Maria Butina got drunk and spilled the beans

As the details continue to pour out about how various Donald Trump underlings and Kremlin underlings went about their scandals, it’s shaping up to be a contest to see who turns out to be the world’s most incompetent corrupt political operative. We’ve been wanting to give the award to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, who got drunk and confessed everything in a bar. But now it turns out Maria Butina might have Papadopoulos beat at his own game – by doing the same thing.

That’s right, Russian operative Maria Butina – who is now sitting in a jail cell while awaiting trial – got drunk and bragged about her status as a de facto Kremlin spy to her American associates. No, really, we’ve got yet another intoxicated confession in this scandal. That’s what CNN is reporting this evening, and it may tell us a lot about the true nature of the Trump-Russia scandal.

The evidence strongly suggests that Russia sent Butina to the United States in order to give the Kremlin direct influence over entities such as the NRA and the Republican Party. The indictment against her claims that she went as far as offering sexual favors to try to gain that influence. But there have long been other examples of properly trained Kremlin operatives who used similar tactics while being professional and discrete about it, so as not to get caught.

Maria Butina comes off like the world’s worst spy. This is unfathomably amateur hour. Yet her ties to a Kremlin oligarch, a Kremlin political leader, and the Russian GRU spy unit make clear that they really did choose her to try to pull this off. It’s as if the Kremlin was never expecting any of this to be investigated – but the minute Donald Trump was named the winner, it guaranteed that this would be investigated. It’s enough to ask if perhaps the Kremlin really was just using Trump, the GOP, and the NRA to try to cripple Hillary Clinton so she wouldn’t be able to fight back against Putin once she took office.