WASHINGTON • Admitted Russian agent Maria Butina has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after the Siberia native, her voice breaking with emotion, begged a judge for mercy and expressed remorse for conspiring with a Russian official to infiltrate a gun rights group and influence United States conservative activists and Republicans.
Lawyers for Butina, a former graduate student at American University in Washington who publicly advocated for gun rights, had asked Judge Chutkan to impose a sentence of time served and let her return to Russia. RUSSIAN AGENT MARIA BUTINA, who pleaded guilty in December to one count of conspiring to act as a foreign agent.Butina pleaded guilty in December to one count of conspiring to act as a foreign agent, agreeing to cooperate with prosecutors."This was no simple misunderstanding by an overeager foreign student," Judge Chutkan said before imposing the sentence.
"There is nothing we could accuse her of, but to make this case not look completely ridiculous, she was sentenced to 18 months in prison," he told journalists on the sidelines of a summit in Beijing.