Russian national Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered agent and infiltrating U.S. political groups, was released from prison Friday morning.
A representative for the Florida prison told the Washington Examiner that Butina, 30, had been released into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s unclear what time she was released.
Butina will be escorted by two ICE agents during her deportation to Russia, her lawyer, Robert Driscoll, told the Washington Examiner.
Driscoll said earlier this week he would not know what her flight path would be until she is allowed to make one phone call prior to the last leg of her trip to Moscow.
ICE did not provide information about Butina’s travels, citing security concerns.
“ICE has lodged an immigration detainer on Russian national Maria Butina and will seek her removal following the completion of her sentence. For operational security, ICE does not discuss specific removal arrangements prior to an individual’s successful repatriation,” said ICE spokeswoman Kaitlyn Pote in a statement.
Butina pleaded guilty in December to failing to register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent while she acted at the direction of Alexander Torshin, a longtime figure in Russian politics, since at least 2015. She was the only Russian national arrested in the U.S. government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, though charges were not brought against her by special counsel Robert Mueller.
In its sentencing memo, the government said Butina “was not a spy in the traditional sense of trying to gain access to classified information to send back to her home country. She was not a trained intelligence officer … [but her] actions had the potential to damage the national security of the United States.”
Driscoll has denied that Butina was a spy, and she was not charged under the Espionage Act.
“If she were a spy, I would have cut a deal. If anyone knows she’s not a spy, it’s the Russians,” he said.
“If she were a Russian spy, she wouldn’t have hung around for the feds to come talk to her. They talked to her boyfriend first. That gave her a warning. If she were a spy, she would have taken her stuff and dumped it. She had the opportunity to do that. She could have gotten rid of it but she didn’t. Eleven FBI agents searched her apartment. They found nothing.”
