A luncheon with hundreds of other people?
He sat right next to Putin at the 10th anniversary of Russia Today, RT.
"NSA Advisor Michael Flynn seated next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Jill Stein (for good measure) at the 10th Anniversary Gala for Russia Today [RT]".
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Here's a little background on Russia Today...
"RT [Russia Today] was conceived by former media minister Mikhail Lesin,[32] and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s press spokesperson Aleksei Gromov.[33]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)
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Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, with Mikhail Lesin
during a meeting in Moscow
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November 2015...
Nov 7, 2015
Mikhail Lesin, a prominent Russian political figure and mass media expert credited with inspiring the creation of Russia Today (now RT), has died in Washington, DC after a heart attack.
Lesin, a former press minister and ex-head of Gazprom-Media, Russia’s largest media holding, died at the age of 57 on Wednesday, according to family members. “Mikhail Lesin died from a heart stroke,” a family member told RIA Novosti.
Meanwhile, TASS has reported that Lesin was found dead in his hotel room in Washington, DC, citing the Russian Embassy in the US. Police found no signs of foul play, but a formal investigation has been launched. It has been reported that Lesin had been suffering from a prolonged unidentified illness. ..."
https://www.rt.com/news/321121-lesin-dies-heart-attack/
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Nov 2015...
- Millionaire Mikhail Lesin, 57, found dead in $240-a-night in Washington DC last Friday [Nov 6, 2015] and police are investigating
- The pro-Putin 'propaganda channel' he set up, RT [Russia Today] , claimed he 'had been suffering from a prolonged unidentified illness'
- But DC police have made no such finding
"Nicknamed the 'Bulldozer', Lesin was one of the key props of the Putin presidency, personally masterminding a wide-ranging media crackdown which has left the vast majority of Russian TV stations and newspapers obedient to the Kremlin."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3315994/Vladimir-Putin-s-media-mastermind-dead-DC-hotel-murdered-FBI-informant-alive-claim-Russians.html#ixzz3rOUopg7Q
______________________________________________________________"On Friday, November 6 [2015], RIA Novosti reported that Lesin died of a heart attack citing a spokesman for the family as saying: "Today, Mikhail Lesin died ... His death came supposedly from a heart attack."[35][38]
RT [Russia Today] reported the next day that the cause of death was a heart attack.[31][39][40][41]
https://web.archive.org/web/20161026095000/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Lesin
_______________________________________________________"Vladimir Putin’s former media czar "was murdered" in Washington, DC, on the eve of a planned meeting with the US Justice Department, according to two FBI agents whose assertions cast new doubts on the US government’s official explanation of his death.
[Lesin] “was going to talk about the inner workings of RT — basically, how the propaganda machine works. DOJ was investigating RT. ..."
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/putins-media-czar-was-murdered-just-before-meeting-feds?utm_term=.koLV9zmDz#.cuo1YjnWj
_________________________________________________________________UPDATE: MAR 2016...
Mikhail Lesin, Ex-Putin Aide, Died of Blunt Force Trauma in Washington: Autopsy
by Alastair Jamieson and Alexey Eremenko
Mar 11 2016A former aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin found dead in a Washington hotel room was killed by a blunt force trauma to the head, U.S. authorities said Thursday.
Mikhail Lesin, 57, was found dead on the floor of his room in Dupont Circle on November 5.[2015]
Autopsy results show that he died from “blunt-force injuries of the head,” according to a joint statement Thursday from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department and Office of the Chief Medical Examiner reported by NBC Washington , but the exact manner of death was undetermined.
Also contributing to his death were “blunt-force injuries of the neck, torso, upper extremities and lower extremities,” the statement said.
Russian media originally reported that Lesin, a former government minister, had suffered a heart attack. ...”
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The mysterious and mounting deaths of Putin's allies turned critics
(excerpt)"...the plot thickened late Thursday with one U.S. official apparently telling
The New York Times that [Mikhail] Lesin's wounds came from an altercation that happened before he staggered back to his hotel room that night.On Friday, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty uncovered another wrinkle, reporting that Lesin had confirmed his attendance at an event in the U.S. capital 48 hours earlier, but he never showed. ..."
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Backup link to NY Times article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171126103233/https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/11/us/former-putin-aide-found-in-washington-died-from-blows-to-head.html?smid=nytcore-iphone-share&smprod=nytcore-iphone&_r=0Backup link to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171126104000/https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-lesin-mysterious-death-key-facts/27604577.html_________________________________________
Death of former Putin aide at D.C. hotel is ruled accidental
Spencer S. Hsu
October 28, 2016A onetime aide of Russian President Vladimir Putin whose body was found last year in a D.C. hotel room died of head injuries suffered in accidental falls after days of “excessive” drinking, authorities in Washington said Friday as they closed the death investigation.
Mikhail Y. Lesin, 57, a former Russian advertising executive who helped create the Kremlin’s global English-language Russia Today television network, was found dead Nov. 5 in the upscale Dupont Circle Hotel, and for much of a year, the manner of death was ruled “undetermined.”
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July 28, 2017:
"Two of the agents said they were told that the FBI has obtained evidence and conducted witness interviews that indicate that Lesin was murdered. Neither agent would describe the evidence or give details about who the witnesses were, or what exactly they said. The third said that a colleague working on the case told him in January that Lesin was beaten to death.
The intelligence officer would not say how he knew Lesin was bludgeoned but said that the weapon was a baseball bat. Another source — with direct knowledge of the autopsy performed by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of Washington, DC — offered new information about Lesin’s injuries: He had fractured ribs, a detail that has not been previously reported.
One of the FBI agents said that he learned Lesin was put up by the Justice Department at the Dupont Circle Hotel — a midrange hotel out of keeping with Lesin’s extravagant lifestyle — during an informal “water cooler talk” with a “case agent” working on the investigation.
Lesin, he was told, “was going to talk about the inner workings of RT — basically, how the propaganda machine works. DOJ was investigating RT. These are the types of meetings we have with people when we want to recruit them as informants.”
Does he believe Lesin was murdered over RT?
“Whether it was over RT, money, pissing off Putin or a combo or all of it, I don’t know,” he answered. “But falling down drunk? Come on. That’s bullshit.”.
The second FBI agent said he learned that the Justice Department had put Lesin up at the hotel from a DOJ official on the case. The DOJ “was investigating something with RT,” he recalled being told, and investigators planned to ask Lesin “how the station operated — how it was run and how the Kremlin used it.”
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The following article is from December (2014)
"Mikhail Lesin has stepped down as head of major state-controlled media holding Gazprom-Media, the company said late last week.
Gazprom-Media, whose holdings include independent radio station Ekho Moskvy, said Lesin's resignation was due to family reasons, Russian media reports said Friday.
The holding's board of directors will finalize his resignation at an upcoming meeting, Gazprom-Media was cited by Ekho Moskvy as saying. No replacement has been named.
Earlier, a flurry of reports of Lesin's imminent resignation appeared on Russian news wires, all based on undisclosed sources and giving divergent accounts of the motive.
Forbes Russia cited sources in the media and government as confirming the resignation, with one of the individuals claiming that the decision was made personally by President Vladimir Putin."
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/513690.html
_________________________________________________________________"When he [Mikhail Lesin] quit Gazprom Media in December [2014], a move seen as a shock, he cited ‘family reasons’ although there were unconfirmed claims he had fallen out with other influential figures close to Putin. ..."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3315994/Vladimir-Putin-s-media-mastermind-dead-DC-hotel-murdered-FBI-informant-alive-claim-Russians.html
______________________________________________________" [RT (Russia Today) founder, [Mikhail] Lesin was a central figure in the early Putin years, spearheading the Kremlin's effort to silence the country's independent television, the first step in the consolidation of authoritarian rule.
The first target was NTV, at that time Russia's largest and most popular independent TV channel, whose hard-hitting news broadcasts, talk shows, and satirical programs criticized the government over growing corruption and the war in Chechnya and gave airtime to the opposition.
In June 2000, a month after Putin's inauguration, NTV's founder and majority shareholder, Vladimir Gusinsky, was arrested and placed in Moscow's infamous Butyrka prison.
While he was there, the information minister made an offer: Gusinsky could have his freedom if he agreed to transfer his media holdings to Gazprom, the state-owned energy monopoly. ..."
http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/vladimir-kara-murza/ominous-return-putins-media-enforcer
____________________________________________________________From the New York Times
Mystery Deepens Over Death of Former Putin Ally Mikhail Lesin
By NICHOLAS FANDOS and STEVEN LEE MYERS
MARCH 10, 2016WASHINGTON — Mikhail Y. Lesin once occupied the upper stratosphere of Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, an advertising executive turned cabinet minister who helped carry out the state takeover of the country’s independent media and later created the Kremlin’s global English-language television network.
Until late 2014 he ran the media wing of the state’s energy giant, Gazprom, before stepping down or, more likely, being forced out. He ended up in the United States, where he and his family owned properties in Los Angeles said to be worth far more than the salary of the former government minister.
And then, in November [2015], he was found in a hotel here in Washington, the victim, the Russian state media he had helped build said, of a heart attack.
On Thursday, more than four months later, one of the questions surrounding Mr. Lesin’s death was answered: The office of the chief medical examiner in Washington announced that he had not died of a heart attack, but rather of blunt force injuries to his head. But the mystery surrounding his rise and fall only deepened.
Although the examiner and the police did not declare his death a criminal act, the authorities clearly no longer consider it to be the result of natural causes.
Mr. Lesin’s body also showed signs of blunt trauma to his neck, torso, arms and legs, the result, according to one official, of some sort of altercation that happened before he returned to his room at the Dupont Circle Hotel on the night in November when he died at the age of 59.
The medical examiner’s office did not explain the timing of its announcement, nor why the findings took so long.
Officials there had said as recently as Wednesday that it would not imminently release its findings, only to reverse course the next day.
His death remains the subject of a police investigation, though spokesmen for the Metropolitan Police Department and the F.B.I. in Washington declined to comment.
For months, Mr. Lesin’s fate has been the subject of much speculation.
In the Russian news media, he was said to have had a falling out with a major shareholder of Gazprom Media, Yuri V. Kovalchuk, an even closer business ally and friend of Mr. Putin’s.
Some speculated that he had fled to the United States in a kind of self-exile, one that is not unknown among ministers and businessmen who once were in favor inside Mr. Putin’s Kremlin. ...”
