WhoWhatWhy Investigated Russia’s Actions Long Before the Mainstream Media
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- Category: Politics
The post WhoWhatWhy Investigated Russia’s Actions Long Before the Mainstream Media appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.
If you’ve been paying attention to the Russia story, even if not to every twist and turn, you’ve heard or learned about something called the Magnitsky Act.
This piece of legislation, which imposed deep sanctions on Russia, is named after a Russian lawyer by the name of Sergei Magnitsky. Before his death in a Russian jail, his client, and patron, was an American financier named Bill Browder.
At one time cozy with oligarchs, and for a time a major financial player in post-Soviet Russia, today Browder is an enemy of the Russian state, and he was the principal lobbyist in the effort to pass the Magnitsky Act in Congress. He is thoroughly steeped in and has knowledge of all the players who were huddling in Trump Tower last summer.
Long before the Trump/Russia story exploded, before the mainstream media knew or was talking about any of this, WhoWhatWhy was getting the low-down from Browder. Seems like a good time to go back and listen to those conversations.
The first is with Browder in May of 2015, just as the story of Russian machinations was beginning to unspool.
The second conversation took place in March of this year. In this conversation Browder explains the Russian efforts to make mischief, the grey zones that they like to operate in, and what may actually be behind their plan to cozy up to Trump, hack the election and destabilize the West.
As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to resource constraints, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to another podcast on WhoWhatWhy.org
Sergei Magnitsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Boris Nemtsov, all opponents of Putin and all dead. Churchill once called Russia a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. Today, there is nothing mysterious about all three of these deaths. All were critics of, or in the way of Putin, and all were murdered in brutal and very public ways. Few understand today’s Russia better than my guest Bill Browder. Sergei Magnitsky was his lawyer before Browder was forced to leave Russia. In the early days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Browder would make fortunes while becoming one of the largest international investors in the new Russia. As it privatized and as the oligarchs emerged, things changed. When Putin went from being in opposition to the oligarchs, to being their partner, the entire underpinnings of the Russian economy would go through a tectonic shift. Bill Browder recently wrote about his experiences inside Russia in his book, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice. It is my pleasure to welcome Bill Browder to talk about recent events in Russia, and about his own history and experience. Bill, thanks much for being with us.
Bill Browder: Thanks for having me.
Jeff: Great to have you here. When you first got out of business school at Stanford, first went to Eastern Europe and later to Russia, did you have any sense of how brutal the whole experience could be?
Bill: Back in those days, and this was now back almost 20 years ago, it was different, it was brutal, but it was brutal in a different type of way. At the end of the Soviet Union, what was left was sort of a vacuum and what filled the vacuum was chaos. And so you ended up having about 22 oligarchs took over the country in terms of getting 40% of the assets of the state. You had gangsters running around. You had hyperinflation. You had all sorts of crazy stuff, but it was what I called disorganized crime. And then what happened later was that Putin showed up and he first made a promise that he was going to sort of bring some order to the country, but his real intention was not to bring order to the country, but just to become the biggest oligarch himself and squeeze out everybody else. And what happened after that was that it became highly organized crime, and the Mafia boss was Vladimir Putin. And the way he would commit his crimes was by using the people that were supposed to be protecting you from crimes, the police, all the law enforcement agencies, and intelligence agencies were there to help maximize theft and profit. And then you ended up with really terrible things happening, including as you mentioned, the murder of my lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was killed for uncovering the government corruption scheme.
Jeff: Early on when you were there as an investor and battling the oligarchs and what was going on behind the scenes, initially Putin and the government were on the same side in battling these oligarchs. In fact, you were very helpful to the government agencies, but that all shifted at a certain point.
Bill: So what happened was, as you said, the government was battling the oligarchs for one simple reason because the oligarchs were effectively stealing power from Vladimir Putin when he first showed up as president. So he was just as interested as I was in taking these guys down a notch or two because they were completely out of control. And so he was very much on the side of getting these guys under control, and then he eventually won his war with the oligarchs, and that happened in late 2003 and in the summer of 2004. And the way that he did that was that he arrested the richest oligarch in Russia, a man named Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was the owner of an oil company called Yukos. And he arrested him, he put him on trial and he allowed the television cameras to film the richest man in Russia sitting in a cage. And it had this most unbelievable psychological effect on the rest of the oligarchs because they saw a man who was far better than them, far richer or more powerful, sitting in a cage, and they didn’t want to sit in a cage, and so they went to him and said, “What do we have to do to make sure we’re not sitting in a cage?” And his answer was: “50%.” He wanted 50% of their money and that was the moment that he’d won his war with the oligarchs. That was the moment that he was no longer interested in stopping their corruption because he was a beneficiary of their corruption to the tune of 50%.
Jeff: The other part of it is what he did with Khodorkovsky was really part of a pattern that he has engaged in right up until the present, in that he finds someone that becomes a symbol and then goes after them in a brutal way.
Bill: Exactly. So basically he doesn’t have enough people, sort of competent people working for him to instill terror on a wide scale basis because there’s just not enough of these people around. So he’s got to be very opportunistic about it in the way, and symbolic about it. So what he does, is he picks in each group, a person that’s most symbolic of that group, and then he destroys them one way or another. And so in that case, he put the richest man in Russia in prison for 10 years. In another case, a very famous case, there was a famous investigative journalist whose name was Anna Politkovskaya and she was one of these people who was just exposing all of his lies and dirty deeds, and so one day she was assassinated, killed, in her stairwell of her apartment building. And after that all the other investigative journalists, either stopped being investigative journalists or toned down their stuff and didn’t go after anything that was close to Putin. In my case, Putin, when I was making all this noise about companies corruption in the big Russian companies, Putin had me expelled from the country and declared a threat to national security. So no other investor wanted to do that. And in the most tragic and brutal case which just happened a little more than a week ago, Boris Nemtsov, either the number one or number two leading opposition politician in the country, the former Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, and someone who had been advocating as of two days before he was killed, to get people out on the street to protest Putin to bring him down – all of a sudden he is brutally murdered on the street in front of the Kremlin. It’s kind of like a contract hit taking place in front of the White House. Whoever did it wanted to send a message that, even with an infinite number of closed-circuit television cameras and security everywhere, that this person could be murdered right there to send a message to everybody else which is, “Don’t be messing with Putin.”
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