Taibbi lived in Russia so he knows stuff that many people don't. I've been
involved with Russian adoptions so, although I had stopped doing this work
in 2008, I have a comment about adoption from Russia. Yes, many disabled
children were adopted from Russia by Americans, but often, not knowingly and
willingly. The reasons for the adoption of disabled children from that
country are complicated and I won't go into them here unless someone asks me
to ssay more about the subject. But I will say that most Americans flocked
to Russian adoptions because they wanted to adopt healthy white babies and
toddlers. So I suspect that threat actually was, "Pass this bill and no more
little white babies for infertile American couples.
Miriam
Donald Trump Jr., "Kremlin-linked lawyer" Natalia Veselnitskaya, and Jared
Kushner. (photo: Getty)
Russiagate and the Magnitsky Affair, Linked Again
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
15 July 17
Natalia Veselnitskaya being at the center of this week's explosive
revelations is the latest indication that Russiagate didn't begin last year
but almost a decade ago
When I first read the explosive New York Times story about Donald Trump
Jr.'s meeting with "Kremlin-linked lawyer" Natalia Veselnitskaya, I had
multiple reactions.
The first was amazement at Junior's sheer stupidity (responding
affirmatively to "If you would like to participate in our country's
state-sponsored effort to help your father's campaign, please respond 'yes'
in writing here" will go down as an unsurpassable moment in unsafe political
sex). The second was confusion, and the third was déjà vu.
I never met Veselnitskaya, but just months ago I did cross paths with one of
her colleagues. Like Veselnitskaya, this person had been lobbying on behalf
of a Russian-directed company called Prevezon to overturn the Magnitsky Act,
a 2012 law which sanctions Russia for human rights abuses.
The interview was off the record, so I can't say much about it, except to
say that my experience was weirdly similar to the account Trump Jr. offered
about his meeting with Veselnitskaya.
I went into the meeting expecting a scoop on another topic, and instead
found myself essentially being lobbied about the Magnitsky Act. I came away
scratching my head about the Prevezon crew, unsure of whether they
represented high-ranking Russian interests, or were instead just a bunch of
provincial amateurs trying to get a sanctions regime lifted in order to
unfreeze their assets.
According to The Hill, others who ran into Veselnitskaya recently came away
wondering the same thing:
"The sources also described their interactions with Veselnitskaya in the
same way that Trump Jr. did. They claimed not to know who she worked for or
what her motives were.
'Natalia didn't speak a word of English,' said one source. "Don't let anyone
tell you this was a sophisticated lobbying effort. It was the least
professional campaign I've ever seen. If she's the cream of the Moscow
intelligence community then we have nothing to worry about.'"
Though Veselnitskaya seems like a small-timer and Leonid Bershidsky's
excellent background report on her for Bloomberg makes her seem like the
equivalent of a third-rate lawyer for the Staten Island Borough president
one never knows with this story. After all, the Trumps themselves aren't
exactly sophisticates, and they live in the White House.
Moreover, the Trump Justice Department, after dismissing former U.S.
Attorney Preet Bharara, subsequently settled a case for Veselnitskaya's
client very much in their favor. That settlement earlier this spring is now
highly suspicious, given this week's revelations. In my personal opinion,
it's the most suspicious act to date in the whole panoply of much-denounced
Trump behaviors with regard to Russia, perhaps even moreso than the firing
of James Comey.
On the other hand, Trump himself came out strongly in favor of the Magnitsky
law earlier this year, a piece of news that was then and remains now a weird
fit with the collusion narrative. Overturning the Magnitsky Act is probably
at or near the top of the list of Russian foreign policy objectives vis a
vis the United States.
In the fall of 2012, Barack Obama breezily declared "the Eighties are
calling, they want their foreign policy back" in response to Mitt Romney's
charge that Russia is our top global threat. The Magnitsky rule was passed
not long after that, precipitating a steep collapse in Russian-American
relations that has continued through this TrumpRussia scandal.
There's no way to understand the now-inevitable sequel to the cold war
without understanding the Magnitsky affair. The fact that anti-Magnitsky
lobbyist Veselnitskaya is at the center of the most explosive Russiagate
story yet, and moreover that the "oppo" she planned to deliver to the Trumps
reportedly concerned the Magnitsky case, underlines this idea even more.
Somehow, this all goes back to Magnitsky.
At about 4 p.m. on August 24th, 2009, a 37-year-old Russian named Sergei
Magnitsky curled up in a ball in his bed at the infamous Butyrka jail, an
imposing building that, since the days of Stalin's purges, has stood as a
symbol of repression and political murder.
Magnitsky had been arrested nearly a year earlier, in November of 2008. He
worked for Hermitage Capital, the investment firm of an American
billionaire, William Browder. In most Western accounts, Magnitsky helped
Browder uncover a complex corruption scheme involving an array of Russian
officials that had resulted in the theft of about $230 million from
Hermitage.
When Browder complained about the theft, the story goes, the Russian
government not only didn't act to remedy it, but instead forced Browder out
of the country. They also ultimately threw Browder's employee Magnitsky in
jail, charging him with the very crime he'd helped uncover.
The ex-pat community in Moscow was initially unsure of what to think about
the apparent attack on Browder and his companies. Browder at one time had
been one of Putin's most enthusiastic Western supporters.
While many ex-pats who lived through the transition to Putin (myself
included) immediately saw the new president as a dangerous autocrat who in
the very best case would be a human rights downgrade from the awful-enough
Yeltsin regime, Browder was one of the leading Western voices insisting that
Putin was a man with whom we could do business. So it was odd to see his
Hermitage company targeted.
In any case, after nearly a year behind bars, Browder's employee Magnitsky,
who was married and had a young son, became ill. Before being transferred to
Butyrka he had been diagnosed with gallstones, pancreatitis, and
cholecystitis in another jail, and scheduled for surgery. But he never
received treatment.
On November 16th, 2009, Magnitsky was finally transferred to another
infamous Moscow jail, Matrosskaya Tishina, ostensibly to go to the medical
ward. He never made it there and was instead handcuffed to a bedrail in an
isolation cell. According to Browder's book, Red Notice, guards in riot gear
entered the room and beat Magnitsky with rubber truncheons. He was
discovered by a civilian doctor dead on the floor a little over an hour
later.
Magnitsky's death would become a major scandal abroad, but that was mostly
due to the accident of his having worked for an influential American,
Browder. In fact, Magnitsky was killed as part of a commonplace scam in the
gangland state that is Vladimir Putin's Russia: a reidersky zakhvat, or
"raider attack."
The scam works as follows: a group of thugs with strong government and/or
police ties targets a private company with assets. They then cook up an
excuse to "raid" the company offices, at which point the thugs take the
company's seals, certificates of ownership, registration files, etc. From
there, the "raiders" simply sign over the company to new owners while the
old ones are either pushed out, killed, or thrown in jail.
This grotesque new interpretation of the "hostile takeover" began in the
Yeltsin years but ultimately became a major part of the gangland revenue
model in Putin's Russia. One study delivered to the Duma by Russia's then
"Business Ombudsman," Boris Titov, showed that 600,000 criminal cases had
been brought against Russian "entrepreneurs" between 2010 and 2013, and that
110,924 of them had resulted in prison terms.
The case involving Browder and Hermitage wasn't even close to being the
biggest. A firm called TogliattiAzot, which has 10,000 employees and
controls upwards of 20-percent of the world's ammonia production, was
successfully raided by the oligarch Dmitri Mazepin in a case that has
rattled Western investors for years.
The Magnitsky case, at least as described in Browder's book, was typical of
the reiderovsky methodology. The raiders first forced Hermitage to pay an
exorbitant tax bill, then raided Hermitage's offices and stole documents
they later used to reassign ownership of three of Hermitage's subsidiaries
to themselves. They then claimed for themselves a $230 million tax "rebate."
When Magnitsky uncovered this fraud/theft, he was tossed in jail.
The billionaire Browder at this point made getting payback for Magnitsky his
life's mission. As detailed in Red Notice, he became a self-taught lobbyist
and in 2012 managed to push through congress the law that came to be known
as the Magnitsky Act. Among other things, it listed 18 individuals deemed
responsible for Magnitsky's death and not only barred them from entering the
U.S., but made provisions for the freezing of any assets they held abroad.
Despite his financial power and profile, Browder for all his furious
complaints had until the passage of the Magnitsky Act barely elicited a yawn
from the Putin government. But once the Magnitsky law was passed, beating
back the rule almost immediately became a primary focus of the Russian
government.
"They didn't care before. But now that we could freeze assets, that
interfered with the whole business model of the Putin regime," Browder told
me a few months ago. "That got their attention."
It should be noted that support of the Magnitsky law was not unanimous in
the Western business community. There are some who disputed Browder's
version of events, or were at least unsure enough about what had happened to
hesitate.
A common concern was that in Russia, you never know whether things are being
executed on orders from the very top, or merely by self-motivated crooks
operating under the krysha, or protection (literally, "roof"), of
higher-ranking officials. Those who lived there long enough knew the amounts
of money taken in the Browder case weren't enough to raise the pulse rate of
the king thieves who run the Russian state. In fact, sanctioning Russia's
leaders for having committed these crimes was sure among other things to
anger them on the level of being an insult to their professionalism.
Some American business interests also quietly grumbled that the Magnitsky
rule would derail the fragile relations between the two countries the
commercial relations, particularly and that Browder might have achieved a
moral right at the expense of irreversibly angering the Russians and
queering lucrative business interests.
Hillary Clinton herself went so far as to oppose the Magnitsky rule at one
point in time. Her opposition, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and
others, coincided with a trip to Moscow by Bill Clinton in which he was paid
$500,000 to give a speech by Renaissance Capital, a firm that Sergei
Magnitsky himself had claimed was part of the tax fraud perpetuated against
Browder.
The Obama administration, too, originally opposed the Magnitsky rule in
favor of a "reset" and a continuation of a nervous détente with Putin, one
that among other things would include further nuclear arms reductions. Obama
at the time was pushing the idea of "nuclear zero," a world without nuclear
weapons. But there was considerable opposition to this concept in the
Senate, and the Magnitsky act became a vehicle for consolidating legislative
opposition to the "reset."
Eventually, Obama relented and the Magnitsky law passed. The predictions
that it would drive the Russians ape proved immediately true. Russian
government officials were infuriated and felt unfairly maligned by the law.
The general tenor of the Russian complaints that I remember hearing went
something like this: We're not the only vicious kleptocracy in the world,
and naming your human rights abuse/extortion law after Magnitsky makes it
seem like we are.
After the law passed, the Russians fought back, hard. The counterattacks
against the Magnitsky Act and Browder were numerous and ranged from savage
to absurd.
One of the first moves was to ban Western adoptions of Russian children,
which was one of the few moves Russia could make that didn't involve
imperiling their own financial interests. The move had life-threatening
consequences for abandoned Russian children with diseases like Down Syndrome
and spina bifida, who might otherwise have been adopted by foreigners with
means. As one U.S. official told the Daily Beast last year, the Russian
messaging was, "You repeal Magnitsky and we'll let go of the kids."
Browder put it another way. "Banning adoptions was especially cruel because
what they were essentially saying is, 'We're going to hurt kids because we
don't care, and you do,'" he says.
The Russians also passed a counter-law petulantly banning 18 Americans from
entering Russia because of "human rights abuses." The list included noted
federal Judge Jed Rakoff and none other than former U.S. Attorney Preet
Bharara, recently dismissed by Trump.
When none of these moves were successful in beating back the Magnitsky rule,
some Russians tried a public relations campaign in the West. This included
the production of a documentary called The Magnitsky Act Behind the
Scenes, which denied that Magnitsky had been mistreated and more or less
absolved the Russian regime of any guilt.
The movie's director, Andrei Nekrasov, has a record as a staunch Putin
critic, having among other things made a damning film about the
assassination/poisoning of former intelligence officer Alxander Litvinenko.
He has told reporters he began his Magnitsky project intending to tell it
from Browder's point of view, even envisioning Browder as narrator, but
became convinced the facts didn't support that narrative.
What that means is hard to say. But add it to the long list of factors that
make the Magnitsky/Browder case a very difficult one to unwind.
What's not in dispute is that the anti-Magnitsky lobbyists have in recent
years used singularly revolting tactics. Veselnitskaya and her clients at
Prevezon among other things created an organization called the Human Rights
Accountability Global Initiative Foundation, whose long-winded title is a
sarcastic echo of the formal name of the Magnitsky Act.
The organization's purpose was really to lobby against the Magnitsky rule,
but was couched as having been formed to seek out "legal and legislative
options to help overturn this adoption ban." The HRAGIF, in other words, was
essentially a vehicle for negotiating the release of children held as
political hostages.
If you click on the website, you'll see heart-rending black-and-white photos
of children who ostensibly could be living in peace and comfort with nice
American families, if only the United States would drop its wrong-headed
human rights sanctions law. If you want to make yourself ill, take a tour
through the whole site.
Veselnitskaya is the wife of one Andrei Mitusov, at one time the deputy
transport minister of the Moscow Oblast, the equivalent of a borough or
maybe a county. Mitusov worked under Pyotr Katsyv, who in turn is the father
of Denis Katsyv, identified by the Organized Crime Corruption Reporting
Project as one of the people who ended up with the monies originally stolen
in the Magnitsky case. According to these reports, the money ended up in the
accounts of their Prevezon Holdings, which is registered in Cyprus.
When Prevezon was charged in the aforementioned money-laundering case, the
company engaged an American firm to help with "litigation support." That
firm was Fusion-GPS, the same company that commissioned the dossier on
Donald Trump written by ex-spy Christopher Steele.
By an amazing coincidence, Fusion was working on behalf of this strange
group of Russians at exactly the same time its founder, Glenn Simpson, was
deciding to hire Steele to produce the most famous anti-Russian dossier of
all time.
I originally thought that coincidence was too odd to ignore. But after
looking into it and talking to some of the people involved, I came away
believing that Fusion had not been employed by "the Russians," but rather by
"some Russians," and not very sophisticated ones at that.
There were lots of conspiracy theories floating around in Washington at that
time (including a theory, pushed variously by people in both parties, that
"the Russians" had used Fusion to plant disinformation in the Steele
report), but to me it seemed more likely that Fusion had just done what oppo
firms do, i.e. take business wherever they can get it. Even dingbats like
the Prevezon people are entitled to buy research help.
Still, this ultimately is the question that hovers over the latest
revelations involving Trump Jr. Is Natalia Veselnitskaya a cutout for the
Kremlin? Or is she just the lawyer for a group of provincial yahoos
inveigled in a relatively small-time (by Russian standards) ripoff, in the
States to push a preposterous and off-putting kids-for-sanctions deal to get
their money back?
If it's the former, the collusion narrative is suddenly red hot. If it's the
latter, then what we've got is a case of failed or attempted collusion, by a
Trump scion who is too dense to know what he's meeting about and with whom.
What's the truth? I have no clue. This will be for poor Robert Mueller to
sort out. Veselnitskaya seems like a nobody, but then again she scored a key
meeting with the Trumps and also received special permission from the Obama
Justice Department to remain in country. And there is that oddly auspicious
settlement in the Prevezon case to ponder.
The relatively localized and specific Magnitsky controversy ultimately
became a vehicle for a much broader and weightier disagreement between camps
of powerful Russians and Americans. It became the nexus of two different
ways to envision the future of Russian-American relations.
Hardliners on both sides originally used the Magnitsky affair as a way to
argue successfully against the kind of pragmatic
rapprochement/disarmament campaign that Barack Obama once favored with his
"reset" idea.
With Russiagate en fuego, Magnitsky is no longer needed as an excuse to hype
up aggression between the two countries. But it's not surprising that
characters from the old divisive controversy keep appearing in this new one.
Everything we know about the members of Trump's campaign who had contact
with the Russian government. Watch here.
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