Remember how the anti-gun activist camps started running stories about how Maria Butina, the Russian gun rights activist, was running around giving away sex to politicians and other people as part of Russian collusion or for the NRA to launder money or some crap like that?

Well, it was all fake news.

Prosecutors Admit They Wrongly Accused Russian of Offering Sex for Republican Access

Federal prosecutors have admitted that they wrongly accused Maria Butina, a Russian citizen now in custody on charges of illegally acting as a foreign agent, of offering to trade sex for a job as part of a covert effort by Russian government officials to infiltrate Republican circles in the United States.

In a court filing late Friday, prosecutors in the United States attorney’s office in Washington acknowledged that they had been “mistaken” in interpreting what were apparently joking text messages between Ms. Butina and a friend who had helped her renew her car insurance.

They were ‘mistaken.’  A mistake amplified by the anti-Trump media and anti-gun nut jobs who try to sell a message that the NRA is some combination of the Soylent Corporation and the Third Reich, that have figure out how to profit from the murder of children and minorities.

Right… that was only a mistake.

Ms. Butina was charged this summer with conspiracy and illegally acting as an agent of the Russian government in what prosecutors have claimed was a secret campaign to try to influence high-level Republican politicians, including Donald J. Trump, both as a candidate and after his election. Denied bail, she is now in custody in the detention center in Alexandria, Va.

Defense lawyers for Ms. Butina are arguing that the prosecutors’ error is emblematic of a flawed federal case that has wrongly landed their client in pretrial custody. A federal judge is scheduled to review Ms. Butina’s request that she be released from jail, as well as whether to impose a gag order, on Monday.

Make Trump, the GOP, and NRA look bad all over the news.  Then backtrack when a judge has to decide if her civil rights were violated.

“I’m glad they walked it back, but in a lot of ways, the damage is already done,” Robert N. Driscoll, Ms. Butina’s lawyer, said in an interview. In court filings, he has argued that his client engaged in innocent political activity but has now been falsely portrayed as a villain in a sensationalized spy drama. “A simple Google search using the phrase ‘Maria Butina and sex’ yields over 300,000 hits,” he said.

No.  Fucking.  Shit.  That was the whole point.  That is what happens when the Justice Department become the “Just Us Department” for Federal bureaucrats.  This wasn’t an accident, it was a partisan hit job.

In their latest filing, prosecutors argued that even if they had wrongly interpreted Ms. Butina’s text messages to a friend, she should not be released from custody, because she was likely to flee the country. Since her arrest, they said, it has become even clearer that she was not simply a foreign graduate student with an interest in American politics, but a Russian operative.

They said that Russian government emissaries had visited her at least six times in jail, and that Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, had complained twice about her prosecution to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. “The actions of the Russian Federation and its officials toward the defendant have confirmed her relationship with, and value to, her own government,” they said.

Maybe that’s true.

Maybe it is the job of a goverment to protect its citizens when they are locked up abroad.

I guess by the standards of the DOJ, Otto Warmbier really was an American agent in North Korea simply by the fact that Trump worked to bring him home.  A nation trying to protect its citizens overseas is an admission of spying.  A nation trying to protect its citizens overseas is an admission of spying.  This is probably why the Obama administration left Warmbier to be tortured in Korea.  It could also be why they left Ambassador Stevens to die in Benghazi.  He wasn’t a spy so we didn’t need to protect our asset.

So it turns out that the sex and intrigue was fake news.  I have a feeling this whole case is going to turn out to be fake news.  But the trial by media and Twitter #Resistance has already been done and Trump and the NRA have been found guilty.  Even if all charges against Ms. Butina are dismissed, it’s not like David Hogg is going to apologize for his attacks on the NRA using this fake news.

These people got what they wanted, everyone they don’t like got a black eye in the public perception, facts be damned.