Why Russia Hacked Our Election

well welcome everyone thanks for being here this is really pretty cool to see this great crowd here and to be with one of my friends and heroes bill Browder welcome to everyone bill it's I sometimes feel might be a little bit dangerous being near you because you're kind of a a wanted guy and I even read somewhere that even the the kind of your enemies found you here at Aspen one year is that true first of all thank you all for coming I'm delighted to be here if there are any Russian agents in the audience please stand up III have I've had a lot of run-ins with Russians in different times I did actually not have a run-in at the Aspen Institute at the door Hoosier building I think it was - I think it was around four years ago I was I was accosted by Process Servers working for the Russian government trying to subpoena me here in Aspen but but I want to tell a quick story about last summer I was I was May 29th last year I was invited by the chief anti-corruption prosecutor of Spain to come and give evidence about proceeds of the crime that my lawyer Sergey Magnitsky had exposed was killed over that had gone that money had gone to Spain so he fights me to Spain I arrived on the 29th of May and my meeting with the prosecutor is at 11:00 a.m. the next morning I check into my hotel that night they asked me for my passport I give them my passport they were very nice to me I booked it on my American one my mom platinum American Express card they gave me a big upgrade and and the hotel manager showed me to the room he was very proud of the room and and the next morning I'm going to breakfast at 9:45 and I open up the door and and the the hotel manager of the guy who had been so proudly showing me into the room was standing there with two very large uniformed Spanish police officers is it mr. Browder very sheepishly said can you show these gentlemen your identification so I give them my passport one of the cops then compares it with a piece of paper he has in his hand and and he says you're under arrest and I said what for and he said Interpol Russia and my heart sank when I heard this and the hotel manager was really worried because this fancy room that he had upgraded me to he thought it was going to continue to be occupied with my belongings while I was arrested and so and so he he sort of quickly in Spanish which I didn't understand started negotiating with the police officers to allow me to pack my bag so that I could clear out of the room and and it was it was actually a series of rooms and because it was such a nice setup he had given me with the upgrade and so I went into the and and and the police officers allowed me to go and do this and so I went into the room where they couldn't see me and I quickly tweeted out urgent being arrested in Madrid Spain on a russian interpol arrest warrant right now and and then i came out of the room with my bag as we went down i paid my bill they then pushed me into the back of the police car it was a real police car with the you know the windows don't go down you can't open the doors is all there's big thick wind plexiglass between you and the police officers and and I was thinking to myself I wonder if people believed my tweet because maybe my account had been hacked or something like that and so I and the people in that and the police officers didn't take away my phone or Pat me down and so I took out my phone and I snapped a picture from the back of their heads and you know and then you could see that like all the radios and stuff on the dashboard and and I tweeted out one out and I said in the back of the police car going to the police station and at this point it was clear that I was being arrested and I could see my all the news alerts on my phone and all this kind of stuff and and the fact that I had tweeted it out and sent off this sort of viral interchange of messages that going all around the world and I finally got to the police station and and everybody all very excited in the police station they like you know that how often do they get an international fugitive and and people are popping their head in to get a good look at me and and and and and you could really feel like this was like pretty a great day for that for this police station in central Madrid and I was sitting there for about an hour and all of a sudden that you could just feel the mood of the police station deflate and and and and then the lady who is the official translator comes in and says I'm sorry sir we we've we've just been informed that um you you're the arrest warrant has been invalidated by Interpol you're free to go so when I when I say that I'm delighted to be here today I really am delighted to be here so bill this is I mean we're laughing a little bit but it's pretty serious because we know that Vladimir Putin murders his enemies not just people inside Russia but he's gone after people have opposed them beyond their borders so this is serious business and I I'd like you to tell your basic story about Magnitsky but maybe from the angle of why have you gotten under the skin of Vladimir Putin why have you become like one of the people in the world that he is most angry and frustrated with well let me let me start out why why did I go to Russia in the first place I I'm you hear my accent I was born in Princeton New Jersey I was brought up in Chicago but I come from very unusual American family my grandfather was a labor union organizer from Wichita Kansas and he was so good at organizing the Union in the 1920s that the Communists spotted him and said if you like labor union ISM you're gonna love communism why did you come to Moscow to check it out so he goes to Moscow he meets he does what most single red-blooded American men do when they get to Moscow he found a Russian girl who became my grandmother my father was born there and and then five years later he was tapped to go back to America to lead the United the Communist Party of the United States and he was the head of the American Communist Party he ran for president in 1936 1940 against Roosevelt on the Communist ticket he was imprisoned by Roosevelt and 41 pardoned in 42 kicked out of the Communist Party in 1945 for being too much of a capitalist and then viciously persecuted there and during the McCarthy era for being a communist and I was born in 1964 I'm 55 years old and in the 1970s when I was going through my teenage rebellion I was trying to figure out a great way to rebel from this family of Communists and I can't tell now but I grew my hair long into an afro and that didn't upset my family um I followed the Grateful Dead around for three months that didn't upset my family but then I came in with a perfect way to upset my family which was to put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist and and that really upset my family I became a capitalist I went to Stanford Business School I graduated Business School in 1989 the year the Berlin Wall came down I thought if my grandfather was the biggest communist in America and the Berlin Wall has just come down I'm gonna become the biggest capitalist in Eastern Europe I moved to London and then I eventually moved to Russia and I and I set up an investment fund called the Hermitage fund and in it and I succeeded in my goal it went from from nothing to becoming the largest for an investment fund in the country the problem was that all the companies that I was investing in were run by these people called the Russian oligarchs and the Russian oligarchs are not nice people and the Russian oligarchs were stealing money hand-over-fist out the backdoor of these companies and I was a shareholder in and so I decided that I was going to try to stop the stealing and the way that I tried to stop the stealing was to research how they did the stealing and then share that research with the international media and so we would start running these naming and shaming campaigns of the biggest companies in Russia gas prom the National echt Rissa tea company the National Savings Bank various other companies and as you could imagine um the people who was stealing we're doing the stealing weren't so happy to have they're stealing exposed and in November of 2005 I was stopped at the border I had been there for ten years I was largest investor and Russia four and a half billion dollars under management I would stopped at Sheremetyevo Airport I was arrested I was put in the detention center of the airport I was kept there for fifteen hours and then the next day I was deported and declared a threat to national security of Russia and at this point I pulled all of my people out i liquidated all of my holdings and i thought that that was the end of the story but it turns out it was the beginning of the worst nightmare you could ever imagine about eighteen months later and the one thing I did do is I kept an office in Moscow and 18 months later I got a frantic call from the one person in the office the secretary who said there twenty-five police officers raiding the office what should I do and I said I'm not sure let me call my lawyer in Moscow and I called an American lawyer I worked with there and I said there's twenty five police officers raiding my office what should I do and he said I'm not sure there twenty five police officers remaining my office looking for your documents let me call you back and that the the police were looking for the stamp seals the certificates for our investment holding companies they found them at the law firms office and then they used these stamps seals and certificates to steal two hundred and thirty million dollars of taxes that we paid to the Russian government in the previous year it was a complex fraud but I don't have time to go into this evening but it's all described in my book if you have one we didn't called read notice but in the process of this fraud going on I hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky Sergei was a 35 year old lawyer who work for an American law firm and I had him investigate and try to figure out how to stop this whole thing he figured out the whole scam he figured out who was involved he testified against the police officers were involved and about five weeks after his testimony the same police officers came to his home at 8:00 in the morning on the 24th of November 2008 they arrested him they put him in pretrial detention where they then started to torture him to get him to withdraw his testimony he was put in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds and they left the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation they put him in cells with no window and the windows in her no window panes and December Moscow's were nearly froze to death at they put him in cells with no toilet just a hole in the floor then the sewage would bubble up they moved him around from cell to cell to cell and the purpose of all this was to get him to withdraw his testimony against these corrupt police officers and they wanted to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the 230 million dollars of taxes and he did so in my instruction and and they figured here's a lawyer who's wearing a blue suit and a red tie and buys his Starbucks in the morning before he goes works at a fancy law firm he'll buckle within a week and they completely misjudged Sergey Magnitsky Sergey was a man of incredible principle and integrity and for him the idea of perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more awful than the physical torture they were inflicting on him and he refused and with his refusal things got worse and worse and worse after six months of this his health broke down he ended up getting terrible pains in his stomach he ended up losing 40 pounds and he was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gall stones needing an operation which was scheduled for the 1st of August 2009 a week before the operation his his persecutors came to him again asked him to sign a false confession again he refused in a retaliation they abruptly moved him from a prison that had a medical wing where he was supposed to have his operation to a maximum-security prison called putea considered to be one of the worst prisons in Russia and most significantly for for they had no medical wing there that could treat his ailment and that booty rak'ahs health when completely broke down he went into a terrible downward spiral ear piercing pain untreated pain he and his lawyers wrote 20 different desperate requests for medical attention to every different branch of the criminal justice system of Russia every different branch of the criminal justice system of Russia either ignored or denied in writing his desperate request for medical attention and on the night of November 16 2009 he went into critical condition when that night the boutique authorities didn't want to have responsibility for him anymore they put him in an ambulance and sent him to a different prison that had a medical wing when he arrived at this different prison instead of putting him in the emergency room they put him in an isolation cell they chained him to a bed and a dryad guards with rubber batons beat Sergei Magnitsky to death that was November 16 2009 bill won't you keep the story going but can you just talk a little bit more I mean about Sir Jay himself about what kind of person he was how well did you know him it is can you bring him a little bit more to life for us I mean obviously he's incredible courage and not buckling under this torture but but tell us a little more about sergej the person well so so them Sergey was probably what what I would just drive is a stubborn idealist he was he was he was sort of he was he was the face of what the good face of Russia he was the he was he was the person he was the type of person that that Russia that should have been sort of the future of Russia and and it was really heartbreaking about his story I mean with everything is art bringing about the story but what was particularly heartbreaking about his story was that he up until the last moments of his life he kind of he always thought the rule of law would eventually prevail in one of the things he did during his time in in prison was every time they would do something terrible to him he would write a criminal complaint and over the course of 358 days he wrote 450 criminal complaints and he believed that somehow if he just kept on you know using the law the law would prevail and that this horribleness would stop and and and you know the fact that the country in the law and everything about the failed him is really you know it's such a terrible indictment of what Russia is that he was the space of of the good honest optimistic Russia and they and they snubbed snubbed him out how did you feel when you heard about his death and how did it mean obviously was a life-changing experience for you as well so I got the news of Sergei Magnitsky murder the next morning at 7:25 a.m. and it was the most heartbreaking life-changing traumatic horrible news I could have ever gotten it was just like a knife going right into my heart Sergei Magnitsky was killed effectively as my proxy Sergei Magnitsky hadn't been working for me he'd still be alive today and and the burden of responsibility the burden of guilt that he was killed effectively in my place was overwhelming and and I at first there was just a terrible sort of chaos in my mind and and and then eventually once I was able to think clearly it became obvious to me that I really had only one choice which was to put aside everything else I was doing and devote all of my time all of my resources and all of my energies to going after the people who killed him and make sure they face justice and coming to your original question why does Putin hate me so much is because I was able over over some period of time to be able to get some measure of justice for Sergei Magnitsky alright so explain in a simple way if you can what the Magnitsky Act is and why it's such a powerful tool on behalf of human rights and and and and the story how you got it passed in in five minutes by the way read notice if interview is a fantastic book that summarizes this whole thing but we're gonna get the precis so after surrogate was killed I said we need to get justice and then we tried to get justice first in Russia and because he had written all these complaints that were all we had copies of we had the most well documented human rights abuse cases come out of Russia in the last 35 years and I thought yeah maybe we weren't gonna be able to prosecute everybody but we surely should be able to prosecute a lot of the people did he send you the consent you the complaints well so what happened was that once a month or so he would they were handwritten complaints he knew the law perfectly he would write the complaints hand them to his lawyer his lawyer would file them the government would reject them but we got copies and so we have copies of all these complaints and they were very granular very detailed and very damning and we figured we maybe you know that we probably get justice inside of Russia but there was no chance of that they the government the Putin regime circled the wagons they exonerated every single person who was involved Vladimir Putin personally got involved in the exoneration process they gave promotions estate honors some of the people who were most complicit and in the most horrifying miscarriage of justice they put Sergei Magnitsky on trial three years after they killed him it was the first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia they found him guilty they put me on trial as his co-defendant I was also found guilty since to nine years in absentia so I so is clear there was no chance of justice inside Russia so then I said how do we get justice outside of Russia and the answer was that that the people who killed him did it for 230 million dollars and they don't keep that money in Russia because as easy as they stole it it could be stolen from them they keep that money in the West they keep that money in in real estate in New York and south of France and then bank accounts in Switzerland London and ski chalets and Aspen and all sorts of other stuff and and so I came up with this idea which is that we might not be able to prosecute them for murder and torture and Russia but there's no reason why they should be able to travel to the United States and other countries and spend their money and so I took this idea to Chintan and it's it's actually not a coincidence that I'm sitting here with Mike who's head of freedom house because in Washington I needed to find an organization that cared about human rights to be my partner I didn't know anything about navigating the the corridors of power in Washington and Freedom House became my partner and Freedom House walked came to every meeting with me and I first went to meet with senator Benjamin Cardin Democrat from Maryland along with Freedom House and then I went went to Senator John McCain Republican from Arizona and I told him the story of what happened to Sergey Magnitsky and I said can we ban their visas and freeze their assets and and the two senators said yes and that became the Magnitsky ad and the Magnitsky act started with just the Magnitsky case and then all sorts of other victims of human rights abuse from Russia start showing up and saying you you found the Achilles heel of the Putin regime can you sanction the people who killed my father my brother my sister my aunt and after about a dozen of these calls I got a call from Senator Cardin and he said how would you feel about broadening this for to apply to all Russian human rights violators and I said I can't think of a more beautiful way to honor Serge's memory than that and the Magnitsky act grew and grew and grew and in Washington where people can't greet agree on almost anything this was something that everybody could agree on and when it went for a vote in the Senate it passed ninety two to four it passed the House of Representatives with 89% and on December 14 2012 President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act into law and Vladimir Putin went crazy well well this is a sort of a serious question how do we know that the Medici Act is working well a lot of people ask me that question and and the answer is we know by how crazy Vladimir Putin God so they're the most horrible horrible part of his reaction and many of you will remember this but you might not have made the connection is that in retaliation for the Magnitsky Act passing Vladimir Putin banned the adoption of Russian orphans by American families and that sounds pretty bad on the surface but let me explain to you how bad it is that the Russians had had been allowing Americans and other Westerners to come to Russia to adopt for many years but they started to basically only allow the sick orphans to be adopted by American families the healthy ones they wouldn't put up for adoption and when I say sick I mean children who were born with HIV from their mothers with fetal alcohol syndrome with Down syndrome etc and and Americans came year after year in the thousands with open arms and open hearts that brought these sick children back from Russia to America and nursed them to health the children who stayed in Russia they just don't have the capacity and they don't have the resources in the orphanages to treat these children and many of them died before the age of 18 so by banning the adoption of Russian orphans Vladimir Putin was sentencing his own orphans to death in as a retaliation to the Magnitsky Act and that gives you some idea of how of how crazy Putin was about this it was such a crazy and emotional and self-destructive thing what was he worried that he himself would be sanctioned well so so that's the key and so one of the things which we learned when the Panama papers came out we've been also tracking one of the money of where where the 200 30 million dollars wind and many of you will remember panama papers' was this big leak that came up came out of this Panamanian law firm mossack fonseca and when the and in every country there was a star of the Panama papers and the star of Russia was a man named sergei roldugin um most of you won't know his name but you'll know his profession he was a cellist and sergei roldugin was a cellist who is worth two billion dollars I think he was the wealthiest musician in the world and certainly the wealthiest cellist by far and but there's no reason why a cellist would be worth two billion dollars and so everybody said why is he worth so much money and and the answer is he's putin's best friend from childhood he's the Godfather of putin's daughter and he's a nominee for holding putin's assets and we discovered that sergei roldugin got some of the money from the two hundred thirty million dollars so why is putin so upset about the Magnitsky Act is the Magnitsky Act says that anyone who was involved in the Magnitsky case anyone who profited from the Magnitsky case and anyone who commits other gross human rights abuses in Russia will be sanctioned well Putin figures into all three of those categories and most importantly Vladimir Putin is a very rich man Vladimir Putin in my estimation is worth 200 billion dollars and he doesn't keep that money in his own name he keeps the name of oligarchs and that money is held offshore and Putin very realistically understands that at some point in time all that money that he imprisoned people over killed people over stole extorted extracted all that hard work that he put into accumulating that fortune could be confiscated in any moment with a swipe of a pen because of what Bill Browder did and and that's why he hates it so much and that's why he has made it his single largest foreign policy priority to repeal the Magnitsky Act and that's why he sent in a Russian lawyer to Trump Tower on June 9th 2016 with one specific one specific ask of Donald Trump jr. which is as if his father gets elected will he repeal the Magnitsky Act I want to talk a little bit of Putin if I could and by the way in about 10 minutes we're gonna open this up for some questions but I wanted I want a few more questions for Bill for me when Putin took power in 2000 you were quoted in the papers as being somewhat complimentary of him and you flipped obviously on him for obvious reasons but tell me tell me what you think you might have gotten wrong about Putin or what was what was your miss read about Putin so when so the history so pre Putin there was Yeltsin Boris Yeltsin was the President of Russia Boris Yeltsin was a he Boris Yeltsin did did a deal with the devil which was in order to become president he allowed 22 oligarchs to to steal 40 percent of the country from from the country from the government and and in that time it was the it was this terrible period of what we called oligarch capitalism where these 22 oligarchs at the yachts and planes and villas and the average male died at the age of 58 because it wasn't enough medicine in the hospital nurses had to prostitute themselves to support their families professor's became taxi drivers art museums sold the paintings off the walls and and so everybody was longing for the end of all of our capitalism and so Putin shows up and he says we're gonna he shows up as the successor of Yeltsin and said we're gonna end this oligarchs stuff and and I cheered and everybody else cheered but it turned out that that and for a period of time Putin behaved I would I would argue he acted in the national interest before he became before he was able to assemble enough power to be a dictator and I I praised him and other people praised him and as it turned out I was pretty damn wrong but what happened was he didn't want to get rid of the oligarchs he just wanted to become the biggest oligarch himself and and when he became the biggest oligarch um he there's an expression absolute power corrupts absolutely and that's that's what happened so in your experience in being Putin's principal foe in some ways what lessons to draw from that experience that should inform how the West should deal with him so we had a situation today you know where the president knighted States met with him kind of actually joked a little bit about the interference with the election which doesn't seem like that much of a joke to many people I think he also I believe either was going to meet or had met with Theresa May is this the right way for for the West to deal with someone like Putin so just so you understand why Putin is doing what he's doing is that Putin has stolen between Putin's money and the money of the top 1,000 people they've stolen a trillion dollars over the last 20 years and and that money should have been spent on hospitals on roads on schools and on everything else and so the average Russian is living a very bad life just like it was in the prepotent days but in fact worse and and he's living in an a in a situation which should be a democracy where people can actually in theory could vote to get rid of him and so and so people in theory should be angry with him and and and so what he's had to do is he's had to deflect their anger in outside so if you're if you're if you're somebody who doesn't want people to be angry at you you've got to create somebody else to be angry at and so what Putin has done is he's started foreign wars the circle war with Ukraine there is no Russia has no beef with Ukraine it's a totally fake war created to create a war in order to have an enemy so that everyone could rally around Putin it's the reason for for all this action in Syria and it's kind of the reason for all this action everywhere else but Putin can't raise Russia up to the roof for the rest of the world who wants to bring the rest of the world down to him and he's exporting it in the form of election meddling in the form of money laundering in the form of BOTS in the form of of hacking and and and so I would say that the the way that the United dates in the r and the Western world dealt with the Soviet Union during the Communist time was a strategy of containment and everyone understood that it was that the Communists were dangerous they're trying to spread communism we need to stop them we needed to contain them we now have a criminal regime the Putin regime is a criminal regime and we also need a policy of containment but it doesn't really help now when Donald Trump is busy joking with him about election hacking it doesn't help when Teresa may whose country I live in Britain I'm a British citizen I've been living there for thirty years last year the Russians committed an act of chemical weapons terror in Salisbury and Theresa May is having a bilateral with the President of Russia at the g20 today that just makes no sense to me and that's that that's not the proper strategy for dealing with a malign figure like Putin so bill what is your recommendation for countries like the United States and other countries of how to deal with them are there other laws that need to be passed so obviously one thing would be to enforce and implement the menisci Act what other steps do you recommend for dealing with Putin well so so Vladimir Putin as I mentioned is I believe to read that the richest man in the world and he doesn't hold that money in his own name he holds that money in the name of Allah dork trustees some of them some of the big famous oligarchs you read about in the financial press that's that when you hear about their wealth it's not all their money some of that money is Putin's and so it's really easy you know during the you know the Brezhnev era these guys didn't didn't have all their money offshore they have a huge Achilles heel the leverage we have is all their money offshore and the way you deal with it and we started to do this in April of last year the United States in response to the election hacking sanctioned seven of the richest Russian oligarchs and that was devastating that was probably the single most powerful foreign policy move ever and and Vladimir Putin was absolutely shocked and the way we deal with these people is go after the oligarchs go after their money because a lot of that money is Vladimir Putin's and he values money more than human life and so if you go after his money that's where we have the leverage I'm gonna throw it up him two questions in one second let me just ask you one final question just on why did I guess you've answered the question partially but I just wanted features elaborate on it why did why was Putin so interested in you know interfering with the u.s. election with you know stealing the you know having his people steal the the emails and you know running the ads on Facebook and all the other things he did to try to so division in our country why was it so important with him to do that well so as I've said he um his single largest foreign policy priority in writing was to repeal the Magnitsky Act the Magnitsky Act also metastasized all these other other sanctions programs and he he he knew that if Hillary Clinton was elected there was no chance of getting rid of any of this stuff and he saw an opening with Donald Trump and and he and and I let me just ask a question this is really important question and don't and don't be embarrassed if you don't raise your hand how many people have actually read the Moller report in this room so let's say three percent it's it it you don't have to read the whole thing each section has an executive summary I encourage every one of you just like spend two hours of your life and read the Moller report it goes I'm such incredible damning detail about what the Russian that absolutely 100% for sure whether you're a trump supporter or not the Russians illegally hacked the US election and that there's no there's no controversy about that and and they did it because they thought that Donald Trump would be a better president for them okay I'm gonna throw it open for questions and we have to Aspen staffers with Mike so if you want to be recognized just raise your hand then I'll try to do it sir right here and just see if you could just please wait for the microphone to come to you pootin stole an oil company I believe he jailed and later released a man whose name I think was hurt or coughs key whatever happened to him and the oil company I imagine is now now lukoil so the you got the name right of the oligarch Mikhail Horta Koski the oil company that they seized was called Yukos he was the richest man in Russia and in fact the reason that Putin arrested him was to Putin likes to rule by symbolism and by example and when Putin made his play to become the biggest oligarch he took the biggest oligarch the previously biggest oligarch stuck him in jail put him on trial allowed the television cameras to film the richest man in Russia on trial sitting in a cage and so imagine you're the 17th richest oligarch in Russia you're on your yacht has parked off the hotels we could do cop and then teep you've just finished up with the mistress your mistress in the bedroom you had that pad out to the living room you flick on CNN and there you guys are richer far better far more powerful than you sitting in a cage what's your natural reaction gonna be you don't want to sit in that cage and so one by one by one they went to Putin and said Vladimir what do we have to do is make sure we don't sit in the cage and he said fifty percent and that was the moment that he became the richest man in the world whatever became of Michael Horta coughs key he was put in jail for nine years and four months he was released right before the Sochi Olympics when Putin was trying to make a play to show how wonderful he was now lenient he was instead of having this man in jail for ten years nine years and four months it's just such an act of generosity he now lives in London and and we work together on trying to hold Putin to account any lady back there and and just wait for microphone of sorry do you have an information that was interesting to Muller and were you interviewed by Muller great question I have all sorts of interesting information I well I I was actually in the molar report if you search my name you'll find I think there was 14 mentions of my name in the roller report which all dates so in the Trump Tower meeting on June 9th 2016 the female Russian lawyer who is an agent of Vladimir Putin Natalya pencil net skaia went into that meeting to meet with Donald Trump jr. Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner Donald Trump had just been nominated the Republican nominee and she went in there and she said I'd like the Magnitsky Act repealed but she also said if Donald Trump becomes president could you have built Browder arrested and and and there's a very famous notes which would show up in the Moller report Paul Manafort from his from his iPhone where it has bill Browder and a bunch of other stuff under it and so I was a central part of this whole thing and interestingly that was the one part of the other than the obstruction of justice part of the Moller report where they said that Donald Trump jr. had effectively broken the law by by looking for for a foreign foreign value of for foreign information that had value in order to help their campaign bill I before I go to another quiz it's one thing I forgot that I wanted to ask you about and one thing just for this group to know about Bill is he's kind of a small NGO into himself it's like you and your Twitter account and a couple of financial advisers that are do you know making a huge ruckus and stink that really equals a lot of the impact of a lot of you know more sizeable human rights organizations and so people come to you with requests for help and we were talking at dinner a little bit about this case of this Russian family that had their business essentially stolen by the Russians and and and had fled to where they thought they might be safe Guatemala and it didn't turn out so well for them and to tell us that story I think it's kind of indicative of kind of the way Putin operates it's actually really so I wrote my book in 2015 in early 2015 and I set up a special email account that you could email me if you have something to say about my book and and I got some nice letters people loving my book if you hate letters as well and and and then one day I got this letter from a woman a Russian woman who had the most horrible stories to tell and her story was the following and that she and her husband and their daughter she and her husband owned a paper mill in in st. Petersburg Russia and the FSB the Russian secret police came to them and said we want to have your pulp and paper mill please and they said no and sure after that the the 16 year old daughter was kidnapped and and then raped repeatedly and then they paid a ransom and finally got her back and then the the Russian government then swooped in and used some state banks to call in loans that weren't due for 10 years called them in overnight bankrupted the company seized all the assets auctioned them off they were worth 500 million dollars auctioned them off for $100,000 and then went after the family and the family first went to Latvia they thought that was too close to Russia then they went to Turkey realized Turkey had an extradition treaty with Russia and then they found on the internet that Guatemala didn't have an extradition treaty with Russia so they found a law firm in Guatemala that that offered to get them proper documents so they could emigrate they changed their names they emigrated to Guatemala they went into hiding they didn't have much money left the father became a science teacher at a local high school the mother became a drawing teacher the daughter was who was hugely traumatized started to slowly recover from this terrible kidnapping and rape situation they had another child in Guatemala and then five year after they arrived in Guatemala the Russians found out about them and tracked them down and then the most unbelievable thing there was an organization that was set up by the United Nations to fight lawlessness impunity and corruption in Guatemala called CSEC it was a union organization the US government paid about 45% of their budget and the Russians found a way to get sisig to prosecute the family for passport violations they prosecuted the family and they they sends the father to 19 years in jail for passport violations the mother and daughter to 14 years and then they put the three-year-old son in a Guatemalan orphanage and the the mother wrote to me from jail about this whole thing and and this is such a heartbreaking story and I couldn't live with myself I didn't do something about it and the fact of the matter was that um I knew how to do something about it because I'd spent some time in Washington lobbying for the Magnitsky Act and so I put together a PowerPoint presentation and I went to Washington I went to the same people that supported the Magnitsky Act and I told them the story and I said we can't allow this and specifically we can't allow the United States government to pay the budget to this organization that clearly did this incredible act of aggression against his family and and I was very pleased that Senator Roger wicker and Congressman Chris Smith held hearings at the u.s. Helsinki Commission on the bit caught family last year and as part of the hearings I wouldn't testified the family lawyers went and testified and my recommendation was that they with the United States government withhold funding to this organization for what they did and they withheld the funding and the family has since been released from prison I had a question about it could you compare Stalin's hold on dictatorial power with Putin's how do they compare well in a certain way so Putin so Stalin killed tens of millions of people Putin has not killed tens of millions of people Putin is a much more efficient dictator and and the way that Putin operates is by he creates a climate of Terror but he doesn't have to I mean he kills people and he doesn't kills a lot of people but he doesn't have to kill that many people he what Putin does is he picks out the most emblematic person in any given class of people he wants to terrorize like in the case of Michaela or Tokarski the oligarch he picks the biggest oligarch he really does terrible stuff to him and everybody around him it wasn't just Hordak offski went to jail everybody worked for him anyone who had anything to do with him went to jail or fled the country and and then no other oligarch heaped-up I was the largest foreign investor in the country complaining about corruption look what they did to me guess what there's no other foreign investors complaining about corruption and Boris Nemtsov was the most outspoken opposition politician they murder him in front of the Kremlin guess what they're no more opposition politicians and and so Putin has been very he's very efficient about his dictatorship and he's a completely different type of dictator he's also not an ideal I D allistic or ideological dictator Putin is not he has no ideology he's just a criminal he's so I would I wouldn't I wouldn't compare him to Joseph Stalin I compare him with Pablo Escobar that's probably except that with Pablo Escobar he didn't have access to nuclear arsenal if I could actually add one thing to that I think Putin is a not to toot the horn of my organization we have a great report on our website about the Takas of modern authoritarianism and Putin is example a and other dictators have kind of copied it he's also in addition to all the stuff that Bill is done said he's also gone after the press he's gone after the court system he's after civil society basically is neutered all the potential opposition to him and it's and other people are watching that those tactics other questions maybe there sir what would you say is the best-case scenario at this point I mean if Putin leaves is it a cultural thing within the oligarchy where it's gonna stay like this is there some scenario that we could all hope for what what should we be wishing for well so Putin there is no exit strategy for Vladimir Putin he's stolen all this money he's killed and falsely imprisoned all these people none of the money is in his own name if he's ever to lose power and he calls up somebody said you know could use wire over a billion dollars so say I'm sorry flat Amir who and worse than that so you wouldn't get access to his money because the money is not in his own name he'd be arrested terrible things would happen to him in jail and so there's no there's not gonna ever be a Putin presidential library that he can increase flee retire to and the problem with this is that the longer it goes on for doesn't matter whether he's the greatest leader in the world you no one's gonna like you after twenty years people you know people just get tired of anybody and if they particularly get tired when the economics are not good and the economics are not good in Russia and so the worse the economics get the more foreign enemies and adventures they have to go on and the more domestic repression they have to engage in and so there there is no optimistic scenario that I could predict about how Russia is going to evolve I think it's gonna get worse I think the people are gonna get angrier Putin is gonna get more aggressive and adventurous in the world and we have to prepare ourselves for that back there sir it's been reported that Russian oligarch laundered their money to State of Israel is that true and if that's a true why is that well so I'm actually a great expert on on where they've laundered the money because one of the other tasks in addition to the Magnitsky act that I've been involved in is tracing who got the two hundred thirty million dollars that Sergei Magnitsky was killed over and for the last ten years I've had a team of investigators forensic investigators looking for that money and we found that money and that money has gone to a lot of places and a lot of places you wouldn't expect and I can say that that in this particular investigation Israel hasn't showed up but weirdly Denmark as Denmark has a bank the largest bank in Denmark is called Danske Bank and we discovered that that of the two hundred thirty million dollars that Sergei Magnitsky exposed was killed over 200 million of that went through Danske Bank and and when we when we started pulling on the thread we we started working with a Danish the largest Danish newspaper called Berlinski and they started looking at the data we had and some other data they had and they discovered it wasn't two hundred million it was about eight and a half billion and then Danske Bank had to do their own external investigation and they discovered it wasn't eight and a half billion it was two hundred and thirty four billion dollars of illicit funds from the former Soviet Union Russia was laundered through Danske Bank Denmark which is considered to be on another one of these indices is the second most honest country in the world based on transparency international's Index was involved in the largest money-laundering scandal in the history of Europe and it wasn't just Danske Bank because the money in order to launder money it's got to go through a lot of banks so that you know the 203 danske bank then went to sweat bank in north north which is Sweden's largest bank and Nordea Bank which has finished Finland's largest bank and and there's all sorts of people and banks and and situations you just wouldn't expect and I'll tell you the biggest money laundering hub in the entire world is London in London they uh as my hometown they all speak with nice accents and they all wear nice suits and they are there's a lot of really crooked bankers in London and what makes it really hard is that the British police do not prosecute money launderers and so if anyone here is a money launderer and you want to be okay do it in London we had the lady right there does Putin have anything over Trump it just appears that is completely illogical for Trump to continue being so buddy-buddy I mean it cannot it can't just be because he doesn't want to appear that he won't partly the election because of his help there has to be something more than this is there well so Moeller so coming back to the molar report the molar report has the whole section on collusion where and molar had a great access to information that wiretaps that subpoena powers they had all sorts of great stuff and in the molar report um and again I encourage everybody please read it it's just it's it's interesting and it's it's good it's seems sort of fun reading because in the molar report there and the section of collusion what you have is a whole bunch of people in the Trump Organization all desperately trying to collude with Russia you have George papadopolis Carter page and Paul Manafort and all sorts of people and they're all lying to each other in the Trump campaign about all the the prospects of collusion and how great it's gonna be when they could do collude and how the great contacts they have to collude with and and they kind of couldn't find anyone to collude with according to the molar report and then you've got a whole bunch of people from Russia you have the head of the Russian foreign direct investment fund and the head of one of Russia's most important banks all desperately looking for people on the Trump campaign to collude with and apparently not being able to find anyone to collude with and so they're all kind of missing missing each other in the middle of the night and then you have everybody in the Trump Organization going right up to Trump lying to everybody about what about everything to do with this with their involvement in Russia and so all I can say is what's written in that report the report doesn't find any it doesn't find evidence of collusion this process prosecutable doesn't mean the intelligence community doesn't doesn't haven't found at a lower standard what they believe to be collusion but but I think we have to rely on molars report which is that there was no collusion bill we're sort of running out of time and I'm not possibly gonna be able to get to the all the questions I will say to everyone that bill will be signing copies of red notice somewhere in the hotel outside but I did there two questions that I just couldn't take the the moderators chair to ask one is can you tell us what's happened to Sir Jay Magnitsky's family how have they done personally you know ten years later that's number one and number two can you just give us a little bit of a look ahead to your next book and what's that about so on the Magnitsky family I circuit was killed it was the most from for them more than anybody the most traumatic thing that could ever happen and he wasn't just killed but they then tried to prosecute him afterwards and they made the family sort of sit as his representative as the as the accused and they really harassing the family in all sorts of ways and so I vacuumed from Russia and they live in London now they're under my support and protection and you know they're as good as anyone could be having gone through this type of trauma his youngest son is off to university next year in America and and they're trying to live a normal to children what was your second question next books project which I hear you're writing a little bit here in Aspen I'm writing my next book and my next book is gonna be all about what all about those crazy stuff that's happened how the Magnitsky act has led to this huge geopolitical crisis and all the further murders poisonings debt bodies arrests etc that have happened and I think it'll be just as exciting perhaps more exciting than the first book so um but I've got I've got a high bar people have complimented me on the first book every time they do now I think God I really better book the next time all right I'm gonna suggest I'm gonna take three final questions let's have real quick rapid-fire questions and Bill you couldn't answer them all and then we'll go to book signing mark has there been any expansion or development of the menisci act around the world to other countries if so to what degree and if not why not okay and anyone else have a question back there the gentleman back there in the back China Russia she Zhi ping and Putin the Bri and them China building a transport hub outside Moscow okay a question in there you'll want to hit bills reaction yeah just what do you think of the relationship then because of that beef between XI Peng and Putin okay and alright you gentlemen the front row yes the three of us have read your book and you finished it I think in 2015 one of the things you talked about was the rule of law and without it what would happen so is there been a drop in investment outside investment in Russia during this period since you finished the book okay so all good questions thank you on the Magnitsky act we now have a Magnitsky act in the United States in Canada in the United Kingdom in Estonia in Latvia and Lithuania we have one on deck in Australia the European Union has it on deck and then a number of individual European Union countries Germany France the Netherlands Sweden Denmark Romania Czech Republic all have Italy Italy all have Magnitsky legislation working at working their way its way through it is the new technology for dealing with with bad guys it used to be that we would sanction countries and then the people who would in the countries these poor people would suffer and the oligarchs and the dictators with fly-in plane loads of champagne and caviar and be fine this is much more specific it's like it goes right after the bad guys it leaves everybody else out of the picture and there is nothing worse than being added to the Magnitsky list when you get put on the Magnitsky list every bank in the world shuts your account that minute nobody will do any business with you at that point forward you become a nonentity a non-person in the financial world they used to do this with Colombian drug barons and they and they came up with a word for this which was more to seville which means civil death and it's and it's not there's nothing worse than being added to it and and this and and and then the proudest thing that for me is is to watch all the victims around the world and the Magnitsky act doesn't just by to russia applies to bad guys everywhere now i look at all the victims who now have a hope of getting some recourse some reprieve from from what had happened to them by creating some punishment and and you know some of the biggest cases in my in my in front of me right now are the Weger is in china this whole whole population of people who are basically being rounded up and put into concentration camps the the murder and dismemberment of jamal Khashoggi the ramanga massacre and all of these cases the Magnitsky sanctions are a proper way of dealing with it and and i'm very happy to see people like mike using the Magnitsky act in cases where where there's been atrocities and many other human rights organizations doing the same thing on China Russia Putin is really very foolish to have burned his relations with the West and thrown himself in with the Chinese because on one side of the border you have hundreds of millions of people and no resources on the other side of the border we have hardly any people and all the natural resources and China will gobble up Russia in 50 years and Putin should be aligning himself with the West to prevent that from happening on role of law and foreign direct investment in Russia for reasons not necessarily to do with the Magnitsky Act but reasons to do with Putin's own bad behavior after invading Crimea and all the other and the sanctions that came from that the level of foreign direct investment in Russia has dropped ninety five percent no but nobody puts their money into Russia and if anyone here has the urge to invest in Russia lie down and wait half an hour until it passes okay all right I think we're out of time but can everyone join me in giving bill a huge round of applause thank you Bill

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 6,124

Rating: 4.4468083 out of 5

Keywords: Russia, Bill Browder, Vladimir Putin, hacking, Aspen Institute, Aspen Ideas Festival, 2016 election

Id: u_g5I1e0xnY

Length: 59min 45sec (3585 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 29 2019

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