw standing outside the van in Orlando. Here was a girl only six years older than me, wearing a princess T-shirt and blue jean cut-off shorts. Her entire personality in that moment boiled down to, “Excited to go to Disney World.” In contrast, Paul, then 53, seemed unbearably old, with his yellow buck teeth poking from his gums at jagged angles, and the last strands of his ridiculous haircut moments away from skipping town. “Come on,” I wanted to say to her. “Let’s Thelma and Louise out of here.” I had red lipstick in my back pocket, I really did.




What I know now: Maria’s feet were in concrete. She wasn’t going anywhere. But don’t feel bad — she put them there. After knowing Paul for some years, Maria moved to America in 2016 on a student visa. While she was studying at American University, she was also cavorting with politicians in meetings brokered by Paul. As with the day we met them, it appeared their daily activities comprised of a whirlwind of buzzwords like Republican party, National Prayer Breakfast, and gun rights, but we had no way of knowing specifics. Until the torrent of recent coverage, both Maria and Paul were virtually scrubbed from the internet (back in 2009, I’d scoured the internet for what Paul did for a living and found nothing but some mentions in South Dakota clips — turns out he didn’t put “conman” on his LinkedIn).


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Nearby, Paul charmed a table of my friends with stories of celebrities he’d met while working the Oscars. None of them were verifiable; all of them were fascinating. Briefly, the conversation turned to the media spectacle that was the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. Paul dismissed any talk of competition with a flick of his hand. “Trump’s going to win,” he said, confidently. I rolled my eyes. He sounded like a conspiracy theorist.





Or, he sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about. After all, what was it, exactly, that had been keeping him so purposeful ever since we’d met him? Paul wasn’t plugged into conventional worries. He had a big life, without the trappings of a desk job or a 401k to fill. He supposedly had money in the Bakken oil fields and elder-care homes (now revealed to be part of his long-running fraud). He had stories.





But which of his stories were true? Did he really spend his summers in college fighting Communists abroad? Did he really fly Green Day out for his niece’s birthday party in South Dakota? Who did he know? Who was he? Before, those questions were like pestering flies that I flicked away so I could pay attention to the glitz of it all.





Now that his stories of NRA meetings and the Russian government were converging oddly with current events, I snapped to attention. Namely, what were the “meetings” he was constantly referencing, in-between his bursts of booming laughter and fast-paced spouts of celebrity gossip? Why did they interrupt our dinner at Orlando’s Bahama Breeze to briefly meet with that Russian couple? Later, when photographic evidence of Maria meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other GOP and NRA officials emerged, I wasn’t surprised. I was relieved. I was right.
 
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