Some interesting details in the Politico piece on this including what her lawyer said

U.S. officials charge NRA-linked Russian with acting as Kremlin agent

By JOSH MEYER and DARREN SAMUELSOHN 07/16/2018 09:44 PM EDT

my underling in these excerpts:

 U.S. officials allege that Butina, while attending a university in Washington, worked from 2015 until at least February 2017 as a Kremlin agent under the direction of a high-level official in the Russian government and Russian central bank, according to an FBI affidavit in support of the complaint.Although the complaint does not name him, it appears to refer to Alexander Torshin, an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin and longtime supporter of the National Rifle Association who reportedly also has ties to Russian security services and organized crime figures.

Butina’s lawyer denied that on Monday, and Torshin also has denied any wrongdoing. The NRA did not respond to requests for comment.

Robert Driscoll, a lawyer for Butina, said in a statement Monday that a dozen FBI agents executed a search warrant on her Washington apartment in April. Since then, Butina has offered repeatedly to meet with officials in federal law enforcement, including the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, but they’ve rebuffed her, Driscoll said, and she was arrested Sunday "without prior notice to counsel."

She voluntarily testified several months ago before the Senate Intelligence Committee and handed over thousands of documents, he said.

“The substance of the charge in the complaint is overblown,” Driscoll said. “While styled as some sort of conspiracy to violate the Foreign Agent Registration Act, in actuality it describes a conspiracy to have a ‘friendship dinner’ at Bistro Bis with a group of Americans and Russians to discuss foreign relations between the two countries — hardly a shocking development for Russian International Relations student living in Washington.”

“There is simply no indication of Butina seeking to influence or undermine any specific policy or law of the United States — only at most to promote a better relationship between the two nations,” Driscoll added, saying she is not an agent of Russia but a Russian national who recently graduated from American University and who has a work permit in pursuit of a business career [.....]

Mariia Butina and the Open Secrets of the Russia Scandal

Butina has been accused of trying to covertly influence conservative political groups in the U.S. Yet she made little secret of what she wanted. Photo caption: Mariia Butina will go down in history as perhaps the first person to publicly ask Trump what his policy toward Russian sanctions would be if he were President.

By Eric Lach @ NewYorker.com, July 17

[....] the woman whom the Department of Justice has charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of Russia in the U.S., wasn’t a secret agent in the Hollywood sense of the term. The founder of a Russian gun-rights group called Right to Bear Arms, Butina spent the past few years living in Washington, D.C., pursuing a graduate degree at American University. It wasn’t much of a cover, and, according to court records, she didn’t seem to have much fear of getting caught. On the night of Donald Trump’s election, Butina was up late, messaging on Twitter with her handler back in Russia. Butina suggested that they talk on the phone, to discuss who Trump might nominate to be Secretary of State. “All our phones are being listened to!” her handler—who has widely been identified as Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of Russia’s central bank—responded. O.K., Butina said, how about WhatsApp?

Butina has been accused of trying to covertly influence conservative political groups in the U.S.—the court documents detail how, with help from U.S. citizens, she developed relationships with officials of a gun-rights group widely presumed to be the National Rifle Association, as well as organizers of the National Prayer Breakfast. Yet she made little secret of what she wanted. In a 2015 e-mail included in the court documents filed against her, Butina told an American contact that she’d been introduced to Republican Party leaders as a “representative of informal diplomacy” of Russia, and in the spring of 2016, she reportedly helped try to broker a meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin. In 2014, at the N.R.A.’s convention in Indianapolis, she bumped into Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania. A year later, at the group’s convention in Nashville, she met Scott Walker, the Governor of Wisconsin.  She posted photographs from both these run-ins on her Facebook page [.....]