According to CNN, suspected Russian agent Maria Butina was not particularly discreet and had difficulty keeping her spy status a secret, especially when drinking.
The alleged covert Russian agent liked to communicate via Twitter messages and WhatsApp. Her overly flirtatious approach left men wondering what she was truly after. She tended to brag about her ties to Russian intelligence when she was intoxicated, according to people familiar with the situation.
"She's like a Scud missile. There's no precision," said CIA veteran Robert Baer, a CNN intelligence and security analyst.
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In her graduate-level classes at American University -- a cover for work on behalf of the Russian government, according to prosecutors -- Butina vociferously defended Putin. She also claimed, in class, to be a liaison between the Trump campaign and the Russians, according to a person familiar with the situation.
People who met her through school and through political events described her as a little too friendly. She was quick to start playing footsy under the table or sidle up to an older man at a political event and suddenly request that they become friends on Facebook, according to people who knew her.
On at least two separate occasions she got drunk and spoke openly about her contacts within the Russian government, even acknowledging that Russian intelligence services were involved with the gun rights group she ran in Moscow. Twice, classmates reported her actions to law enforcement because they found her comments so alarming, sources said.
In her final months at American University, the FBI raided her apartment. They arrested her in July.
While Butina's methods were inconsistent with traditional spycraft, her casual behavior appeared to yield results.
[I]ntelligence experts say Butina's far-from-subtle approach to infiltrating Republican political circles in the US appears to be just one tactic in Moscow's arsenal as Russian President Vladimir Putin aimed to influence American politics and disrupt democracy ahead of the 2016 election ...
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Putin has numerous intelligence services at his disposal. Some excel in hacking. Others churn out seasoned operatives to gather intelligence and quietly recruit Americans. But there are also more informal missions, ones that are often directed by Putin himself with the help of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor.
"It's much less structured," Alina Polyakova, a Russia expert and foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, said of Russia's influence operations. "There often is kind of a proxy lead actor, who is usually an oligarch close to the regime, that is given a project and he outsources portions of that project."
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It ... helps shed light on why run-ins between a ragtag assortment of Russians and members of Donald Trump's orbit appeared so random.
In other words, put into this context, the multiple points of contact between suspected Russian operatives and Trump campaign associates during the 2016 campaign start to make sense.
In April 2016, a Maltese professor with Kremlin ties informed Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had thousands of damaging emails about Hillary Clinton, according to court records.
A month later, a Russian man who went by Henry Greenberg made a more overt offer to longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone: damaging information on Clinton in exchange for $2 million. Stone has said he believes the offer was part of a law enforcement setup directed at the Trump campaign.
That same month, May of 2016, Butina and her alleged handler, Kremlin-linked banker Alexander Torshin, snagged a brief meet-and-greet with Donald Trump Jr. on the sidelines of the National Rifle Association's annual meeting in Louisville, Kentucky. That was only after her efforts with Torshin to establish back channel communications between candidate Trump and Putin fell short.
By June of 2016, a Russian lawyer met with Trump Jr. and other top Trump campaign officials for the now infamous Trump Tower meeting. The Trump officials believed the lawyer was there to offer dirt on Clinton. The offer was pushed by a Russian billionaire with ties to Putin.
Alleged Russian agent's infiltration of GOP circles anything but subtle (CNN)