Arsenault recalled that Butina was on the panel because she claimed to run a gun-rights organization in Russia, and was the only participant with a pro-gun stance. Organizers liked that she had a different take on the issue and could offer an international perspective, Arsenault said.

The group she's said to have founded is called Right to Bear Arms.

"I don't know to this day if it was real, or a paper cover for her infiltration into the NRA," the professor said.

Arsenault recalled that Butina didn't come off as "professional" during her participation on the panel.

"She was not a scholar," he said. "She was just, as you might imagine. She was pretty. And kind of coquettish. She smiled a lot."

At the same time, after the FBI informed Maryland just days ago that its entire election system was being hosted on a private commercial server said to be owned by a Russian oligarch tied to Putin (as discussed in detail on yesterday's BradCast), we learn this week that the top U.S. election system vendor, ES&S, has been lying about remote access software and modems installed, for many years, on systems still used by a majority of U.S. voters.

The new revelations may help explain an exclusive special report published by The BRAD BLOG back in 2011, with an officially-commissioned independent analysis finding that, among other concerns, Venango County, Pennsylvania's ES&S election management system had been accessed by an unknown and unauthorized computer for "several hours" from a remote location. As we reported at the time, ES&S and the County's Board of Commissioners went to considerable lengths, after those revelations, to block a further, independent forensic analysis of the system.

And now, perhaps, we may know why. Kim Zetter reports this week at Vice's Motherboard that the company lied to her and New York Times' fact-checkers earlier this year in advance of her February article at the paper on the inclusion of modems and pcAnywhere remote access software included with the election management systems sold to customers from 2000 to 2006. After previously insisting the company had no "knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software", ES&S reversed itself in a letter to U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, she reports. But they have refused to respond to the Senator's subsequent follow-up queries or to appear at recent Senate hearings on U.S. election system vulnerabilities.

The new indictment of Russian military officials who hacked Democrats during the 2016 presidential elections has Florida written all over it.
Two Florida Republicans and possibly a third — Rep. Brian Mast — play starring roles in the indictment, although none is named.

Almost as soon as the indictment was released Friday, Florida Republicans, Democrats and even allies of Mast speculated that the congressman’s campaign was likely implicated — in great part because a former campaign consultant for Mast admitted last year to The Wall Street Journal and then to POLITICO that he used some of the hacked information in 2016.

“There was data for our campaign available, so I used it,” Bustamante told POLITICO last year after The Wall Street Journal first reported his involvement. He told the Journal that “I did adjust some voting targets based on some data I saw from the leaks.”

Nevins, another Republican consultant and blogger, separately became involved with Guccifer 2.0 when he saw news reports of its information and an invitation for reporters to get the hacked information. Under his @HelloFLAnews account, he direct-messaged Guccifer 2.0 on Twitter and on Aug. 22 received “approximately 2.5 gigabytes of data stolen from the DCCC,” according to the indictment. “The stolen data included donor records and personal identifying information for more than 2,000 Democratic donors.”