A lawyer for alleged Russian agent Maria Butina filed a motion Friday arguing that federal prosecutors misconstrued a three-year-old playful exchange between Butina and a male friend in Russia to smear the 29-year-old student as a seductress who offered sex for access. Driscoll wrote that the claim that Butina had offered sex for a position leans on a 2015 joking text exchange between Butina and a Russian man. Not a nickel to my name.”Later, she wrote, “Ask for anything,” adding: “That they hire you?” — a joking reference, Driscoll wrote, to the fact that Butina’s group already employed the man. “Three-year old, offhand complaints about one’s romantic partner being too close to their mother should be out of bounds, and certainly not asserted to be proof of a ‘duplicitous’ relationship,” Driscoll wrote. Driscoll argued that Butina should be freed to home detention, noting that the activities for which she is charged were not covert and involved no collection of sensitive information.

Source: Washington Post August 24, 2018 15:32 UTC