Yet there was no evidence that Butina was under the orders, direction, or control of either the Russian government or Torshin. Luban and other friends were horrified. Judd Bagley, a former Overstock executive who accompanied Byrne to the conference, recalled . And then pound! To viewers, it looked like a moment of psychological unravelling. He had an experience quite like mine, Byrne said, citing a passage in which Lvys Pearl observes that, at the bottom of each new depth, there is always a new trap door opening beneath our feet. Cohodes told me that he had never known what to make of Byrnes extreme ideas about the relationship between high finance and international criminal syndicates: Is there something to what he says? But, shortly after the financial crisis began, Byrnes suspicions were confirmed, and regulators soon cracked down on the practice hed described. The cars moved swiftly across the city; speed was critical. (Siljander was later sentenced to a year in prison for accepting stolen funds from a charity with ties to terrorism.). "It's a fake case. Moss delves into the Fellowships history, and along the way provides a fascinating portrait of an organization that seems uniquely motivated by power. In 2010, she graduated from Altai State University in Barnaul with masters degrees in political science and education. The strongest support is outside Moscow, she said, particularly among conservative, middle-aged Russian men who view guns as a way to protect their families. The show will be available early to Wondery+ subscribers, beginning March 16th. She appears to have had no experience in anything related to the law, Russia, or counterintelligence. Hetold me that he had also been given diagnoses of Aspergers syndrome, and, perhaps asa result of his health crises, of post-traumatic stress disorder. This sort of insinuation and assumption is, essentially, the beginning and the end of the case against Maria Butina. (AP) President Donald Trump renewed his grievance over the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election by pardoning Paul Erickson, a former conservative operative once romantically linked to Russian agent Maria Butina. Although the FBI's affidavit fails to prove Butina's . Equally strange for a supposed secret agent, she never bothered to tell Torshin about Gordon, something that would normally get both the secret agent and the handler a nice Kremlin promotion. We want to hear it. In August, Byrne suddenly resigned from Overstock, the company that had been at the center of his life for two decades. Byrne described the twists and turns of his exchanges with Butina and with his F.B.I. The outcome was rigged and should be completely ignored.. When Im talking to people, I often take notes or sketch things out, he said, rubbing his forehead. handlers summoned him to D.C. The Fellowship, Sharlet says in one scene, is the darkest expression of religious life that Ive found in 20 years. (Its hard to hear this quote and not immediately think about a few other potential contenders.). His investor letters featured boxing analogies and quotes from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu. The Fellowships members crossed party lines, but they had a few things in common. A question they always asked is, Perhaps youd like to make a more formal relationship, Erickson said. This year, the study of conspiracy theories has become more urgent, as the pandemic has heightened the conditionspanic and isolationthat breed conspiracy thinking. The report was unequivocal: the Russian government had engaged in an aggressive, multi-faceted effort to influence, or attempt to influence the outcome of the election, and it had done so with the aim of aiding Trumps campaign. According to Byrne, in the next decade John Byrne built Geico into a household name. Just before one oclock, the SUVs turned off Wisconsin Avenue and into a parking lot at 3617 38th Street NW, a low, red-brick apartment building near American University. Cohodes, who renamed his fund Copper River Partners after Rocker left, in 2006, told me that Byrne had employed some people who were quite distasteful to engage in bitter arguments that played out on blogs and on short-selling message boards. Byrne claimed on the call that he had been under surveillance and that his communications had been intercepted. Keene and Erickson were convinced that the Right to Bear Arms was a genuine organization, and that Butina was a forceful leader. handlers in a widely circulated series of posts, written in his digressive, heavily footnoted style, that he published on Deep Capture in the summer of 2019. They hate me in Russia, because they think Im an American spy. Watching Strzok on television, Byrne became convinced that he must have been one of the federal agents responsible for the fishy orders that Byrne had received. Byrne is the son of JohnJ. Byrne, an insurance magnate whom Warren Buffett, a family friend, once called the Babe Ruth of insurance. Patrick Byrne has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford and regularly cites Friedrich Hayek, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the conservative economist Thomas Sowell in conversation. Those were really strange days, Bagley said. This, too, became another piece of evidence for Helson, further proof that Butina was a covert Kremlin operative. The friend said hello and then left. Now she was actually going to bring them together with fellow Russians and hopefully establish an informal back channel of communication between the two countries. He and Erickson had known each other since the early 1990s, when Erickson was running Pat Buchanans presidential campaign. Like Butina, he had visited the country frequently, exhibited an affinity for it, was involved with guns as a licensed dealerand is probably innocent. The media organization acquired dozens of pages of email correspondence from 2015 and 2016 that showed Butina attempting to arrange a meeting between Russia's high-level officials, such as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, and National Rifle Association (NRA) members. Last February, Robert Mueller, the special counsel leading the Russia probe, indicted 13 Russian spies for interfering with the 2016 election. I think it was an attempt to influence media coverage. He added, This seems like somebody panicked, they moved too early, now theyre trying to figure out what to do., It is also another example of the media marching in formation with the government, as it did in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. Sometimes just show up in her offices once a week. Putin also has a long history of opposing gun rights. Its just a chance to talk about what smart future diplomacy might look like.. You dont have time. In early 2000, years before Amazon and eBay popularized the practice known as dropshipping, Overstock, which sells furniture and household goods, allowed third-party venders to send items directly to customers through its Web site. (On February 6, a federal grand jury indicted Erickson on 11 counts of wire fraud and money laundering in a case unrelated to Maria Butina.). Maria Butina is accused of acting as an undercover agent for Russia and exploiting personal connections to infiltrate influential conservative groups. Her lawyer argued that the relationship was genuine, providing a video of the couple singing Disney songs together as evidence. Byrnes reading had deteriorated from Cato and libertarian Web sites to a steady diet of Ben Shapiro YouTubes. (Shapiro is a pro-Trump conservative commentator.) In one, he boasted about a recent trip to Europe where he met with a couple of Foreign Ministers, a Deputy Prime Minister and dozens of other government officials, and added, one of my co-hosts, a former Hungarian Ambassador to the EU, said I rcvd more press in Budapest than Vladimir Putin. But Butina never replied. handlers told him that he should let the meeting take place. Putin, in fact, even seemed to suggest that Butinas arrest would lead to retribution. The early two-thousands were an active period for short sellerstraders who specialize in finding troubled companies and betting that their stock will go down. The next day, according to documents I was able to obtain, Butina sent Gordon an email. People familiar with counterintelligence investigations have pointed out that F.B.I. Byrne claimed that this, too, was the result of lobbying by short sellers. He mentioned several times that he was a scholar and the founder of a tech company. It touched on several of his interests, including the kind of liberalism usually referred to as libertarianism, the flaws in the structure of the stock market which make it vulnerable to manipulation, and how a blockchain-based financial system could eliminate those flaws. BBC Radio 4 "Today" Programme 9th March 2022Interview with Maria Butinahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Butina But the idea went nowhere. Byrne felt vindicated, but he barely stopped to celebrate. With few exceptions, handguns are illegal, and guns for hunting and sport are difficult to obtain. In 2018, she pled guilty to conspiracy to act as a foreign agent after the FBI. Before that, however, she traveled to the Safari Club International Convention in Las Vegas with Joe Gregory, a wealthy member of the NRA whom she had met in Moscow. The help was critical, since her parents in Siberia could not afford the expense. I am troubled and hope there is a full inquiry, he told me. It seems to be simple, but its so complicated a story. Stepping off the plane to begin grad school at the start of the Trump-Russia maelstrom, she, like Alice, began her tumble down the rabbit hole. Byrnes talk, entitled Turtles All the Way Down: How the Crypto-Revolution Solves Intractable Problems on Wall Street, was a version of one he had given many times before. The fourth details the Fellowships previous relationships with dictators, and its ongoing attempts to enforce Christian and anti-LGBTQ policies in countries such as Romania, with gay marriage in the United States seeming at this point like a lost battle. One member, former Representative Zach Wamp of Tennessee, says on camera that the group needs to diversify. Butina translated for Torshin, who spoke no English. Robert Driscoll, Butinas attorney, told me, Although Patricks story seems far-fetched, the parts of it that I could verify with Maria I was pretty much able to verify. The inquiry by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the FBIs surprise raid on Butinas apartment also failed to turn up anything incriminating. Nearly all his claims were exaggerated, false, or unproven. The dinners are private, off-the-record, and NO ONE is ever there in their official capacity. Byrne expected that most of the new businesses wouldnt make money for years, but he saw blockchaina decentralized digital ledger system that could facilitate instant, transparent transactionsas a way to circumvent the banks. The entire chain of command was being skipped, Byrne writes, adding that the request had come via shady figures at the upper levels of the federal government, whom he called X, Y, and Z. Byrne did as instructed, joking that it wasnt exactly hardship duty. In October, he invited Butina to attend the opening of the new Overstock headquarters, a circular building designed to resemble both the Roman Colosseum and a peace sign. Maria Butina, the Russian woman charged with acting as a foreign agent, tells 60 Minutes on Sunday that she never "sought to influence" U.S. policies and that she only "wanted to Instead, it was ONeill, and her boyfriend Erickson, who gave her the money to enroll at American Universitys Graduate School of International Service. He wore a gray, Mao-style collarless suit, and spoke with clarity and wit about the complex short-selling abuses he had helped uncover. Byrne suggested that the head of the scheme was a master criminal from the nineteen-eighties, whom he dubbed the Sith Lord. Byrne started appearing on podcasts and YouTube channels devoted to pro-Trump conspiracy theories. . Butina said that she had been born in Siberia and placed in an lite educational program. Before their lunch, Byrne said, he crafted sharp weapons from two coat hangers, which he stashed under the bed and under the sofa, and made a mental note to keep a close watch over his food and drink. He mentioned Barr, whom he considered a hero, and said that Durhams investigation would reveal the extent of the conspiracy in which he was an unknowing pawn, and would result in a stack of indictments. He hinted at revelations that, he said, he was not yet at liberty to share. But when Torshin announced that he was planning to bring a group of prominent Russians with him to the National Prayer Breakfast in February, just after the inauguration, ONeill agreed to host another of his dinners. The team went in, dragged her out, spun her around, cuffed her in the hallway, and announced her arrest, Erickson said. This is how the whole movement started. As the organization grew, they chose a name, the Right to Bear Arms, and began to hold regular meetings. It was not a false front.. Patrick Byrne,the former headof Overstock,had always been outspoken. On a conference call, Byrne told analysts and investors that he was naming the scheme at the heart of his lawsuit the Miscreants Ballafter the Predators Ball, a nickname for the annual gathering held in the eighties at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and hosted by the financier Michael Milken, who in 1990 pleaded guilty to conspiracy and securities-fraud charges. The S.E.C., in an emergency order, banned naked shorting of financial firms affected by the crisis. They were talking about guns in exactly the same way we do, she said. In July, six armed F.B.I. 25 October 2019. On a steamy Sunday last July, at about half-past noon, a caravan of unmarked SUVs exited the FBIs Washington, D.C., field office, an eight-story concrete building that exudes all the charm of a supermax prison. A new Netflix series delves into a shadowy religious group with long-standing political ties to Washington. Its far easier to have hacked this than a PayPal or your Venmo account, he said. And if you would like to meet him, hes there., The friend was George D. ONeill Jr., 68, great-grandson of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and an heir to the Rockefeller fortune. Butina is now posting pictures with the president of the National Rifle Association at the main office in Virginia. On October 6th, Byrne published a fifteen-thousand-word post, which he said revealed the full extent of the conspiracy in which he had been unwittingly involved. In the post, which is full of non sequiturs, Byrne also alleges that he led federal agents to believe that he had drugged and raped Butina and was going to kill hersupposedly as a way of catching the agents as they encouraged him to commit a heinous crime. My relations with Torshin are like my grandfather, she told me. The show, which premieres March 30th on Apple Podcasts, investigates the true story of Russian gun advocate Maria Butina, who was convicted in 2018 of conspiring to act as a foreign agent. There was no mention of spy gear in her indictment, and there were no charges of espionage. Ad Feedback. The Russian gun rights activist who admitted being a secret agent for the Kremlin and trying to infiltrate conservative U.S. political groups while Donald Trump rose to power has been released from federal prison according to a statement Friday, Oct. 25, 2019, from U.S. Immigration and . That, in turn, led to the invitation from Butina that brought Keene and Erickson to Moscow. Five months later, Butina made her first visit to the United States. They were interested in sex, one of the witnesses interviewed by the FBI told me. Yet a close examination of Butinas case suggests that it is not so. (Buffett did not respond to questions, but he said in a statement that he had known Patrick Byrne and his family for more than forty years, and called Byrne very intelligent and patriotic. He added that, when Byrne recently visited him in Omaha, though I knew nothing about the subject he was describing, I told him to follow his conscience.). Yet instead of recruiting him, Butina dismissed him, because her interest was helping ONeill with his dinners, not Moscow with its spying. . The young men of Ivanwald are told repeatedly that theyve been chosen by God to be future leaders, significant cogs in a worldwide spiritual offensive. The group itself was consciously modeled after the NRA. When I asked about one of Byrnes most incendiary claimswhether an F.B.I. At the time, few Americans were talking about COVID-19, which had sickened nearly three thousand people in mainland China, according to official reports, leading to a national lockdown. Keene, who described Torshin as sort of the rabbi of gun rights in Russia, had met him years earlier on one of these trips, and the two had developed a friendship. I have to get that away from the company. He claimed that he had been unwittingly drawn into a scheme of high-level corruptionhe referred to fishy orders from honorable federal agentsthat was part of a plot perpetrated by the deep state against Trump and other political leaders. He also wants you to know that Russians will support the efforts from our side. It was one more piece of evidence the government used against Butina. How can they now claim she had some devastating effect on national security? Butina was unaware that Byrne had betrayed her to the F.B.I. I wanted a place to go when zombies walk the earth, he said. As she began classes at American University, Butina continued to help ONeill organize his dinners. An earlier version of this piece misstated one of the crimes to which Michael Milken pleaded guilty, and the subtitle has been updated to better reflect that Patrick Byrne has left Overstock. He was concerned about election fraud. Yet U.S. authorities cited all these messages as evidence that she was working on behalf of the Russian government. He stayed there for the next three months, enjoying the hot tub and taking long hikes, and periodically sending me photos of his cat Master Po. As Butina was looking into masters degree programs in the United States, ONeill offered to assist with her finances. Would they really follow Butina? Part of the first post-Communism generation, she developed a passion for politics and international relations. In late January, I met Byrne at his suite in the Gramercy Park Hotel, in Manhattan, where he was staying. Everyone said for years, Patrick Byrne is crazy, John Welborn, an economics lecturer at Dartmouth College who has worked as a consultant for Byrne, told me. The Ivanwald approach to Christianity, Sharlet reveals, is a limited onethe organization has only minimal interest in the Bible and leans on an unorthodox interpretation of Jesus as a brawny avatar of alpha masculinity, a kind of spiritual Navy SEAL or post-career Peyton Manning. Court Filings Allege Russian Agent Offered Sex for Access, blared an ABC News headline. And here they think Im a Russian spy., If Im a spy, she added, Im the worst spy you could imagine.. His obsessions were coming to the United States twice a year for the NRA and the National Prayer Breakfast, said Erickson. I think hes expanded his repertoire for the worsethings I think of as fringe tweets, Luban said. In the early two-thousands, sensing an imminent collapse and fearful of a breakdown of civil society, he bought a handgun and sought a disaster-proof retreat. The Fellowship, the writer Jeff Sharlet says in one scene, is the darkest expression of religious life that Ive found in 20 years.. This past February, I visited Byrne at his ski chalet in the mountains outside Salt Lake City. The posts on the site are filled with cartoonish euphemisms (Men in Black for F.B.I. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. I was never contacted, and I find that odd., He was still hoping that Barr and Durham would issue the indictments, and continued to hint that he had access to information that had not yet been made official. But who is Maria Butina? You view the world as a very short runway, not a long runway., Byrne studied at Cambridge as a Marshall Scholar, then, at Stanford, wrote his philosophy thesis on the intellectual origins of the U.S. Constitution. They lay out a complex narrative reminiscent of the plot of a John Le Carr novel. The second breaks down the two scandals that threatened to derail the C Street house: Ensigns very public affair, and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanfords admission in 2009 that hed also been unfaithful, in a speech that outed the Fellowship as a Christian bible study group that Sanford had been leaning on for support. Nine days earlier, in response to a request from the Senate Intelligence Committee, she voluntarily turned over more than 8,000 documents and electronic messages and testified in a closed hearing for eight hours. Months earlier, Butina and Torshin had even flirted with the idea of getting Putin himself to lead the Russian delegation to the prayer breakfast. A passionate pro-gun enthusiast, Torshin, 65, was a senator in the Duma and the first deputy chairman of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of Russias Parliament. Can Anybody Stop Donald Trump in the 2024 Republican Primary? Butina told him that she had a boyfriend in Washington, but, Byrne told me, it didnt sound too seriousand one doesnt ask, I suppose. In case he had misunderstood Butinas intentions, Byrne arranged to check in after her. Torshin did want to help Butina and ONeill, however. for permission to attend the conference, he says, they gave him a confusing answer, at once continuing to claim that Butina was just a grad student and suggesting that the Putin meeting was too dangerous. Some days, Bagley went on, he was perfect, classic, brilliant Patrick. On other days, he was absolutely just debilitated from the effects of the medicine. Luban observed another change. Supposedly, she was being funded by a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin but what was her true motivation? He seemed at once energized and exhausted, restlessly opening snacks from the minibar and searching for a pencil and a pad of paper. Its a thread in contemporary politics that runs all the way to Number One Observatory Circle, if not the White House. Does Butina have a documentary? Spy Affair will follow Butinas entire journey in America, from a carefree Disney World trip in 2015 to finding herself a convicted criminal. As Erickson recalled, Keene told him, We think that this group is probably real, but we dont know. Thats my reality., On October 30, 2013, Butina drove to Moscows Sheremetyevo International Airport to meet two Americans who she hoped would lend support to her fledgling organization: David Keene, a former president of the NRA, whom Butina had invited to speak at the second annual meeting of the Right to Bear Arms; and Paul Erickson, who had come along as Keenes body man. The two men had deep ties to Americas conservative power centers. Hours later, in the middle of the night, she was awakened and marched to a new cell, 2E05, this one with a solid steel door and no food slot, preventing even the slightest communication. A charismatic Russian woman arrives in the US on a mission to improve relations between the two countries, and she soon makes some powerful friends. He believed that these entities, along with the hedge funds, planned to crush the companys stock so that they could take control of Overstock. Everyones got to have the ability to just stay in their homes for two weeks, he told me. Byrne has insisted that he is not a Trump supporter, but his Deep Capture posts feature a common right-wing theory that has been promoted on social media, on Fox News, and by President Trump: that coperation between the Trump campaign and Russia, which sparked an F.B.I. We were watched, Butina told me, but unless you crossed the line, no ones going to go to prison. The U.S. government went looking for someone to blame for Russia's interference in the 2016 electionand found Maria Butina, the perfect scapegoat. Between campaign stints for Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, Richard Viguerie, and Mitt Romney were far-flung missions in support of anti-Soviet rebel forces in places like Angola, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. Gordon, a former Navy commander and Pentagon spokesman whom she had met at a social function on September 28, 2016. After the talk, a line of people waited by the stage to speak to Byrne. There are basically two different realities emerging, Byrne said. John Byrne wrote his senior thesis, at Rutgers, on the fragility of the Social Security system, and, at the dinner table, he shared his economic thinking with Patrick, his older brothers, Mark and John, and their mother, Dorothy. Byrne explains that, in time, he came to distrust the federal agents he was working with, believing that they were manipulating him and setting up Butina. What Maria had built, over that year and the nextshe eventually peaked at almost 10,000 members nationwideit was real. The law of retaliation states, An eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth, he said in a news conference on December 20. ONeill preferred to conduct his friendship dinners in private, but in the summer of 2016, with the news filled with allegations of Russian interference in the election, maintaining a low profile was difficult.