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Paul Erickson, the conservative operative who helped Russian agent Maria Butina make outreach to the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, is still defending her name years after the whole operation went south.
Butina, the gunslinging, flaming Russian redhead—and Erickson’s former girlfriend—infamously admitted to conspiring to act as a clandestine foreign agent of Russia in 2018. Her work including trying to build backchannels between the Russian government and the Trump campaign and infiltrating conservative political circles in the United States. She was sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2019, before being deported back to Russia, where she now serves as a member of parliament.
Erickson—who himself was convicted in a fraud scheme unrelated to the influence operation and sentenced to seven years in prison—claims in new interviews that Butina was never acting as a spy and complained about her treatment in the United States justice system.
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