To understand the roots of the collusion, set aside Putin and follow the money.”
That’s what Seva Gunitsky, a politics professor at the University of Toronto and the author of Aftershocks, told me in a recent interview. I reached out to Gunitsky on Monday after he posted a short but incisive thread on Twitter about the financial roots of the Trump-Russia collusion case.
Gunitsky, who was raised in Russia, has followed the evolving relationship between Donald Trump and Russia for more than a decade. He says the prevailing narrative about Putin interfering in the American election in order to undermine democracy is wildly overstated.
Putin is happy to sow confusion and distrust in America’s system, of course, but to assume that’s the basis of this operation is to overlook a much simpler motive: money.
The financial connections between Trump and various Russian banks and oligarchs (business elites with ties to the Kremlin) stretch back decades, which is likely a big reason why Trump won’t release his tax returns. Trump’s election, Gunitsky contends, presented Russian oligarchs with an opportunity to recoup losses and leverage Trump’s debts for political gain.
I asked Gunitsky to lay it out for me as clearly as possible, and to explain the financial dealings between Trump and his Russian business partners.
New York Times Sunday Book Review, 18th March 2015:
The grandson of the head of the American Communist Party commits the ultimate act of rebellion: He gets a business degree from Stanford. From there, he goes on to build the biggest hedge fund in Russia. After exposing widespread government corruption, he gets expelled from the country. While he’s gone, the Kremlin raids his fund and perpetrates an elaborate financial fraud. The lawyer investigating the crime is tortured and dies in prison. He avenges his lawyer’s death, exposing a cover-up at the highest levels of the Putin regime.
Here’s the craziest part: It’s all true, as told by that Stanford M.B.A., Bill Browder, in his new memoir, “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice.” It’s a riveting account — and really, how could it not be? — marred only by Browder’s perhaps justifiable but nevertheless grating sense of self-importance.
A cocksure math whiz, Browder rebels against his lefty family — his grandfather Earl Browder twice ran for president on the Communist ticket — by embracing capitalism. Even so, his affection for his grandfather runs so deep that when his boss at a consulting firm asks him where he would like to be posted, he says Eastern Europe.
So in 1990, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Browder found himself on assignment in Poland, where the government had begun privatizing state-owned companies and selling their shares at ridiculously low valuations. It was his light-bulb moment. “I now knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life,” he writes.
The first third of “Red Notice” recounts the engrossing tale of Browder’s rise to the top of the financial world. Descriptions of his early jobs working for the disgraced financier Robert Maxwell and the highflying bank Salomon Brothers are among the book’s most entertaining sections. Browder is a keen observer of Wall Street culture with a gift for making complex financial investments understandable. You find yourself cheering along as he earns a fortune investing in post-Soviet Eastern Europe, even as he beats his chest after each winning bet. “In a short time, our $25 million portfolio was transformed into $125 million,” he writes. “We had made $100 million!”
Browder soon begins to bump up against rapacious oligarchs and crooked management. But rather than exit the country, like many disillusioned American investors, Browder wages a campaign to clean up Russian capitalism and expose its underbelly. In 2005, the Kremlin bars him from Russia, his assets are misappropriated and one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, is imprisoned and dies after being beaten by eight riot guards.
Unbowed, Browder punches back. He persuades Congress to pass a law in 2012 imposing sanctions against Russian officials said to be responsible for Magnitsky’s death. His actions drive the Kremlin berserk, and Putin retaliates by signing into law a ban on Americans’ adopting Russian orphans. There is a warrant out for Browder’s arrest in Russia, and he believes there is a real chance that Putin will have him killed.
No doubt, last month’s murder of the Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov has surely heightened that fear. Nemtsov had championed Browder’s crusade, traveling to Washington to call on the American government to establish sanctions.
“Previously, the Putin regime relied primarily on imprisonment and exile to silence opposition politicians,” Browder said in a statement issued after Nemtsov’s death. “Now, they have started murdering them. I’m sure this won’t be the last.”
The narrative in “Red Notice” moves along briskly, and Browder’s prose is clean. But as he morphs from iconoclastic investor to political crusader, Browder becomes less likable. At times, he is not his own best protagonist and too frequently lapses into off-putting self-aggrandizement when discussing his accomplishments.
He describes his testimony before a United States House committee. “As I spoke, I noticed that the fresh-faced staffers had stopped tapping away at their BlackBerrys,” he writes, and after he finished “several people in the room had tears in their eyes.” He recalls a human rights panel discussion with Tom Stoppard and Bianca Jagger. “I’d planned to say more, but was cut off by an outburst of applause,” he writes. “One by one, people rose from their seats, and before I knew it, everyone was standing.”
“Red Notice” isn’t the first time Browder has told his tale. He was featured on “60 Minutes” last year, and this newspaper and numerous others have profiled him. Browder acknowledges using the media to help both his investments and his quest for justice, but he also appears to relish the attention, even while it comes at great personal risk. Though he has dedicated his life’s work and this compelling book to his deceased lawyer, make no mistake: Bill Browder is the hero of his own story.
Review by Peter Lattman for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, 18th March 2015
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Russian lawyer who met Donald Trump Jr. after his father won the Republican nomination for the 2016 U.S. presidential election counted Russia's FSB security service among her clients for years, Russian court documents seen by Reuters show.
The documents show that the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, successfully represented the FSB's interests in a legal wrangle over ownership of an upscale property in northwest Moscow between 2005 and 2013.
The FSB, successor to the Soviet-era KGB service, was headed by Vladimir Putin before he became Russian president.
There is no suggestion that Veselnitskaya is an employee of the Russian government or intelligence services, and she has denied having anything to do with the Kremlin.
But the fact she represented the FSB in a court case may raise questions among some U.S. politicians.
The Obama administration last year sanctioned the FSB for what it said was its role in hacking the election, something Russia flatly denies, and Charles Grassley, Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has raised concerns about why Veselnitskaya was allowed into the United States at all.
Veselnitskaya did not reply to emailed Reuters questions about her work for the FSB. The FSB did not respond to a request for comment.
Reuters could not find a record of when and by whom the lawsuit - which dates back to at least 2003 - was first lodged. But appeal documents show that Rosimushchestvo, Russia's federal government property agency, was involved. It did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Veselnitskaya and her firm Kamerton Consulting represented "military unit 55002" in the property dispute, the documents show.
A public list of Russian legal entities shows the FSB, Russia's domestic intelligence agency, founded the military unit whose legal address is behind the FSB's own headquarters.
Reuters was unable to establish if Veselnitskaya did any other work for the FSB or confirm who now occupies the building at the centre of the case.
"Mass Hysteria" Over Meeting
President Donald Trump's eldest son eagerly agreed in June 2016 to meet Veselnitskaya, a woman he was told was a Russian government lawyer who might have damaging information about Democratic White House rival Hillary Clinton, according to emails released by Trump Jr.
Veselnitskaya has said she is a private lawyer and has never obtained damaging information about Clinton. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for the Kremlin, has said she had "nothing whatsoever to do with us."
Veselnitskaya has also said she is ready to testify to the U.S. Congress to dispel what she called "mass hysteria" about the meeting with Trump Jr.
The case in which Veselnitskaya represented the FSB was complex; appeals courts at least twice ruled in favour of private companies which the FSB wanted to evict.
The FSB took over the disputed office building in mid-2008, a person who worked for Atos-Component, a firm that was evicted as a result, told Reuters, on condition of anonymity.
The building was privatised after the 1991 Soviet collapse, but the Russian government said in the lawsuit in which Veselnitskaya represented the FSB that the building had been illegally sold to private firms.
The businesses were listed in the court documents, but many of them no longer exist and those that do are little-known firms in the electric components business.
Elektronintorg, an electronic components supplier, said on its website that it now occupied the building. Elektronintorg is owned by state conglomerate Rostec, run by Sergei Chemezov, who, like Putin, worked for the KGB and served with him in East Germany.
When contacted by phone, an unnamed Elektronintorg employee said he was not obliged to speak to Reuters. Rostec did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
When asked which organisation was located there, an unidentified man who answered a speakerphone at the main entrance laughed and said: "Congratulations. Ask the city administration."
Additional reporting by Polina Nikolskaya, Gleb Stolyarov and Darya Korsunskaya in Moscow; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Mike Collett-White
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