Others have no doubt linked Alexiei Navalny, Bill Browder, and the Magnitsky Act. Nevertheless, there are a few nodes in this long, drawn-out death-cult unravelling saga that I must document; and Browder is one of them.
Bill Browder came on the radar here fourteen years ago.
He was obviously deeply entrenched and able to direct powerful political resources.
Recap: At that time we learned that Browder teamed up with various people in congress to punish Putin's Russia because Bill's good friend and colleague who no one ever heard of before, Sergei Magnitsky (an accountant, NOT a lawyer as almost always reported), died in prison under suspicious circumstances. [We looked into Magnitsky's death in detail here. Also see: dead friends of Bill, where we noted that Edmund Safra, Edourd Stern, and Sergei Magnitsky -- all close associates of Bill Browder -- died under suspicious circumstances.]
Mysteriously, after the previously unknown man's death in prison, Hillary Clinton, then Secretary of State, and Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary, launched into action and prepared a list of Russians to punish. (Analogous: Hillary interceding for unknown woman, Laura Silsby, when she got pinched trying to traffic children out of Haiti.) Via the Magnitsky Act, the US would revoke visas, freeze assets, and investigate the targets for money laundering.
Precedent-setting legislation.
To be even more dramatic, the list named senior officials of Russia's Interior Ministry (equivalent to the FBI) and the Russian Tax Service, plus some judges and other people.
It was quite specific and perfectly insane legislation over this one random guy, Serge, whose death went viral before that was even a thing. So naturally it became law.
The Magnitsky Act took off around the world because powerful people could use it to target and punish their enemies by seizing assets and revoking visas. What A Tool! All thanks to Bill, the ringleader.
image source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/5941732/Hermitage-points-to-RenCap-in-fraud-case.html
Thank You, Bill. By 2016, a Global Magnitsky Act was passed.
***
Browder considers Vladimir Putin his arch nemesis. He constantly regurgitates claims to his global media pals about Putin imperiling the world. You can easily confirm this yourself. He's been at it for years.
***
On 7/16/18, Trump and Putin held a meeting in Helsinki, Finland followed by a joint press conference. Read the transcript. A reporter asked about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and whether Putin would consider extraditing the 12 Russian officials that were indicted by a US Grand Jury subsequent to the Mueller "investigation." In his reply, Putin mentioned Bill Browder.
For instance, we can bring up Mr. [Bill] Browder. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over $1.5 million in Russia. They have paid no taxes — neither in Russia or the United States. And yet the money escaped the country.
They were transferred to the United States. They sent a huge amount of money — $400 million — as a contribution to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
While that's their personal choice — it might have been legal, the contribution itself — but the way the money was earned was illegal. So we have some reason to believe that some intelligence officers accompanied and guided these transactions, and we have an interest in questioning them.
That could be a first step and we can also extend it. Options abound, and they all can be found in an appropriate legal framework.
Again, it's complicated. I don't claim to understand it all, but you can look into what happened. It seemed to be a financial false flag, and due to THE RULE OF LAW, the Russian government's case ended when Serge unfortunately died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Benefitting Bill, who then went on to accuse Putin for the next fourteen years.
In 2022 Biden permanently reauthorized the Global Magnitsky Act. Kind of a strange thing to do for a massively corrupt ringleader himself, but what do we know.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
THEN (meaning now), Alexiei Navalny has also reportedly died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Guess who he was a close associate of? Bill Browder.
What are the odds?
In this interview from last week, 2/20/24, Browder talks all about his good friend Alexiei Navalny. If you don't want to listen (about 13 minutes), I understand so I took the time to recap his remarks:
We learn that Bill was surprised at Navalny's death. It hit him like a "punch in the gut... it was intellectually not surprising but emotionally it was very surprising," and Bill is still trying to process a world in which Navalny is dead, which is hard for him to even imagine.
Bill doesn't know what happened, and we will probably never know EXACTLY, but he does know that Putin has a very, very long list of dead enemies (he names Boris Nemtsov, Anna Politkovskaya, and Alexander Litvinenko as examples); and he (Putin) goes around the world killing anybody he doesn't like. He tried to kill Alexiei once before with (nerve agent) Novichok in 2020. It didn't work, but for whatever reason now was the time to kill Alexiei. It's all Putin, you understand. There's no question in anybody's mind, really. He executed a high level political assassination of a prisoner in his custody.
Bill hasn't had contact with Alexiei since he was put in jail, but before that they were regular allies on a bunch of issues surrounding Putin and Russian government corruption. "Good friends, good allies." Alexiei was a very robust, large fit man who doesn't drop dead at age 47 unless the Russian authorities have something to do with it.
And it's so close to the Russian elections, which we can't even call elections because, you know, "there are no elections in Russia." Everybody in opposition is either dead, or in jail, or exiled. Alexiei was the most popular politician in Russia, and Putin is not a politician he's a dictator. He uses state power to force people into submission.
In contrast, Alexiei won the "hearts and minds" of many people in Russia, especially young people. He would have gotten, like, 90% of the vote. Why would anyone vote for an old, kleptocratic dictator who only knows how to punish people, when they could have a "young, optimistic man who believes in freedom, democracy, and wants to stamp out corruption."
He was SO ATTRACTIVE. Young people paid attention to his three line tweets. This was "deeply scary to Putin." If Putin ever lost legitimacy he'd lose everything, go to jail and probably die. Putin is just so scared. He Gets More Scared Every Single Day. !
We can only speculate why Putin waited this long to kill Alexiei, but it's obvious to Bill that Putin killed him. This could definitely backfire on Putin, so he's going to do everything he can to "suppress, attack and terrorize" the people in Russia so that it doesn't. Who knows how it will play out. The "fact that Putin killed Navalny, and his charismatic, attractive wife steps in to take over... that was probably unexpected from Putin's side..." It's impossible to say what will happen next, but Bill is certain that Navalny will plague Putin in one way or another for a long time to come.
There's one thing left that will "level the playing field" and "create some pain for Putin." When the (Ukraine) war started, "we (Western governments) froze roughly $300 billion dollars of Russian central bank reserves that were held in the West." That happened a week after the war started. Bill and many others think that money should be confiscated and used for the defense and reconstruction of Ukraine. That should happen now, and that should be called the Navalny Act. "That would give Putin two fingers in the eye." Yeah, that would show him.
When Bill was tirelessly campaigning for the Magnitsky Act, he thought people would grow tired of him, and he would slip into irrelevance. But every time people would get tired of Bill's story, Putin would do something so outrageous that everyone would want to hear Bill's story again! And again and again! "And that's exactly what happened here." People were tired of the Ukraine war, Putin, Russia bad blah blah blah, and "all of a sudden, Putin kills Alexiei Navalny, and everybody is paying attention now.... And a lot of things which might not have happened before will probably happen now."
Such As: Congress will probably release the $63 billion for Ukraine, and the Western governments will confiscate the Russian money and give it to Ukraine! And he imagines Putin will do "more really, nasty things" that will keep people energized and willing to help Ukraine. Putin inspires anti-Putin people around the world. He's always doing something to make people want to contain him!
The interviewer laments so many dead friends of Putin, and asks Bill about journalist Vladimir Kara-Murza. Bill appreciates this. Kara-Murzs is another close friend of Bill's, who traveled the world with Bill to advocate for the Magnitsky Act. "The Russians hate his guts because of the Magnitsky Act." They tried to poison him in 2015 with some horrible nerve agent that left him in a coma, with organ failure, and he nearly died. (!) They tried again in 2017, and again he nearly died (!!), and he's been suffering with the after-effects ever since. And at the beginning of the war in 2022, he returned to Russia to protest the war and lead the people against Putin. But he only lasted one day! After going on CNN to call Putin a murderer and war criminal, he was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in jail (for treason, Bill forgot to mention). And he is now in solitary confinement in a Siberian prison, suffering from the after-effects of this horrible nerve agent, slowly dying. Very Slowly. And it's one of Bill's biggest priorities to free Vladimir Kara-Murza from prison (just like Serge except he didn't really do anything helpful that time). And he was just at the Munich Security Conference meeting with assorted world leaders trying to drum up a prisoners swap. Find some Russian spies in Western prisons and trade them for Kara-Murza and a few other vulnerable heroes. Because Vlad won't survive even two years in a Siberian Gulag.
In Munich, regarding Navalny, "the shock and outrage was visceral." You could just look in people's eyes and see how outraged they were." Words were not even necessary. "And this will have a very dramatic and important political consequence for Putin as everybody processes this shocking, outrageous story and tries to do something with it."
INDEED.
It's not so clear that Navalny would be bragging about his friendship and working relationship with Bill, but he's not here now to protest. However, some years back Navalny sued a Russian state-owned media company for linking him to Browder in a film. The Moscow court dismissed the suit.
July 12, 2016: Moscow court dismisses Navalny's claim against Browder film
A Moscow court has rejected Russian oppositioner Alexei Navalny's lawsuit against state-owned media company VGTRK over a film linking him to British-American investor William Browder, the RBC news website reported Tuesday.
“The Browder Effect” film premiered on the Rossiya 1 television channel on April 13. It claims that Navalny and Browder were part of a joint British-American intelligence operation in Russia from 2007.
According to the film, the CIA gave Navalny the codename “freedom,” and he received money as a paid agent of Browder, the head of the Moscow-based Hermitage Capital investment advisory firm.
The film shows Browder telling Navalny via Skype to undermine Russian constitutional order, and shows what it claims to be CIA reports of their conversations. Navalny claims to never have used the Skype name shown, and implied the falsification of the CIA reports by the filmmakers.
Navalny and Browder have only ever exchanged a few emails, in which they discussed Browder's experience in court against Russian gas giant Gazprom, according to Navalny's press secretary Kira Yarmish.
The film also implicates Navalny in the death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in prison and says the politician received $300,000 to support the ensuing Magnitsky list, which restricted travel of Russians involved in the case to the United States.
Well all that protesting accomplished nothing, except getting it on the record; and that is convenient for us eight years later.
Now what's kind of funny about the Global Magnitsky Act, is that President Trump on 12/20/2017 used it in Executive Order 13818.
From the Congressional Research Service:
E.O. 13818, which the Treasury Department describes as building upon and implementing the Global Magnitsky Act, includes differences in language that expand the scope beyond that stated in the law. The E.O. broadens the standard of behavior for potentially sanctionable targets from those responsible for statutorily defined “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” against certain individuals (as described above), to those determined “to be responsible for or complicit in, or to have directly or indirectly engaged in, serious human rights abuse.” The E.O. does not define “serious human rights abuse.” Similarly, the E.O. refers to “corruption,” rather than the law’s “acts of significant corruption.” The E.O. specifies additional categories of persons as potential sanction targets, including, for example, any person determined “to be or have been a leader or official of” an entity “that has engaged in, or whose members have engaged in” serious human rights abuse or corruption. The E.O. delegates sanctions determinations to the Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Attorney General. As is the case with sanctions regimes generally, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) administers the economic sanctions, while the State Department implements visa sanctions. The Global Magnitsky Act sunsets on December 23, 2022. Because the President invoked national emergency authorities to target human rights abusers, sanctions could continue beyond the expiration of the Global Magnitsky Act. The President has annually renewed the national emergency under E.O. 13818, most recently in December 2019.
As noted up top, in 2022 Biden signed into law its permanent reauthorization. This really allows the Treasury to cast a nice, wide net.
Now, if we go over to the Office of Foreign Assets Control website, and search recent actions for Magnitsky, there are 77 results which are basically lists of people and companies which are identified for economic sanctions. Long lists. Lots of people and companies -- their assets trapped under the (greatly expanded) OFAC net.
Do we know what this all means? Nope. Just pointing it out for our records here. Just making some linkages back to circa fourteen years ago. Perhaps, when Bill advocated so assiduously for the Magnitsky Act, he didn't anticipate whose ASSETS might get caught up in that wide net fourteen years later, because all his pals were still in power and presumably, they would be In Power Forever And Ever? Matrix Without End??
Oops.
Kind regards, dear readers. God Bless.
Comments