The Australian parliament seems about to approve a ‘human rights’ law that would establish the ability to exert arbitrary state power over individuals in other countries who have been accused of human rights violations. Ironically, this law gives the accused no day in court, and no chance to see charges or evidence, confront accusers, present a defence or have a ruling made by an authority other than the prosecution.

The law is called a Magnitsky Act. Kimberley Kitching, a Labor senator from Victoria, has given notice that she will introduce the bill in December. If it’s like the other Magnitsky Acts introduced in half a dozen countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, it will itself violate human rights when it is weaponised to target international adversaries. How did Australia come to consider a law that violates human rights? And how does it weaponise ‘human rights’ to target international adversaries? How come it isn’t being critically questioned by the media? How come it enjoys bipartisan support? Here is the backstory Australians don’t know. I call it the Browder Hoax.

In 1998 William Browder, an American investor, gave up his passport to become British, which put him on the US Internal Revenue Service list of ‘tax expatriates’, as the United Kingdom, unlike the United States, doesn’t tax profits on offshore holdings. This was convenient because from the mid-1990s he invested in Russian shares, becoming, he says, the largest foreign holder of Russian stocks. The shares were moved offshore to tax-free British Virgin Island .

In a 2007 scam involving collusive lawsuits (‘You cheated me, you must pay’; ‘Yes, I agree, I will pay’), Browder’s shell companies claimed to the Russian Treasury that they had to pay out all their 2006 profits and requested refunds of all taxes paid in 2006: $230 million. This was known as the tax-refund fraud.

The victim of the scam was the Russian Treasury, though Browder first lied to the Financial Times that his companies had been targeted by crooked Russian officials who were after the companies’ assets. This, however, was rather unlikely, as the companies themselves were participants in the scam, and Browder later admitted in a US federal court deposition that his companies had no assets to go after.

Browder would then claim that the shells were stolen by an unrelated criminal operation, but evidence raises questions about that. His trustee, HSBC (as confirmed by the HSBC comptroller in US federal court), said in July 2007 that it needed $7 million for legal fees to recover stolen companies, but Browder wrote in his book he didn’t know that they were stolen till October of that year.

Browder declares that his ‘lawyer’ Sergei Magnitsky, hired in 2007 (and really his accountant since 1997), discovered the scam and was jailed because of it, and then beaten to death when he wouldn’t recant. However, Browder never provided evidence of this, and neither do Magnitsky’s pre-arrest testimonies, which list him as an auditor. In fact, the scam was first revealed in April 2008 by a Russian, Rimma Starova, the figurehead director of a shell company that took over the companies, and reported in July by the New York Times and the Russian paper Vedomosti. Magnitsky didn’t allude to it in testimony until October.

Magnitsky was named as a fraud collaborator by the scam’s operative, Viktor Markelov, in the Russian trial that sent Markelov to prison.

In fact, the whole Magnitsky hoax was invented two years after the accountant’s 2009 death (due to terrible prison medical care) when Browder needed to block the Russians from using Interpol to arrest him and return him for trial over $100,000 in tax evasion (he falsely claimed that he hired the disabled and invested locally) and illicit stock buys of Gazprom, the energy conglomerate whose share sales in Russia were then restricted to Russian citizens (he used cut-out companies with nominee owners). Browder admitted the ‘disabled’ ruse in his US court deposition.

Browder’s public statements to Chatham House, London, and University of San Diego Law School in the two years after Magnitsky’s death said nothing about his being beaten. Browder invented the story that Magnitsky was beaten to death by eight riot guards to promote the Magnitsky Act in the United States to block the Russians’ tax-evasion pursuit. The Physicians for Human Rights in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to whom he gave all his evidence, contradicts the beating claim, but the ‘attack’ is nevertheless cited in the US law.

Thus the 2012 US ‘Magnitsky Act’, formally known as the Russia and Moldova Jackson–Vanik Repeal and Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act 2012, sanctioned dozens of Russians that Browder said, without evidence, were responsible for the death of his claimed ‘lawyer’—that is, his accountant, Magnitsky. They were low-level officials, tax investigators, court officers, and medical and prison staff. It was a stretch to say that investigators looking into tax evasion overseen by an accountant were responsible for his death in detention.

In fact, the European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that, ‘The Russians had good reason to arrest Sergei Magnitsky for Hermitage tax evasion’. It said: ‘The accusations were based on documentary evidence relating to the payment of taxes by those companies and statements by several disabled persons who had confessed to sham work for the two companies. One of them testified that he had been in contact with Mr Magnitskiy, had received money from him and had assisted him in finding other sham employees. He also said that Mr Magnitskiy had told him what to say if questioned by the authorities and had asked him to participate in a tax dispute as a witness’.

None of the targeted people were given a chance to answer the charges. When former Interior Ministry tax investigator Pavel Karpov brought a defamation case in London against Browder for accusing him of the murder of Magnitsky, the judge ruled that he didn’t have standing, because he didn’t have a UK reputation to defend. However, the judge said there was no justification for the charge. He said, ‘nothing in this judgment is intended to suggest that, if the Defendants were to continue to publish unjustified defamatory material about the Claimant, the Court would be powerless to act’. It was the only time any of the targets had anything close to due process in a court of law.

The US act was expanded to sanction human rights violators in any country of the world. Browder has had it passed in half a dozen countries, and is lobbying for an Australian version. Putting Magnitsky’s name on a law builds his wall against Russian justice. But the so-called  ‘human rights’ law has dangerous implications for the civil societies of democratic countries.

It violates due process of the law. People accused of crimes in Australia have the right to hear the charges against them, to have evidence presented in court, to challenge or refute the evidence and if found guilty to be punished according to law. Should people accused of crimes in countries other than Australia be charged here while being denied those rights?

Michael McFaul, US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014 and a friend of Browder’s, writes in his book From Cold War to Hot Peace that before the Magnitsky Act the United States had already put Russians on a sanctions list. ‘I was the one that ran that decision-making process in the government. And we did that. And we don’t need the Magnitsky Act to deny people visas to come to the United States of America.’ But, he said, Browder wanted a more public action: ‘He said that wasn’t good enough—we needed to do this publicly’—with Magnitsky’s name on the bill. McFaul went on:

‘Bill and I had a philosophical disagreement. I did not believe that the U.S. government should be able to seize individuals’ private property without due process. They should have the right to defend themselves in a court of law. Bill disagreed. He vowed to push on with his campaign in Congress. I wished him luck’.

In fact, the Magnitsky Act is not about human rights, which might have made the due-process issue salient. It is the weaponisation of human rights not only to benefit Browder but to attack declared adversaries. The Magnitsky Acts are now added to an arsenal of sanctions that includes economic sanctions against a country for ‘crimes’ attributed to their governments, though the crimes are not adjudicated by any international tribunals, which would provide due process. Though the Magnitsky Act was devised by Browder to attack Russia, Australian parliamentarians appear to be aiming it at China, which follows the United States’ escalating campaign against that nation. Most of the 160 witness statements filed with the foreign affairs subcommittee considering the law came from invited witnesses attacking Beijing. Browder was one of a handful invited to give live testimony. Critics of the bill were not. Later, former senior diplomat Tony Kevin was given a chance to oppose the law in a statement and a hearing. In fact, the Australian parliament did its best to prevent critics of the proposed law from expressing their views even in print. I filed an extensive comment exposing Browder’s falsehoods that was largely redacted, with links to documents blocked.

After I responded to a direct attack on me by Browder, the subcommittee refused to post my response.

One must be careful about the models one constructs. This law is aimed only at people in other countries, since Australian law guarantees due process to anyone charged in Australia. How can Australia claim jurisdiction over crimes in other countries? Would it accept other countries claiming jurisdiction over crimes alleged in Australia? This law would deprive people charged in other countries of rights enjoyed in Australia. That challenges Australia’s claims to be a country that honours the rule of law. In effect, the proposed law is not aimed at people because they are human rights violators (such as some police in the United States or France) but because they are political enemies (officials in Russia and Iran). This damages the legitimate worldwide human rights movement by allowing targeted governments to dismiss charges as politically motivated. And in many cases, they would be right.

Beyond that, there may be another harmful effect. Authoritarian right-wing political movements are growing in the world. Imagine what any of their governments could do with a Star Chamber law bereft of due process that accuses and punishes political targets. They could say that they are just copying the West. The precedent is poor. Back in 2001, George W. Bush’s government pushed the UN General Assembly to adopt a resolution requiring all member states to pass anti-terror laws, and this rapidly became an open invitation for various regimes to bring in oppressive laws, with far-reaching consequences. The Magnitsky Act risks giving more tools to authoritarian regimes.

arena.org.au

Last month, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, in the course of her State of the Union Address, urged parliament to “complete our tool box” by passing a so-called ‘European Magnitsky Act’ to punish Russia over the 2009 death of Sergey Magnitsky. Unfortunately, the only tool that appears in the EU “tool box” at this point is a sledgehammer.

Von der Leyen appears to be doing the cheap bidding of Washington at a time when the Trump administration is furious over the prospects of Germany and Russia completing the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which envisages 55 bln cubic meters moving annually from the coast of Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany. Such a project could actually work to dissolve tensions between Brussels and Moscow, and of course Washington would never stand for that. The EU Commission president hinted as much in her speech when she remarked that “no pipeline will change” Brussels’ stance. Incidentally, this makes the alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure, Alexei Navalny, seem all the more questionable when considered in the full context of events.

In any case, for anyone who has been following the long string of accusations being leveled against Russia over the course of the last several years, an unmistakable pattern has emerged. From the suspicious ‘poisoning’ of the Skripals in the UK, to the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 over Ukraine, Russia is never invited to contribute testimony and evidence that may help to shine a critical light on the proceedings. That seems to be an unforgivable oversight if the pursuit of truth were indeed the goal.

Instead of going out of its way to base its conclusions on all of the available data, the Western capitals are once again picking and choosing its sources. In the Magnitsky case, the bulk of the ‘incriminating evidence’ is being provided by none other than Bill Browder, an individual who has a real conflict of interest in the case, to say the least.

Before continuing, some essential background. As an auditor at the Moscow law firm Firestone Duncan, Sergey Magnitsky worked directly with Hermitage Capital Management, the asset management company headed by Browder. In 2001, Browder was the director of two HSBC subsidiary companies that were eventually accused by the government of underpaying its taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Browder was convicted in Russia in absentia for “aggravated tax evasion” as well as illegally bankrupting a company involved in tax fraud. As for Magnitsky, he met a more tragic fate, dying in 2009 in a Moscow prison awaiting trial for tax fraud, a tragedy that has provided the basis for the so-called Magnitsky Act. In Western capitals, the name Magnitsky has become synonymous with the “murderous brutality” that the Western media endlessly ascribes to the Russian state. For many Russians, however, the case provides yet another stark example of the West acting unilaterally as judge, jury and executioner without considering all of the available evidence and facts at its disposal.

Former Kremlin critic questions Browder story

Andrei Nekrasov, an award-winning Russian filmmaker and investigative journalist, has spent a considerable amount of time and energy getting to the bottom of the Magnitsky case. In 2016, he released a film entitled, ‘The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes’, which was supported by a number of European film funds and the public Franco-German TV network Arte TV. In the words of the New York Times, the film was “generating a furor.” In the film, Nekrasov argues, with no shortage of compelling evidence, that entire governments are being misled by Browder into believing that Magnitsky had been persecuted and killed for exposing political corruption. That is highly questionable, Nekrasov argues, considering that Browder had been an avid supporter of the Russian government before the question of tax fraud hit the headlines.

In his open letter to the EU Commission, Nekrasov goes on to take issue with Browder’s claim that Magnitsky was tortured during his imprisonment, revealing that the auditor “spent a considerable part of his detention in an “elite” – better equipped – section of the Matrosskaya Tishina prison…. where the rich and famous prisoners, such as the oil tycoon [Mikhail] Khodorkovsky…. and the leaders of the 1991 coup against Gorbachev were kept.”

Furthermore, during a Oct, 2013 hearing at the UK High Court of Justice (‘Karpov vs Browder’), Browder claimed that the Russian authorities, purportedly wanting Magnitsky out of the way, imprisoned him because the lethal outcome was a “reasonably foreseeable” consequence of the sentence, “not least” because of the high mortality rate in the Russian prisons. Judge Simon, however, dismissed such a “causal link”, noting that “nothing is said [by Browder – R.B.] about torture and murder ( §128, Page 25 ).

Meanwhile, Magnitsky himself stated that the quality of the medical attention he received in prison was “adequate”.

Here, it is important to note that Nekrasov is no biased journalist with a political ax to grind. As far as reporting the truth goes, he is a rare type of reporter who is guided not by a desire to reach a predetermined conclusion, but by where the facts lead him. In fact, in one of his earlier documentaries, ‘Disbelief,’ he discusses the 1999 Russian apartment bombings in a way that showed the government in a negative light.

In his letter, he admits that he was ready to retell Browder’s emotional story about his “heroic lawyer.”

“I believed Browder,” Nekrasov writes, “partly for political reasons, as my previous work had been highly critical of the Russian government.”

He continues: “Having, however, detected inconsistencies in Mr. Browder’s story I decided not to sweep them under the rug. The result of my investigative work, the film entitled “The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes” was at first highly praised by its commissioning editors, at ZDF/ARTE inter alia. The premiere of the film was to be held at the European Parliament in April 2016. Yet, as a result of Browder’s intense pressure on the top management of ZDF, and a decision of a group of Green MEPs, the screening was dramatically cancelled, minutes before the planned starting time.”

It is difficult, as the mild-mannered journalist confessed, to consider that snub as “anything but censorship”.

The question that must be asked is obvious: how can the President of the EU Commission call to punish Russia when the cinematic work of a highly respected investigative journalist, who provides an alternative perspective to the Magnitsky case, is banned from viewing for EU MEPs due to the threat of legal action by Bill Browder? How can the West speak about “democracy” and the “rule of law” when only one side of the Magnitsky saga is allowed to go unchallenged? Why does Mr. Browder feel compelled to suppress this film? If he is telling the truth, why not let Neskrasov’s ‘false’ story see the light of day so that the facts can speak for themselves?

Andrei Neskarov’s letter ends as follows:

“Should you not be concerned that the findings of other European journalistic investigations [here, here and here] … while directly relevant to the Magnitsky question, have apparently failed to reach your high offices and your keen attention?

My film, “The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes”, ends with a question: “Will democracy survive if its moral high ground, human rights, is used to protect selfish interests?”

My film was censored, but I pose that question again today.

Yours truly,

Andrei Nekrasov

Nekrasov’s open letter to the President of the EU Commission can be read in its entirety here.

When compared to the leading hardcore Russophobes, Michael McFaul comes across more as being a diva, seeking to maintain a niche within the anti-Russian leaning US establishment. McFaul is on record for saying that he doesn't accept the notion that Russia is inherently prone to negative attributes and bad relations with the West. Given that view and the existing status quo of folks out there, he's arguably not a top ten Russophobe.

Bill Browder is considered a Russophobe by a twist of fate. Prior to his falling out of favor with the Russian authorities, Browder was characterized by some anti-Russian leaning elements as a Kremlin shill. Browder's main focus of criticism is the Russian president and government at large. As is true of McFaul, the available choices indicate that Browder is arguably not a top ten Russophobe.

Several names come to mind that IMO should make a top ten Russophobe list for 2018. Granted, the difficulty in choosing people for such, as there're numerous individuals worthy of consideration.

Whether in 2017 or this year, it's surprising that the outgoing Trump administration UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, didn't get a top Russophobe ranking by RT. During her time as UN ambassador, Haley has spoken about the need to slap Russia, adding that the US and Russia can never be friends.  

An acquaintance describes the Washington Examiner's Tom Rogan, as exhibiting the worst Anglo-American ignorance and arrogance against Russia. Rogan's often enough, unchallenged, Russia related commentary at some leading American media venues, is a tell all sign of US mass media shortcomings – when it comes to having a reasonably balanced presentation of views.

Rogan called for the Kiev regime to bomb the bridge linking Crimea with the rest of Russia. That advocacy of his received attention in Russia.

Rogan recently wrote a very inept piece on the situation with Orthodox Christianity in Ukraine. Whether he likes it or not, a noticeable number of people in the former Ukrainian SSR, don't oppose the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is loosely affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (ROC-MP). That established Ukrainian Orthodox Church (also known as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate, UOC-MP) didn't ask for the Kiev regime and/or the Constantinople (in Istanbul) Patriarchate to get involved with its matters. Note that the Washington Examiner appears to be otherwise prone to support the desire for a separation between church and state.

In conjunction with the Kiev regime, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (formed in 1992) that sought autocephaly approval from the Constantinople Patriarchate, is headed by Filaret Denisenko, who for decades supported the Moscow Patriarchate's ties with the Orthodox churches in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova. He changed course after not getting a promotion within the Moscow Patriarchate. A noticeable number of individuals in Kiev regime controlled Ukraine support Denisenko's changed position. That aspect doesn't deny the noticeable existence of those in that territory who support the UOC-MP.

The Constantinople Patriarchate doesn't have the same centralized authority as the Vatican. There's good reason to believe that some form of payola might be at play between the corrupt nationalist Kiev regime and the Constantinople Patriarchate. One is hard pressed to find any of the national Orthodox churches (recognized by the Constantinople Patriarchate) supporting the Constantinople Patriarchate's decision to grant autocephaly to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. If anything, there's a near unanimous to complete agreement of these national Orthodox churches, favoring the position of the UOC-MP and ROC-MP, to not have the Constantinople Patriarchate grant an autocephaly status to the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

Among the UOC-MP and ROC-MP faithful (as well as some others), there's a reasonable concern that the Kiev regime and Denisenko's church will use the Constantinople Patriarchate's decision as a basis to seize UOC-MP property. Further complicating matters is the existence of a third and smaller Ukrainian Orthodox Church, known as the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church.

Contrary to Rogan, the ROC-MP and Russian government aren't nationalistically interwoven with each other, in the way that he so very inaccurately suggests. Despite the Kremlin's recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, the ROC-MP recognizes Orthodox Christian property in these areas as being with the Georgian Orthodox Church. Likewise, the UOC-MP continues to maintain jurisdiction over Orthodox Christian property in Crimea, which is now part of Russia.

As I noted, the sports world has experienced a good deal of overtly anti-Russian advocacy. This situation leads to three individuals with top ten anti-Russian credentials.

Travis Tygart is a US legal sports politico, who has repeatedly sought a collective ban on all Russian athletes – something he has never collectively advocated against any other national group of athletes.

Sebastian Coe heads the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), that still has a ban on Russia, unlike the International Olympic Committee. In 2016, Coe actively sought to have Russian drug cheat turned "whistleblower", Yulia Stepanova compete in the Rio Summer Olympics, unlike the clean medal contending Russian track and field athletes, who were unfairly banned from that competition. Coe apparently approves of Stepanova uncritically participating in a German aired propaganda film, that made a broad unproven claim against Russia's top track and field athletes.

Rune Andersen serves under Coe at the IAAF. Andersen suggested the possibility of banning clean Russian track and field athletes from competing as neutrals, if the Russian sports authorities don't acknowledge all of the core claims made in the quite faulty McLaren report.

Photo: flickr

At the press conference following their summit meeting in Helsinki, Russian President Vladimir Putin and American President Donald Trump discussed the possibility of resolving potential criminal cases involving citizens of the two countries by permitting interrogators from Washington and Moscow to participate in joint questioning of the individuals named in indictments prepared by the respective judiciaries. The predictable response by the American nomenklatura was that it was a horrible idea as it would potentially require U.S. officials to answer questions from Russians about their activities.

Putin argued, not unreasonably, that if Washington wants to extradite and talk to any of the twelve recently indicted GRU officers the Justice Department has named then reciprocity is in order for Americans and other identified individuals who are wanted by the Russian authorities for illegal activity while in Russia. And if Russian officials are fair game, so are American officials.

A prime target for such an interrogation would be President Barack Obama’s Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who was widely criticized while in Moscow for being on an apparent mission to cultivate ties with the Russian political opposition and other “pro-democracy” groups. But McFaul was not specifically identified in the press conference, though Russian prosecutors have asked him to answer questions related to the ongoing investigation of another leading critic, Bill Browder, who was named by Putin during the question and answer session. Browder is a major hedge fund figure who, inter alia, is an American by birth. He renounced his U.S. citizenship in 1997 in exchange for British citizenship to avoid paying federal taxes on his worldwide income.

Bill Browder is what used to be referred to as an oligarch, having set up shop in 1999 as Hermitage Capital Management Fund, a hedge fund registered in tax havens Guernsey and the Cayman Islands. It focused on “investing” in Russia, taking advantage initially of the loans-for-shares scheme under Russia’s drunkard President Boris Yeltsin, and then continuing to profit greatly during the early years of Vladimir Putin. By 2005 Hermitage was the largest foreign investor in Russia.

Yeltsin had won a fraudulent election in 1996 supported by the oligarch-controlled media and by President Bill Clinton, who secured a $20.2 billion IMF loan that enabled him to buy support. Today we would refer to Clinton’s action as “interference in the 1996 election,” but at that time a helpless and bankrupt Russia was not well placed to object to what was being done to it. Yeltsin proved keen to follow oligarchical advice regarding how to strip the former Soviet Union of its vast state-owned assets. Browder’s Hermitage Investments profited hugely from the commodities deals that were struck at that time.

Browder and his apologists portray him as an honest and honorable Western businessman attempting to operate in a corrupt Russian business world. Nevertheless, the loans-for-shares scheme that made him his initial fortune has been correctly characterized as the epitome of corruption by all parties involved, an arrangement whereby foreign investors worked with local oligarchs to strip the former Soviet economy of its assets paying pennies on each dollar of value. Along the way, Browder was reportedly involved in money laundering, making false representations on official documents and bribery.

Browder was eventually charged by the Russian authorities for fraud and tax evasion. He was banned from re-entering Russia in 2005 and began to withdraw his assets from the country, but three companies controlled by Hermitage were eventually seized by the authorities. Browder himself was convicted of tax evasion in absentia in 2013 and sentenced to nine years in prison.

Browder, who refers to himself as Putin’s “public enemy #1,” has notably been able to sell his tale of innocence to leading American politicians like Senators John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Ben Cardin and ex-Senator Joe Lieberman, all of whom are always receptive when criticizing Russia, as well as to a number of European parliamentarians and media outlets. In the wake of the Helsinki press conference he has, for example, claimed that Putin named him personally because he is a threat to continue to expose the crimes of the mafia that he claims is currently running Russia, but there is, inevitably, another less discussed alternative view of his self-serving narrative.

Central to the tale of what Browder really represents is the Magnitsky Act, which the U.S. Congress passed into law to sanction individual Kremlin officials for their treatment of alleged whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, arrested and imprisoned in Russia. Browder has sold a narrative which basically says that he and his “lawyer” Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive tax fraud and, when they attempted to report it, were punished by a corrupt police force and magistracy, which had actually stolen the money. Magnitsky was arrested and died in prison, allegedly murdered by the police to silence him.

The Magnitsky case is of particular importance because both the European Union and the United States have initiated sanctions against the identified Russian officials who were allegedly involved. In the Magnitsky Act, sponsored by Russia-phobic Senator Ben Cardin and signed by President Barack Obama in 2012, the U.S. asserted its willingness to punish foreign governments for human rights abuses. The Act, initially limited to Russia, has now been expanded by virtue of 2016’s Global Magnitsky Act, which enabled U.S. sanctions worldwide.

Russia reacted angrily to the first iteration of the Act, noting that the actions taken by its government internally, notably the operation of its judiciary, were being subjected to outside interference, while other judicial authorities also questioned Washington’s claimed right to respond to criminal acts committed outside the United States. Moscow reciprocated with sanctions against U.S. officials as well as by increasing pressure on foreign non-governmental pro-democracy groups operating in Russia. Some have referred to the Magnitsky Act as the start of the new Cold War.

The contrary narrative to that provided by Browder concedes that there was indeed a huge fraud related to as much as $230 million in unpaid Russian taxes on an estimated $1.5 billion of income, but that it was not carried out by corrupt officials. Instead, it was deliberately ordered and engineered by Browder with Magnitsky, who was actually an accountant, personally developing and implementing the scheme, using multiple companies and tax avoidance schemes to carry out the deception. Magnitsky, who was on cardiac medication, was indeed arrested and convicted, but he, according to his own family, reportedly died due to his heart condition, possibly exacerbated by negligent authorities who failed to medicate him adequately when he became ill.

The two competing Browder narratives have been explored in some detail by a Russian documentary film maker Andrei Nekrasov, an outspoken anti-Putin activist, who was actually initially engaged by Browder to do the film. An affable Browder appears extensively in the beginning describing his career and the events surrounding Magnitsky.

As Nekrasov worked on the documentary, he discovered that the Browder supported narrative was full of contradictions, omissions and fabrication of evidence. By the time he finished, he realized that the more accurate account of what had occurred with Browder and Magnitsky had been that provided by the Russian authorities.

When Nekrasov prepared to air his work “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes,” he inevitably found himself confronted by billionaire Browder and a battery of lawyers, who together blocked the showing of the film in Europe and the United States. Anyone subsequently attempting to promote the documentary has been immediately confronted with 300 plus pages of supporting documents accompanying a letter threatening a lawsuit if the film were to be shown to the public.

A single viewing of “The Magnitsky Act” in Washington in June 2016 turned into a riot when Browder supporters used tickets given to Congressional staffers to disrupt the proceedings. At a subsequent hearing before Congress, where he was featured as an expert witness on Russian corruption before a fawning Senate Judiciary Committee, Bill Browder suggested that those who had challenged his narrative and arranged the film’s viewing in Washington should be prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which includes penalties of up to five years in prison.

Because of the pressure from Browder, there has never been a second public showing of “The Magnitsky Act” but it is possible to see it online at this site.

Bill Browder, who benefited enormously from Russian corruption, has expertly repackaged himself as a paragon among businessmen, endearing himself to the Russia-haters in Washington and the media. Curiously, however, he has proven reluctant to testify in cases regarding his own business dealings. He has, for example, repeatedly run away, literally, from attempts to subpoena him so he would have to testify under oath.

When one gets past all of his bluster and posturing, by one significant metric Bill Browder might well be accounted the most dangerous man in the world. Driven by extreme hatred of Putin and of Russia, he personally and his Magnitsky Myth have together done more to launch and sustain a dangerous new Cold War between a nuclear armed United States and a nuclear armed Russia. Blind to what he has accomplished, he continues to pontificate about how Putin is out to get him when instead he is the crook who quite likely stole $230 million dollars and should be facing the consequences. That the U.S. media and Congress appear to be entranced by Browder and dismissive of Moscow’s charges against him is symptomatic of just how far the Russia-phobia in the West has robbed people of their ability to see what is right in front of them. To suggest that what is taking place driven by Browder and his friends in high places could well lead to tragedy for all of us would be an understatement.

unz.com

Apart from search for a scapegoat to explain the Hillary Clinton defeat, how did it happen? Israel Shamir, a keen observer of the American-Russian relationship, and celebrated American journalist Robert Parry both think that one man deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War and that man is William Browder, a hedge fund operator who made his fortune in the corrupt 1990s world of Russian commodities trading.

Browder is also symptomatic of why the United States government is so poorly informed about international developments as he is the source of much of the Congressional “expert testimony” contributing to the current impasse. He has somehow emerged as a trusted source in spite of the fact that he has self-interest in cultivating a certain outcome. Also ignored is his renunciation of American citizenship in 1998, reportedly to avoid taxes. He is now a British citizen.

Browder is notoriously the man behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia and has done so much to poison relations between Washington and Moscow. The Act sanctioned individual Russian officials, which Moscow has rightly seen as unwarranted interference in the operation of its judicial system.

Browder, a media favorite who self-promotes as “Putin’s enemy #1,” portrays himself as a selfless human rights advocate, but is he? He has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. He claims that his accountant Sergei Magnitsky was a crusading “lawyer” who discovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme that involved the Browder business interest Hermitage Capital but was, in fact, engineered by corrupt Russian police officers who arrested Magnitsky and enabled his death in a Russian jail.

Many have been skeptical of the Browder narrative, suspecting that the fraud was in fact concocted by Browder and his accountant Magnitsky. A Russian court recently supported that alternative narrative, ruling in late December that Browder had deliberately bankrupted his company and engaged in tax evasion. He was sentenced to nine years prison in absentia.

William Browder is again in the news recently in connection with testimony related to Russiagate. On December 16th Senator Diane Feinstein of the Senate Judiciary Committee released the transcript of the testimony provided by Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS. According to James Carden, Browder was mentioned 50 times, but the repeated citations apparently did not merit inclusion in media coverage of the story by the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico.

Fusion GPS, which was involved in the research producing the Steele Dossier used to discredit Donald Trump, was also retained to provide investigative services relating to a lawsuit in New York City involving a Russian company called Prevezon. As information provided by Browder was the basis of the lawsuit, his company and business practices while in Russia became part of the investigation. Simmons maintained that Browder proved to be somewhat evasive and his accounts of his activities were inconsistent. He claimed never to visit the United States and not own property or do business there, all of which were untrue, to include his ownership through a shell company of a $10 million house in Aspen Colorado. He repeatedly ran away, literally, from attempts to subpoena him so he would have to testify under oath.

Per Simmons, in Russia, Browder used shell companies locally and also worldwide to avoid taxes and conceal ownership, suggesting that he was likely one of many corrupt businessmen operating in what was a wild west business environment. My question is, “Why was such a man granted credibility and allowed a free run to poison the vitally important US-Russia relationship?” The answer might be follow the money. Israel Shamir reports that Browder was a major contributor to Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, who was the major force behind the Magnitsky Act.

Why is the U.S. mainstream media so frightened of a documentary that debunks the beloved story of how “lawyer” Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive Russian government corruption and died as a result? If the documentary is as flawed as its critics claim, why won’t they let it be shown to the American public, then lay out its supposed errors, and use it as a case study of how such fakery works?

Instead we – in the land of the free, home of the brave – are protected from seeing this documentary produced by filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov who was known as a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin but who in this instance found the West’s widely accepted Magnitsky storyline to be a fraud.

Instead, last week, Senate Judiciary Committee members sat in rapt attention as hedge-fund operator William Browder wowed them with a reprise of his Magnitsky tale and suggested that people who have challenged the narrative and those who dared air the documentary one time at Washington’s Newseum last year should be prosecuted for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

It appears that Official Washington’s anti-Russia hysteria has reached such proportions that old-time notions about hearing both sides of a story or testing out truth in the marketplace of ideas must be cast aside. The new political/media paradigm is to shield the American people from information that contradicts the prevailing narratives, all the better to get them to line up behind Those Who Know Best.

Nekrasov’s powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth – and the film’s subsequent blacklisting throughout the “free world” – recall other instances in which the West’s propaganda lines don’t stand up to scrutiny, so censorship and ad hominem attacks become the weapons of choice to defend “perception management” narratives in geopolitical hot spots such as Iraq (2002-03), Libya (2011), Syria (2011 to the present), and Ukraine (2013 to the present).

But the Magnitsky myth has a special place as the seminal fabrication of the dangerous New Cold War between the nuclear-armed West and nuclear-armed Russia.

In the United States, Russia-bashing in The New York Times and other “liberal media” also has merged with the visceral hatred of President Trump, causing all normal journalistic standards to be jettisoned.

A Call for Prosecutions

Browder, the American-born co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management who is now a British citizen, raised the stakes even more when he testified that the people involved in arranging a one-time showing of Nekrasov’s documentary, “The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes,” at the Newseum should be held accountable under FARA, which has penalties ranging up to five years in prison.

Browder testified: “As part of [Russian lawyer Natalie] Veselnitskaya’s lobbying, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Chris Cooper of the Potomac Group, was hired to organize the Washington, D.C.-based premiere of a fake documentary about Sergei Magnitsky and myself. This was one the best examples of Putin’s propaganda.

“They hired Howard Schweitzer of Cozzen O’Connor Public Strategies and former Congressman Ronald Dellums to lobby members of Congress on Capitol Hill to repeal the Magnitsky Act and to remove Sergei’s name from the Global Magnitsky bill. On June 13, 2016, they funded a major event at the Newseum to show their fake documentary, inviting representatives of Congress and the State Department to attend.

“While they were conducting these operations in Washington, D.C., at no time did they indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests, nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act. United States law is very explicit that those acting on behalf of foreign governments and their interests must register under FARA so that there is transparency about their interests and their motives.

“Since none of these people registered, my firm wrote to the Department of Justice in July 2016 and presented the facts. I hope that my story will help you understand the methods of Russian operatives in Washington and how they use U.S. enablers to achieve major foreign policy goals without disclosing those interests.”

Browder’s Version

While he loosely accused a number of Americans of felonies, Browder continued to claim that Magnitsky was a crusading “lawyer” who uncovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme carried out ostensibly by Browder’s companies but, which, according to Browder’s account, was really engineered by corrupt Russian police officers who then arrested Magnitsky and later were responsible for his death in a Russian jail.

Browder’s narrative has received a credulous hearing by Western politicians and media already inclined to think the worst of Putin’s Russia and willing to treat Browder’s claims as true without serious examination. However, beyond the self-serving nature of Browder’s tale, there are many holes in the story, including whether Magnitsky was really a principled lawyer or instead a complicit accountant.

According to Browder’s own biographical description of Magnitsky, he received his education at the Plekhanov Institute in Moscow, a reference to Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, a school for finance and business, not a law school.

(In response to my queries about Magnitsky’s professional standing, Leonid N. Dobrokhotov, a professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University, wrote to me on Aug. 4 that Magnitsky had graduated from Plekhanov in 1993 with a specialty in “Finance and Credit” and later worked as an auditor or certified public accountant in a tax consulting firm. “He had never been a lawyer in his life time,” Dobrokhotov wrote.)

Nevertheless, the West’s mainstream media – relying on the word of Browder – has accepted Magnitsky’s standing as a “lawyer,” which apparently fits better in the narrative of Magnitsky as a crusading corruption fighter rather than a potential co-conspirator with Browder in a complex fraud, as the Russian government has alleged.

Magnitsky’s mother also has described her son as an accountant, although telling Nekrasov in the documentary “he wasn’t just an accountant; he was interested in lots of things.” In the film, the “lawyer” claim is also disputed by a female co-worker who knew Magnitsky well. “He wasn’t a lawyer,” she said.

In other words, on this high-profile claim repeated by Browder again and again, it appears that presenting Magnitsky as a “lawyer” is a convenient falsehood that buttresses the Magnitsky myth, which Browder constructed after Magnitsky’s death from heart failure while in pre-trial detention.

But the Magnitsky myth took off in 2012 when Browder sold his tale to neocon Senators Ben Cardin, D-Maryland, and John McCain, R-Arizona, who threw their political weight behind a bipartisan drive in Congress leading to the passage of the Magnitsky sanctions act, the opening shot in the New Cold War.

A Planned Docudrama

Browder’s dramatic story also attracted the attention of Russian filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, a well-known critic of Putin from previous films. Nekrasov set out to produce a docudrama that would share Browder’s good-vs.-evil narrative to a wider public.

Nekrasov devotes the first half hour of the film to allowing Browder to give his Magnitsky account illustrated by scenes from Nekrasov’s planned docudrama. In other words, the viewer gets to see a highly sympathetic portrayal of Browder and Magnitsky as supposedly corrupt Russian authorities bring charges of tax fraud against them.

However, Nekrasov’s documentary project takes an unexpected turn when his research turns up numerous contradictions to Browder’s storyline, which begins to look more and more like a corporate cover story. For instance, Magnitsky’s mother blames the negligence of prison doctors for her son’s death rather than a beating by prison guards as Browder had pitched to Western audiences.

Nekrasov also discovered that a woman who had worked in Browder’s company blew the whistle before Magnitsky talked to police and that Magnitsky’s original interview with authorities was as a suspect, not a whistleblower. Also contradicting Browder’s claims, Nekrasov notes that Magnitsky doesn’t even mention the names of the police officers in a key statement to authorities.

When one of the Browder-accused police officers, Pavel Karpov, filed a libel suit against Browder in London, the case was dismissed on technical grounds because Karpov had no reputation in Great Britain to slander. But the judge seemed sympathetic to the substance of Karpov’s complaint.

Browder claimed vindication before adding an ironic protest given his successful campaign to prevent Americans and Europeans from seeing Nekrasov’s documentary.

“These people tried to shut us up; they tried to stifle our freedom of expression,” Browder complained. “[Karpov] had the audacity to come here and sue us, paying high-priced libel lawyers to come and terrorize us in the U.K.”

The ‘Kremlin Stooge’ Slur

A pro-Browder account published at the Daily Beast on July 25 – attacking Nekrasov and his documentary – is entitled “How an Anti-Putin Filmmaker Became a Kremlin Stooge,” a common slur used in the West to discredit and silence anyone who dares question today’s Russia-hating groupthink.

The article by Katie Zavadski accuses Nekrasov of being in the tank for the Kremlin and declares that “The movie is so flattering to the Russian narrative that Pavel Karpov — one of the police officers accused of being responsible for Magnitsky’s death — plays himself.”

But that’s not true. In fact, there is a scene in the documentary in which Nekrasov invites the actor who plays Karpov in the docudrama segment to sit in on an interview with the real Karpov. There’s even a clumsy moment when the actor and police officer bump into a microphone as they shake hands, but Zavadski’s falsehood would not be apparent unless you had somehow gotten access to the documentary, which has been effectively banned in the West.

In the documentary, Karpov, the police officer, accuses Browder of lying about him and specifically contests the claim that he (Karpov) used his supposedly ill-gotten gains to buy an expensive apartment in Moscow. Karpov came to the interview with documents showing that the flat was pre-paid in 2004-05, well before the alleged hijacking of Browder’s firms.

Karpov added wistfully that he had to sell the apartment to pay for his failed legal challenge in London, which he said he undertook in an effort to clear his name. “Honor costs a lot sometimes,” the police officer said.

Karpov also explained that the investigations of Browder’s tax fraud started well before the Magnitsky controversy, with an examination of a Browder company in 2004.

“Once we opened the investigation, a campaign in defense of an investor started,” Karpov said. “Having made billions here, Browder forgot to tell how he did it. So it suits him to pose as a victim. … Browder and company are lying blatantly and constantly.”

However, since virtually no one in the West has seen this interview, you can’t make your own judgment as to whether Karpov is credible or not.

A Painful Recognition

Yet, in reviewing the case documents and noting Browder’s inaccurate claims about the chronology, Nekrasov finds his own doubts growing. He discovers that European officials simply accepted Browder’s translations of Russian documents, rather than checking them independently. A similar lack of skepticism prevailed in the United States.

In other words, a kind of trans-Atlantic groupthink took hold with clear political benefits for those who went along and almost no one willing to risk the accusation of being a “Kremlin stooge” by showing doubt.

As the documentary proceeds, Browder starts avoiding Nekrasov and his more pointed questions. Finally, Nekrasov hesitantly confronts the hedge-fund executive at a party for Browder’s book, Red Notice, about the Magnitsky case.

The easygoing Browder of the early part of the documentary — as he lays out his seamless narrative without challenge — is gone; instead, a defensive and angry Browder appears.

“It’s bullshit,” Browder says when told that his presentations of the documents are false.

But Nekrasov continues to find more contradictions and discrepancies. He discovers evidence that Browder’s web site eliminated an earlier chronology that showed that in April 2008, a 70-year-old woman named Rimma Starova, who had served as a figurehead executive for Browder’s companies, reported the theft of state funds.

Nekrasov then shows how Browder’s narrative was changed to introduce Magnitsky as the whistleblower months later, although he was then described as an “analyst,” not yet a “lawyer.”

As Browder’s story continues to unravel, the evidence suggests that Magnitsky was an accountant implicated in manipulating the books, not a crusading lawyer risking everything for the truth.

A Heated Confrontation

In the documentary, Nekrasov struggles with what to do next, given Browder’s financial and political clout. Finally securing another interview, Nekrasov confronts Browder with the core contradictions of his story. Incensed, the hedge-fund executive rises up and threatens the filmmaker.

“I’d be very careful going out and trying to do a whole sort of thing about Sergei [Magnitsky] not being the whistleblower, it won’t do well for your credibility on this show,” Browder said. “This is sort of the subtle FSB version,” suggesting that Nekrasov was just fronting for the Russian intelligence service.

In the pro-Browder account published at the Daily Beast on July 25, Browder described how he put down Nekrasov by telling him, “it sounds like you’re part of the FSB. … Those are FSB questions.”

But that phrasing is not what he actually says in the documentary, raising further questions about whether the Daily Beast reporter actually watched the film or simply accepted Browder’s account of it. (I posed that question to the Daily Beast’s Katie Zavadski by email, but have not gotten a reply.)

The documentary also includes devastating scenes from depositions of a sullen and uncooperative Browder and a U.S. government investigator, who acknowledges relying on Browder’s narrative and documents in a related case against Russian businesses.

In an April 15, 2015 deposition of Browder, he, in turn, describes relying on reports from journalists to “connect the dots,” including the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which is funded by the U.S. government and financial speculator George Soros. Browder said the reporters “worked with our team.”

While taking money from the U.S. Agency for International Development and Soros, the OCCRP also targeted Ukraine’s elected President Viktor Yanukovych with accusations of corruption prior to the Feb. 22, 2014 coup that ousted Yanukovych, an overthrow that was supported by the U.S. State Department and escalated the New Cold War with Russia.

OCCRP played a key role, too, in the so-called Panama Papers, purloined documents from a Panamanian law firm that were used to develop attack lines against Russian President Vladimir Putin although his name never appeared in the documents.

After examining the money-movement charts published by OCCRP about the Magnitsky case, Nekrasov notes that the figures don’t add up and wonders how journalists could “peddle these wooly maths.” He also observed that OCCRP’s Panama Papers linkage of Magnitsky’s $230 million fraud and payments to an ally of Putin made no sense because the dates of the Panama Papers transactions preceded the dates of the alleged Magnitsky fraud.

The Power of Myth

Nekrasov suggests that the power of Browder’s convoluted story rested, in part, on a Hollywood perception of Moscow as a place where evil Russians lurk around every corner and any allegation against “corrupt” officials is believed. The Magnitsky tale “was like a film script about Russia written for the Western audience,” Nekrasov says.

But the Browder’s narrative also served a strong geopolitical interest to demonize Russia at the dawn of the New Cold War.

In the documentary’s conclusion, Nekrasov sums up what he had discovered: “A murdered hero as an alibi for living suspects.” He then ponders the danger to democracy: “So do we allow graft and greed to hide behind a political sermon? Will democracy survive if human rights — its moral high ground — is used to protect selfish interests?”

But Americans and Europeans are being spared the discomfort of having to answer that question or to question their representatives about the failure to skeptically examine this case that has pushed the planet on a course toward a possible nuclear war.

Instead, the mainstream Western media has hurled insults at Nekrasov even as his documentary is blocked from any significant public viewing.

Despite Browder’s professed concern about the London libel case that he claimed was an attempt “to stifle our freedom of expression,” he has sicced his lawyers on anyone who might be thinking about showing Nekrasov’s documentary to the public.

The documentary was set for a premiere at the European Parliament in Brussels in April 2016, but at the last moment – faced with Browder’s legal threats – the parliamentarians pulled the plug. Nekrasov encountered similar resistance in the United States. There were hopes to show the documentary to members of Congress but the offer was rebuffed. Instead a room was rented at the Newseum near Capitol Hill.

Browder’s lawyers then tried to strong arm the Newseum, but its officials responded that they were only renting out a room and that they had allowed other controversial presentations in the past.

“We’re not going to allow them not to show the film,” said Scott Williams, the Newseum’s chief operating officer. “We often have people renting for events that other people would love not to have happen.”

In an article about the controversy in June 2016, The New York Times added that “A screening at the Newseum is especially controversial because it could attract lawmakers or their aides.”

One-Time Showing

So, Nekrasov’s documentary got a one-time showing with a follow-up discussion moderated by journalist Seymour Hersh. However, except for that audience, the public of the United States and Europe has been essentially shielded from the documentary’s discoveries, all the better for the Magnitsky myth to retain its power as a seminal propaganda moment of the New Cold War.

After the Newseum presentation, a Washington Post editorial branded Nekrasov’s documentary Russian “agit-prop” and sought to discredit Nekrasov without addressing his many documented examples of Browder’s misrepresenting both big and small facts in the case.

Instead, the Post accused Nekrasov of using “facts highly selectively” and insinuated that he was merely a pawn in the Kremlin’s “campaign to discredit Mr. Browder and the Magnitsky Act.”

Like the recent Daily Beast story, which falsely claimed that Nekrasov let the Russian police officer Karpov play himself, the Post misrepresented the structure of the film by noting that it mixed fictional scenes with real-life interviews and action, a point that was technically true but willfully misleading because the fictional scenes were from Nekrasov’s original idea for a docudrama that he shows as part of explaining his evolution from a believer in Browder’s self-exculpatory story to a skeptic.

But the Post’s deception – like the Daily Beast’s falsehood – is something that almost no American would realize because almost no one has gotten to see the film.

The Post’s editorial gloated: “The film won’t grab a wide audience, but it offers yet another example of the Kremlin’s increasingly sophisticated efforts to spread its illiberal values and mind-set abroad. In the European Parliament and on French and German television networks, showings were put off recently after questions were raised about the accuracy of the film, including by Magnitsky’s family.

“We don’t worry that Mr. Nekrasov’s film was screened here, in an open society. But it is important that such slick spin be fully exposed for its twisted story and sly deceptions.”

The Post’s arrogant editorial had the feel of something you might read in a totalitarian society where the public only hears about dissent when the Official Organs of the State denounce some almost unknown person for saying something that almost no one heard.

It is also unlikely that Americans and Europeans will get a chance to view this blacklisted documentary in the future. In an email exchange, the film’s Norwegian producer Torstein Grude told me that “We have been unsuccessful in releasing the film to TV so far. ZDF/Arte [a major European network] pulled it from transmission a few days before it was supposed to be aired and the other broadcasters seem scared as a result. Netflix has declined to take it. …

“The film has no other release at the moment. Distributors are scared by Browder’s legal threats. All involved financiers, distributors, producers received thick stacks of legal documents (300+ pages) threatening lawsuits should the film be released.” [Grude sent me a special password so I could view the documentary on Vimeo.]

The blackout continues even though the Magnitsky issue and Nekrasov’s documentary have become elements in the recent controversy over a meeting between a Russian lawyer and Donald Trump Jr. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth.”]

So much for the West’s vaunted belief in freedom of expression and the democratic goal of encouraging freewheeling debates about issues of great public importance. And, so much for the Post’s empty rhetoric about our “open society.”

consortiumnews.com

The neo-cons and globalists have regrouped in order to fight against both Russia and the incoming U.S. President Donald Trump. With the departure of arch-neocons Victoria Nuland from her perch in the State Department, Samantha Power from the U.S. mission to the United Nations, and Susan Rice from the National Security Council, the neocon and globalist establishments, which have in common their Atlanticist views, have settled on Canada as the ideal place from which to wage their wars of subterfuge and propaganda.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fired his foreign minister Stephane Dion to make way for an ideological doppelganger for Nuland, Power, and Rice on the world stage: Chrystia Freeland, his trade minister. Dion's policy of seeking to engage with Russia is what ultimately cost him his job as Ottawa prepares to host every anti-Trump instability operation it can muster for future operations against the Trump administration.

Freeland, who is of Ukrainian descent, became a darling of the globalists after she hammered out a free trade agreement with the European Union last year. A frustrated Freeland leaned heavily on the one holdout to the deal, the regional government of Wallonia in Belgium. Even after it was announced that the Wallonian government dropped its reservations to the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), the Belgian central government reneged on a deal with the Wallonians that would have required the EU Court of Justice review the agreement before the final accession by Brussels.

Freeland also oversaw the signing of the Canada-Ukraine Free Trade Agreement with the neo-fascist government in Kiev. Steeped in the corporatism and globalism of Canadian Liberal Party doctrine, Freeland is of the view that regional governments, whether they are in Wallonia, Crimea, or Quebec, have no right to self-determination. This behavior is at the root of corporate globalist ideology. Freeland’s fellow Liberals in Quebec have neutered the Quebec sovereignty movement. However, if French National Front presidential candidate Marine Le Pen is victorious in this year’s election, France can breathe new life into the Quebec independence movement, much as President Charles de Gaulle did in Montreal in 1967 with his famous «Vive le Quebec Libre!» speech.

With the appointment of Freeland as foreign minister and Somali-born Ahmed Hussen as Immigration Minister, Trudeau has drawn a red line against Trump on the twin issues of globalization and open borders migration. Ottawa will soon become a nest for anti-Trump operations that will almost certainly involve the billionaire global troublemaker George Soros.

Like Power, Freeland is a former journalist who traded in her journalistic credentials to become a shill for globalization's new world order. A Rhodes scholar, graduate of Harvard, and alum of the Brookings Institution, she represented the Financial Times in Washington, New York, and Moscow.

Freeland’s anti-Russian stance, including her support for sanctions against Russia over Ukraine and Crimea, earned her a visa ban from the Russian government. During her final months in Moscow for the FT, Freeland became a major critic of the new administration of President Putin and accused him of creating a dictatorship in Russia. Before heading the FT’s Moscow bureau, Freeland’s Russophobia was honed during her time as a reporter in Kiev. In fact, Freeland's bias against Russia has always been present in her reporting. Freeland’s closest friends cross party lines in Canada and they include the Liberal Party’s Zionist overseer, Irwin Cotler; Paul Grod, the president of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress; and Conservative Party foreign affairs spokesman Peter Kent.

In one of her first statements as foreign minister, Freeland vowed that Canadian sanctions will not be lifted against Russia. On January 10, 2017, Freeland vowed that Canada will serve as a front against rising global «trade protectionism and xenophobia». That was a clear warning to Trump in Washington, Marine Le Pen, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and UK Independence Party politician Nigel Farage. In December 2016, Canada hosted a meeting of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and Soros's Open Society Foundations that seeks to expand the movement of refugees from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia to the industrialized nations of the West. There is little doubt that Russophobes Freeland and Soros are cooperating on several fronts against both Russia and Trump.

Europe’s ankle-biting small powers are ecstatic that the Trudeau government has placed a Russophobe in charge of Canada’s foreign relations. Freeland has made no secret of her aim to influence the Trump administration to change course on Russia. She has bragged about her «wide network of contacts» in Washington and she claims she has experience working the «power corridors» in the U.S. Congress, State Department, and White House. The Ukrainian ambassador in Ottawa, Andriy Shevchenko, hopes that Freeland will «educate» the Trump administration on maintaining political and economic pressure on Russia. The Latvian ambassador in Ottawa, Karlis Eihenbaums, views Ottawa as the launch point for a de facto NATO «influence operations» campaign in Washington to derail closer U.S.-Russian relations.

Freeland showed her intentions toward Trump and Putin when she met at the recent Davos Economic Summit in Switzerland with U.S. financier William Browder, the figure at the center of a massive fraud scheme in Russia involving his Guernsey-based company, Heritage Financial Management. Browder, the grandson of the one-time leader of the U.S. Communist Party Earl Browder, is, like fellow fraudster Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a fierce critic of the Russian government and President Putin.

From Ottawa, Freeland will lead the neocon and globalist charge against any attempt by Trump to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She will almost certainly try to salvage the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which includes Canada and which Trump has vowed to scrap. Freeland will also likely open up Canada's Arctic to a military presence by anti-Russian NATO countries like Norway, Denmark, and Germany, as well as pro-NATO Sweden and Finland. An increased NATO presence, without U.S. forces, in the Canadian Arctic will not only militarize the region but send a warning to Russia about Canadian control over emerging Arctic sea lanes that are increasingly navigable due to climate change.

With Ottawa becoming a center for anti-Trump and anti-Russian activities, the world can expect a chill to set in between Canada and the United States. If Trump begins to view Canada as a source for anti-Trump operations, the U.S. border with Mexico may not be the only flash point in North American politics.

Obama and Clinton began pressing for sanctions against Russia after the 2009 death of Russian auditor Sergei Magnitsky. Under Clinton, the State Department, along with the U.S. Treasury Department, began drawing up a list of Russian officials to be sanctioned for the 2009 death in prison of Magnitsky, a less-than-sympathetic figure who was involved with a sketchy firm called Hermitage Capital Management.

Hermitage was under investigation by the Russian government for failure to pay taxes. Magnitsky was an auditor for the Firestone Duncan law firm, which was founded in Moscow in 1993 by two Americans. Hermitage had retained Firestone Duncan as its tax advisory firm and Magnitsky was assigned to conduct audits for Hermitage.

How could a tax evading U.S. investment firm in Moscow, co-founded by Bill Browder, the grandson of Earl Browder, the former leader of the Communist Party USA, obtain the personal interest of Hillary Clinton? It turns out that Hermitage Capital Management was a donor to the Clinton Foundation, which is at the center of a huge pay-to-play influence-peddling scandal during Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State.

It is noteworthy that Earl Browder was treated kindly during the anti-Communist Red Scare days of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Browder was never prosecuted for espionage and he was expelled from the American Communist Party because he was not deemed trustworthy by his comrades. Current Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan, whose fingerprints are all over sanctions imposed on Russian leaders, admitted that in 1976 he voted for Browder’s successor as general secretary of the Communist Party USA, Gus Hall.

In fact, the American Communists were so riddled with CIA and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents that Brennan’s admission should not come as news to anyone. Nor should it be a shock that the CIA might be willing to engage the services of Browder’s grandson in Moscow. The Magnitsky Act, which appears to have more to do with attempting regime change in Russia, was directed against Russian law enforcement officials, prosecutors, and judges.

After the Obama-Clinton team enacted regime changes in North Africa and the Middle East, further sanctions were drawn up against the soon-to-be-ousted leaders of Tunisia and Libya. The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) issued a warning for banks to be in the lookout for money transfers from ousted Tunisian President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali and former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and their families.

After the commencement of the U.S.-led rebellion against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, the U.S. applied sanctions against Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, his family, and senior Libyan officials, as well as the Qaddafi International Charity and Development Foundation. Perhaps had the Qaddafi Foundation made a sizeable donation to the Clinton Foundation, as had Hermitage Capital, the Qaddafi family may have received a slight degree of consideration from Clinton at the State Department. However, after Qaddafi’s brutal assassination by U.S.-supported jihadist rebels in Sirte, Mrs. Clinton cackled with laughter, saying, «We came, we saw, he died!» Billions of dollars of Libyan assets were frozen by the Obama administration.

After the start of the Syrian civil war, Washington applied sweeping sanctions on the Syrian leadership, including President Bashar al-Assad and his family and top Syrian officials. Recently, as Washington found its jihadist allies losing on the battlefield in Syria, calls for increased sanctions against Assad and his government ministers and other officials grew louder from the «human rights» chorus aligned with Obama and Mrs. Clinton.

The U.S.-instigated and Saudi-backed regime change in Yemen and the subsequent civil war in the nation saw the U.S. apply sanctions against Abdul Malik al-Houthi, the leader of the Yemeni Zaidi sect of Islam, and former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and his son Ahmed Ali Saleh.

Under Mrs. Clinton’s term at the State Department, more «themed revolutions» were planned for Europe. The 2014 Euromaidan revolt in Kiev was partly the brainchild of Mrs. Clinton’s press spokesperson Victoria Nuland, who, upon Mrs. Clinton’s recommendation, became Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs under Secretary of State John Kerry in 2012.

After the retrocession of Crimea back to Russia and the declaration of sovereignty of eastern Ukraine’s republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, further U.S. sanctions, including asset freezes and visa bans, were applied against both Russian officials and officials of Crimea, Lugansk, and Donetsk, as well as former officials of the ousted Ukrainian government of democratically-elected President Viktor Yanukovych. U.S. sanctions also targeted the Russian firms Transneft, Lukoil, Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Surgutneftegas, Rostec and Sberbank. These were in addition to visa bans previously imposed against officials of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria.

The Obama administration also drew up plans to enact sanctions, including asset freezes and visa bans, against the democratically-elected governments of Macedonia and the Bosnian Serb Republic for daring to resist U.S. calls for regime change.

Iranian leaders and businesses had already experienced their share of punitive U.S. sanctions, all of which were encouraged by the Israeli-controlled neo-conservative machine in Washington that continued to call the shots after George W. Bush left office. Additional sanctions were imposed by Washington against members of the family of the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez.

At the same time the Obama-Clinton clique sanctioned leaders from Russia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa, Obama continued to maintain warm relations with some of Africa’s most brutal dictators. Displaying naked racism for all the world to see, Obama never brought up «human rights» as Gambia’s dictator announced the death penalty against gays, declared his country to be an Islamic state, and imposed Islamic sharia law. Nor was there any criticism as Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Rwandan President Paul Kagame continued to oppress the political opposition in their countries and support secessionist rebels in neighboring Congo. In fact, Obama sent U.S. military troops to Uganda to oppress Christians and support Muslim jihadists in the neighboring Central African Republic.

Obama also supported kleptocratic regimes in Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Togo, and Burkina Faso. The issue of sanctioning black African leaders, with the exception of Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe and his government and parastatal institutions and Eritrean president Isaias Afwerki, never arose under Obama’s administration. It is also now known that a number of African nations that avoided U.S. sanctions for human rights violations were involved with the Clinton Foundation as donors or recipients. These included Nigeria, Lesotho, Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Malawi, Gabon, Burkina Faso, Chad, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Liberia, Zambia, and Tanzania.

Obama and Mrs. Clinton will go down in history of singling out for «human rights» violations largely white European or Middle Eastern/North African Caucasian leaders and applying sanctions against them. However, when it came to some of black Africa’s worst human rights violators, Obama and the aspiring next president of the United States gave them a free pass.

Magnitsky’s chief sponsor in the Senate was Democratic Senator Benjamin Cardin from Maryland, a leading member of the pro-Israel caucus in Congress. A Magnitsky-type bill has been introduced in Canada by Liberal Party Member of Parliament Irwin Cotler, another leading pro-Israeli politician. Cardin and Cotler are both Jewish. A Magnitsky law has also been introduced in the British Parliament. The British sponsor is Conservative MP Dominic Raab, who is also Jewish. British co-sponsors include former foreign secretaries Malcolm Rifkind, Jack Straw, and David Miliband, all Jewish. The pattern and reasoning behind the Magnitsky legislation is clear.

The Magnitsky Act bans a list of Russian officials and businessmen from entering the United States or having American bank accounts or owning property in America. The Magnitsky list can also be extended to cover other Russian nationals and there have been calls by the neo-conservative Zionist power circles in Washington to extend the list to Russian President Vladimir Putin and members of the Russian State Duma.

During the Cold War, the Israel Lobby wanted the United States to pressure the then-Soviet Union into granting Soviet Jews the right to emigrate from the Soviet Union to Israel – although many ultimately ended up in the United States directly or via Israel. It was pushed through by the Cold War hawk from Washington State, Senator Henry «Scoop» Jackson, whose senatorial office gave rise to such ardent anti-Soviet neo-conservative officials of the Ronald Reagan administration as Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith. Although Jackson-Vanik applied to all non-market economies, it was specifically targeted against the emigration policies of the USSR, although, in 2005, Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman attempted to invoke provisions of the act against Ukraine for anti-Semitic acts in the country.

Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, Jackson-Vanik required the United States to annually certify Russia’s human rights record in order to enjoy another year of trade links with the United States.

Sergei Magnitsky, for whom the American act is named, was a lawyer for Firestone Duncan, a Moscow law firm that represented Hermitage Capital Management co-founded in 1996 by Edmond Safra and Bill Browder, the grandson of the General Secretary of the Communist Party USA Earl Browder. Hermitage was once Russia’s largest foreign portfolio hedge fund. Bill Browder previously worked at the Israel-connected Boston Consulting Group, which once employed Binyamin Netanyahu and Mitt Romney during the same time frame. Hermitage stood charged with violating Russian tax laws and Magnitsky was imprisoned for eleven months of pre-trial detention and died in a Moscow prison on November 16, 2009 after suffering what authorities described as a heart attack. Magnitsky was accused of helping Hermitage defraud Russian tax authorities.

Magnitsky used phantom companies, holding companies, and tax haven firms to hide money. The firms extended from Vladivostok in the Russian Far East to Ukraine, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Cyprus, Belize, British Virgin Islands, United Kingdom, and Dubai. One of the front companies, Prevezon Holdings, Ltd., was 99 percent owned by Israeli «businessman» Denis Katsyv, and 1 percent owned by Martash Investment Holdings Ltd. of the British Virgin Islands, also owned by Katsyv. The Katsyv family has been investigated for the bank laundering scandal involving Israel’s Bank Hapoalim and Mafia figure Lev Leviev. Although the Magnitsky Act applies to anyone who benefitted from Magnitsky’s death, Katsyv owns millions of dollars in New York real estate and conducts Hermitage-related business from Manhattan. The Magnitsky Act apparently has a «Jewish exception» clause.

Browder was expelled from Russia in 2005 as a national security threat. Hermitage co-founder, the wealthy Brazilian-Lebanese Jew Safra, died in 1999 as a result of a mysterious fire at his residence in Monte Carlo that was later ruled an arson attack.

Browder’s grandfather willingly testified against the activities of the American Communist Party before the Senator Joseph McCarthy Communist «witch hunt» hearings and in 1957 told CBS News’s Mike Wallace that «Getting thrown out of the Communist Party was the best thing that ever happened to me». In the 1950s, there were more FBI informants in the American Communist Party than there were loyal party members.

Only four Russians on the 60-person Magnitsky List were associated with the prison where Magnitsky died. The remainder includes prosecutors and investigators for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Federal Security Bureau agents, officials of the tax and economic crimes office, judges, and officials from the Republic of Tatarstan. In fact, by putting some 56 Russian law enforcement and judicial authorities on a U.S. banishment list, the only beneficiary is the ubiquitous Russian-Israeli Mafia that has taken over most organized crime activity from Brooklyn to Tel Aviv and Miami to Los Angeles. Russian Jewish Mafiosi crime figures can now rest assured that they won’t have Russian federal law enforcement and tax authorities peeking into their business activities in the United States because the presence of those officials has been banned by President Barack Obama and Congress. Washington precipitously acted on behalf of Russian-Israeli crime figures who travel unchallenged between London, Washington, Tel Aviv, Geneva, and Riga.

Russia responded to the Magnitsky Act by passing its own retaliatory version that not only puts American officials on a banned list but prohibits the adoption of Russian children by American families. It should be pointed out that the Russian-Israeli Mafiosi has become instrumental in the trafficking of children for all sorts of purposes, including the legal but unsavory adoption industry and illegal sex slave trafficking and human organ harvesting. Some U.S. adoptions of Russian children, arranged through fly-by-night criminal enterprises, have resulted in cases of child abuse being committed by the American parents.

Wariness by other countries of America’s unsavory record on foreign adoptions has not only resulted in Russia implementing restrictions on U.S. adoptions but moves have been made by China, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Belarus, South Korea, Cambodia, Georgia, Romania, Philippines, Ukraine, Sierra Leone, and Thailand to restrict or ban foreign adoptions.

Even during the dark days of Jackson-Vanik, the Russian-Israeli Mafia attempted to game the system. Because of trade sanctions against the USSR and Eastern Europe, American-Israeli Mafiosi figures like fugitive businessman Marc Rich engaged in barter transactions with the Soviets. Barter had other business-oriented names such as «counter trade», «counter-purchase», «compensation», «reciprocal trading», and «parallel transactions». Trade sanctions were by-passed through such barter agreements using counter-trade experts employed by some of the world’s largest banks, including Citicorp, European American Bank, Credit Lyonnais, and Creditanstalt Bankverein. And Rich made a fortune in the counter-trade world by inking lucrative agreements with not only the Soviet Union but also trade sanctioned encumbered Islamic Revolutionary Iran and apartheid South Africa. President Clinton pardoned Rich in an eleventh hour decision before leaving the White House in 2001. Because of Rich’s friends in Tel Aviv, he came off the U.S. government’s criminal «list» as fast as he went on it. Such is the value of American «lists».

Not only are there calls for the U.S. to expand the Magnitsky List to include senior Russian government officials, including those responsible for the prosecution of billionaire tax evader Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another darling of the pro-Israeli Lobby in America, but there is a move for the European Union to adopt its own Magnitsky Act. Barring Russian law enforcement and tax agents from the EU would be yet another god send to the Russian-Israeli Mafia, which wants unfettered business opportunities throughout the EU, even up to Russia’s borders with the Baltic States, Poland, and Finland. The Magnitsky Act was crafted by the Israel Lobby in the United States for the exploitation of the Russian-Israeli Mafia’s illicit activities around the world, all aided and abetted by a criminally-run regime in Jerusalem. The recent indictment of Israeli-Moldovan ex-night club bouncer and former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is a testament to Israel’s undeniable underworld links.