When I read that US senator from South Dakota, John Thune (R), has admitted to holding one of the biggest election funds of the entire US Senate (many millions, records show), I became a little more interested than I had been in the strange case of a South Dakota business visitor from Russia, Maria Butina. The case may have far reaching consequences.
Thune is an unremarkable senator who has apparently achieved millionaire status by supposedly representing a state with the most poverty -stricken counties in the whole country. While anything can happen in this remarkable capitalistic world, his rise seems obscene in terms of the so-called public service expected from our political representatives.
On the television screen, this senator stands resolutely behind Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell in support of a tax bill for the rich and the CEO’s, in rolling back protections of our air and water, and paralyzing a path to citizenship for millions of Mexican and South American immigrants. McConnell, who is called the “grim reaper,” helps Thune in assuring their Republican base that five years of plunging farm prices in South Dakota and elsewhere is acceptable, even inevitable in a changing world.
Because the Butina case seems a far reach from what a rural senator like Thune and his supporters might care about ( a Russian woman working in the US and South Dakota to boost support for the gun laws of the NRA), it has gotten little attention. Newspaper coverage has been negligible. John Thune’s agenda has been under the radar for years. Even his evangelism status is unknown to the general public.
Yet, the so-called political war chest of millions of dollars recently publicized finally brings issues of fraud and money influence in the electoral process to attention even in obscure places like South Dakota. Does any of this connect itself to the corruption so rampant in the political world at this time? The public has not been told much about a recent five-day trip to Russia made by Sen. Thune in the company of several other Republican members of Congress in July 2018. Is the Russia connection worth following, along with the money trail?
Perhaps now is the time for the case of Maria Butina to come under public scrutiny in our area. Perhaps now is the time for the Thune millions to be given over to official examination. Butina was finally convicted months ago and sent to a US prison as a spy against the US. Little publicity was given to this criminal in our midst.
South Dakotans must inform themselves that this sweet-faced woman from Russia, whom many invited to their civic, church and school gatherings, has been deported to her homeland after many months in a US Federal Prison, and given a heroine’s welcome in her home country. The false news that she was tortured in prison is being circulated.
While in this country, she was the lover and assistant to Paul Erickson, a Vermillion, S.D., resident and US citizen, and graduate of the Univeristy of South Dakota, who has been outed as a long time Republican political operative. Years ago, Erickson organized a political action committee for John Thune, who defeated long-time Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle by a very thin margin.
Butina was in the US for years before she was “outed” as a spy and convicted of failing to register as a foreign agent. She seemed innocent enough, giving talks to school children, churches, influencing the National Rifle Association members about gun control, and being romanced by civic minded men to whom she aggressively introduced herself as a business and cultural visitor to the US.
She has said that she was here as a “business” woman, and she was allowed to start a corporation (Bridges LLC) for charitable activities. It has been since revealed that her directive from the Kremlin (though she has admitted to very little about her activities, nor who paid her for her travels) was to infiltrate vulnerable American communities and work for the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the ultimate election of Donald Trump in 2016. She was one of the many foreign agents who are now accused of crimes against the US in the fraudulent 2016 presidential election. This widespread activity is now called “collusion” and “fraud.” Many Russian operatives have been charged and deported.
That is the good news.
The bad news is that little of this kind if cyber-space corruption of the political process, which is a stunning attack on our democratic structures, is being examined locally. The community organizations in which the average South Dakotan takes part is connected to the churches, schools, city councils, and federally run bureaucracies. Yet all is not well in those places.
One wishes that this story, while seemingly being shoved under the rug, would not be finished off with the deportation of Butina as though there is nothing left to tell, nor should it be destined to our silence. Silence in the face of corruption only makes things worse.
We should know that Russian operatives and anti-American voices are on the internet daily. Lies will prevail if we do not inform ourselves of the truth.
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn is an American Indian writer, scholar and retired professor of Indian Studies at Arizona State University, and an enrolled citizen of the Sioux Tribe, born and raised at the Crow Creek Indian Reservation), Fort Thompson SD. She has written 14 books, the latest bring “A Separate Country: Postcoloniality and Indian Nations [Texas Tech University Press. 2012]. She is a columnist for The Native Sun News, Rapid City, S.D.
From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2020
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