Bill Browder On The Magnitsky Act

WAMU 88.5

Published August 7, 2018 at 11:06 AM EDT

William Browder, chief executive officer of Hermitage Capital Management, takes his seat as he arrives for a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled 'Oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Attempts to Influence U.S. Elections' in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, July 27, 2017 in Washington, DC.

Bill Browder was a lead campaigner behind the Magnitsky Act, which was allegedly the reason for a meeting between Trump campaign staffers and a Kremlin-connected attorney last year.

Or so we thought.

The president tweeted this weekend that the meeting was, in fact, about potential damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

Fake News reporting, a complete fabrication, that I am concerned about the meeting my wonderful son, Donald, had in Trump Tower. This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics – and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 5, 2018

Trump previously suggested that the meeting wasn’t about the adoption policy, but this recent tweet was one of the clearest assertions that the Trump campaign was seeking unflattering information about Hillary Clinton and her campaign.

Browder has also been in the news lately because Russian President Vladimir Putin mentioned him by name during a July press conference with Trump.

From an op-ed Browder wrote for Time Magazine:

Putin offered to allow American investigators to interview the 12 Russian intelligence agents just indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in exchange for allowing Russians to have access to me and those close to me. This is no idle threat. For the last ten years, I’ve been trying to avoid getting killed by Putin’s regime, and there already exists a trail of dead bodies connected to its desire to see me dead. Amazingly, Trump stood next to him, appearing to nod approvingly. He even later said that he considered it “an incredible offer.”

We’re re-airing a portion of our 2017 conversation with Browder, a person who knows exactly what a conversation about adoption policy might look like.

Produced by Rupert Gardner. Text by Gabrielle Healy.

GUESTS

Bill Browder, CEO, Hermitage Capital; author, “Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice”; @BillBrowder

For more, visit https://the1a.org.