Dumber Than a Box of Rocks

This story, at first glance, makes you wonder not “What were they thinking”, but rather “WERE they thinking?” I”m not sure any of the people involved in this were thinking. This is both comically dumb, and disturbingly stupid. Definitely not planned, but some sort of fly-by-wire operation.

From The Hill: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/404786-wife-of-ex-nra-head-tapped-accused-russian-agent-to-secure-jet-fuel

The wife of David Keene, a former president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), tapped accused Russian agent Maria Butina to secure a jet fuel deal with Russia, according to hundreds of emails obtained by The New York Times.

Donna Keene, a Washington lobbyist, asked Butina and her boyfriend at the time, GOP operative Paul Erickson, to secure five million barrels of jet fuel in exchange for $1 million, the Times reported. Keene reportedly connected Butina and Erickson with prospective buyers, including Israeli-American salesman Yoni Wiss.

Butina is currently in a Virginia jail awaiting trial.  The 29-year-old allegedly told unnamed people in the U.S. that she targeted the NRA because they have a “central place and influence” in the U.S. and that they are the “largest sponsor of the elections to the U.S. Congress.”

That’s a brief version. The real lowdown is at the NYT site here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/02/us/politics/maria-butina-russian-spy.html

From the NYT:

Federal prosecutors have depicted her (Butina) as a character out of “Red Sparrow,” the spy thriller about a Russian femme fatale. Ms. Butina, supported by Russian intelligence, managed to infiltrate conservative groups and advance Moscow’s interests in the United States, prosecutors say.

In their telling, she used gun rights — Ms. Butina had started a pro-gun group in Russia — to gain a toehold in American conservative circles, and then struck up a romance with a far older Republican operative to open doors further. She has denied the allegations.

Fair warning: the NYT will probably want  money from you, so you might want to just go to their site and read the full article there.

I admit to some curiosity on  my part: the alleged volume of jet fuel, per the article is far more than Russia’s refineries can export in one month. In addition, the NYT article indicates that there is no port anywhere that could handle the amount of oil this group intended to obtain. I’m impressed with their consistent use of “trigger” words: inflitrate, gun rights, pro-gun, gain a toehold, open doors further.

It’s meant to stir your curiosity. Oooh! Is this a spy novel??? No. Sorry.

To add to the curious nature of this, Ms. Butina aligned herself with a Russian coffee bean trader and a public relations consultant with rather sketchy ties to Vlad Putin’s political party, for no visible reason, other than “Russian”.

Apparently, this rather oddly comic adventure began when Ms. Butina ran into the Keenes and they all met with someone as yet unnamed who wanted to import 5 million barrels of Russian oil, for a finder’s fee of $1,000,000, in addition to Yoni Wiss who indicates that not one of these people had the faintest idea what they were doing, such as how to find a market for this product, which is where you start.  If you sell the products without researching the market, that’s kind of like being stuck with Amway’s things.  And besides, isn’t Libyan oil still being stolen and sold? That’s a much higher profit margin, y0u know.

Gee whiz, people, if you’re going to try to pull off some kind of Spy vs. Spy stuff, which this is nearly imitating, at least read Follet and Ludlum novels first about the spy business. Or watch Walter Matthau in ‘Hop Scotch’. You might learn something.

I’m just glad that nobody got hurt, no splinters in the fingers, and no broken nails out of this. Ms Butina, as is indicated, is sitting in a jail cell awaiting a hearing.

Is this “investigation” into tomfoolery kind of a hint that the Demos are scrambling to find a way to prove, once and for, all that the Russians ran our elections in the fall of 2016? It does look that way to me. But they didn’t, so….?

In retrospect, this NYT pile of “evidence” about a bird-brained attempt at making big sales in the USA commodities market with neither the experience to do it, nor the faintest idea how trading commodities works, is simply a tempest in a teapot. The real story is this nitwitted attempt to break into “something big” without the right training or tools to do the job. If Ms. Butina, who had a somewhat inflated view of her place in things, had bothered to check the financial and commodities markets, she might have seen seen that she was completely out of her depth. She had no connections with Gazprom, Russia’s oil contractor, and no real connections to Vlad, who may be snorting with laughter over this dustup. And she had not researched her proposed market ahead of time, in order to make the deal work.

Note that on the sidebar in the “Hill” article, there is a link to something that says the Democrats will “bring sparks to the Kavanaugh hearing”. Is this connected to this oil business nonsense? Yes, in a vague way, because that will somehow sneak into the hearings.

Category: "Teh Stoopid", Reality Check