Busted: Russian Political Networker In New York

From Meduza, December 3:

Moscow’s alleged ‘decolonization’ mole
The FBI says a political networker in New York lied for years about her secret contact and cooperation with Russian intelligence

 Nomma Zarubina’s Instagram page

Remember Maria Butina? In July 2018, the FBI arrested her on suspicion of acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the Russian government. After nine months in pretrial detention, Butina pleaded guilty to felony charges under 18 U.S.C. §951 and spent another five months at a federal prison in Florida before she was deported home to Russia. Today, she is a sitting member of the State Duma, the lower house of Parliament.

Last month, the FBI accused another Russian woman of concealing her collaboration with the Russian state. The charges against 34-year-old Nomma Zarubina allege felony offenses under 18 U.S.C. § 1001: lying to the executive branch of the U.S. government. According to the FBI’s complaint, Zarubina lied twice during voluntary interviews about her communication and cooperation with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Meduza explains what we know about Zarubina’s case and how she spent the past several years networking in the United States.

The charges
The FBI alleges that Zarubina knowingly made false statements in interviews in April 2021 and September 2023, claiming that the FSB had interviewed her only once about her time and activities in the U.S.

In July 2024, after roughly four years of regular conversations with the FBI, Zarubina finally admitted that an FSB officer had previously assigned her the codename “Alyssa” and asked her to “identify potentially helpful contacts in the United States, including American journalists and military personnel, and provide contact information for those individuals to the FSB” so the agency “could come up with reasons to invite those people to Russia to ‘convert’ them to the ‘Russian way of thinking,’” according to the FBI....

....MUCH MORE

There must be more to this story, maybe the FBI were using her to get to someone else or something. Otherwise it looks a bit thin. 

On the other hand she seems a rather cool customer, sometimes a tell, sometimes not:

....Zarubina emphasized that she engaged the FBI voluntarily, telling RFE/RL that she was shocked to face felony charges from the same agents she thought she had been helping for the past four years. “I mean, I know the people who arrested me. And I thought we had a very good relationship, that I was helping them. I even drove myself to the meeting[s] in my car at 8 a.m.” she recalled. Contrary to the FBI’s allegations, Zarubina denies that she ever executed any tasks or assignments from Russia’s intelligence community, partly because there weren’t any, she claims. “They didn’t give me any. They just kept their eye on me,” she told RFE/RL.

However, Zarubina says she now fears she could become a target for Russian intelligence agencies that may not have realized the extent of her conversations with the FBI. For Moscow, her actions might constitute outright treason. “And, of course, it’s not entirely safe for me to stay in New York either,” she said.

If convicted, Nomma Zarubina could face up to five years in prison under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, but she told RFE/RL that she doesn’t worry much about deportation. “I have a daughter; she’s an American citizen,” Zarubina explained. “They’d need really extraordinary circumstances to kick me out. Deportation for providing false testimony? I’ve never heard of that.”

So who knows.