I agree that “the Russians” are not stupid or inept, but I don’t know if Butina’s lawyer is even making the aforestated argument to begin with.
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Yes, I loved reading about and seeing the pictures of Malignia’s spectacular “modeling career”. I have a feeling, though, that she will never be a threat to the legacies of Jean Shrimpton, Cheryl Tiegs, Naomi Campbell, or Cindy Crawford. Just a hunch.
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Just a lot of blowing hot air.
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Carter Page … was trying to get a huge income stream from Putin’s national oil company.
Yeah, Carter’s really the test and the model here - FSB clearly used capital gains as the lure for Page, so there’s no reason to suppose Torshin’s tool wouldn’t try the same with a buncha NRA-ers and their toadies.
I’ll be surprised if anyone’s in great danger from holding their breath waiting for Page’s indictment.
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trying to scrape together enough teaching assignments to buy ramen. Oh what a fool I was!
Clearly I should have (a) run my own front-organization (b) tried to put together major import-export deals and © have my boyfriend do my homework
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Tuition is expensive.
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Well, I was one of the lucky ones. I did not have to TA courses, and I only had to eat Ramen 3-4 times a week. Tuna, on the other hand…
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There’s always a You Tube video:
Love the description of the video: A simple way to frighten away unwanted people from the door like census and cold call sales people religious door knockers… Simply answer the door wearing your new ‘hat’ and explain how the rays from the satellites are controlling the minds of the masses 
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Seriously! Student visas are notoriously restrictive. On campus work-study jobs are basically the only employment allowed.
It puts a lot of students in a really tough spot if the rent goes up, or the currency market takes a dive, or their department doesn’t offer many courses in the spring quarter,or…
But Ms. Butina goes waltzing around handing out money and making jet fuel deals and who knows what else. Grrr.
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No telling what message it sent.
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Yup. The slippery slope is getting steeper. And stupider.
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she had ‘help’. Her body was too overworked with multiple BFs old enough to be her granpa to spend time ‘studying’
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No, no, no, I’m just a private citizen…just because I have all these multimillionaire friends???
Republicans always want to paint illegal immigration as brown people slipping across the border. This situation is the other way people do it- violating visas by staying too long or working.Kinda like models from Slovenia coming to the US and working while holding a tourist visa…
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perhaps the Keenes wanted to launder money via Gazprom, but if Butina is a wannabe she contacted (tried to help) some of the LesserGarks…
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I mean, in any field there are established, trusted people who have experience, connections, all that. And then you have wannabes running around, trying to put together much sketchier deals in a sporadic way with everything being lower level and sloppier. Sometimes some of the more higher-level types will let the lower-levels hang around a bit, like if they’re young and cute, for instance. But their status is never that secure, they’re still lurking around the campfire like jackals. At this point I’m starting to wonder if she was really a serious conduit for money into the NRA. That may have been happening with more serious characters in a more serious way. Stay tuned!
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Yes and it starts small, with just a little grift here a little scam here and, BOOM, you have committed a felony or two and then they have you. I imagine they operate like the Mafia, you don’t get to quit, unless you know how to hide real well or they put you under the ground.
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No problem, none of them would last more than a few minutes.
When I was in grad school our summer support ended in July (with a few exceptions for those who were paid on NIH or NSF grants) and we didn’t get our first academic year paycheck until October 1. We had to plan for one month without a paycheck and we had to pay our fees, buy books, etc.
My birthday is in mid-September. My parents always sent me a check for a couple of hundred packed with a care package of shippable food.
I ate my share of Ramen, but I was never reduced to ketchup-based tomato soup. I tried to look out for my friends so they didn’t reach that state either.
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