Free Republic

WHO IS BILL BROWDER? PUTIN ASKS FOR TRUMP'S HELP IN QUESTIONING BILLIONAIRE FOR 'ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES' IN RUSSIA During a press conference with President Donald Trump in Finland on Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he would allow special counsel Robert Mueller to interview Russians indicted for interfering in the 2016 presidential election if Russian law enforcement can access people connected to one man in particular: the London-based financier Bill Browder. “Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over 1.5 million dollars in Russia. They never paid any taxes, neither in Russia nor in the United States, and yet the money...

Radical left-wing icon former California Democratic Rep. Ron Dellums was a hired lobbyist for Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. June 9, 2016, the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has learned. Dellums, who represented liberal San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., is a long-time darling of left-wing political activists. He served 13 terms in Congress as an African-American firebrand and proudly called himself a socialist. He retired in 1996. The former congressman is one of several high-profile Democratic partisans who was on Veselnitskaya’s payroll, working to defeat a law that is the hated object of...

[Subtitle: “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 writes.]The financier Bill Browder has emerged as an unlikely central player in the ongoing investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. Sergei Magnitsky, an attorney Browder hired to investigate official corruption, died in Russian custody in 2009. Congress subsequently imposed sanctions on the officials it held responsible for his death, passing the Magnitsky Act in 2012. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government retaliated, among other ways,...

. . .Thor Halvorssen, head of the New York-based Human Rights Foundation, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in written testimony that Washington-based political intelligence firm Fusion GPS operated a campaign against journalists who threatened to expose a multibillion-dollar fraud involving faulty South American electric power plants, the laundering of its proceeds in U.S. banks and a kickback scheme to pay off Venezuelan officials. . .Wednesday’s hearing, initially scheduled to also feature testimony from Donald Trump Jr. and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort before they agreed to private interviews, was cut short when Democrats invoked a rule to stop committees...

A London-based businessman who was investigated last year by the opposition research firm behind the so-called Trump dossier will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, The Daily Caller has learned.Bill Browder says that he will “definitely” be testifying about a complaint he filed with the Justice Department last year in which he accused Fusion GPS, the firm behind the dossier, and a former Soviet intelligence officer named Rinat Akhmetshin of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), a law requiring agents of foreign governments to disclose their lobbying and consulting work.Founded by former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn...

A leaked email from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign previously published by Wikileaks may take on new significance because it relates to key issues brought up in media reports about Donald Trump Jr. and a meeting with a Russian lawyer. The email in question was purportedly sent by Jesse Lehrich, a Clinton campaign foreign policy spokesman and member of the campaign’s rapid response communications team. In the correspondence, which has not yet received news media attention and remains searchable in the WikiLeaks archive, Lehrich writes that the campaign “killed a Bloomberg story” attempting to link Clinton’s opposition to the anti-Russia...

The Russian lawyer who penetrated Donald Trump’s inner circle was initially cleared into the United States by the Justice Department under “extraordinary circumstances” before she embarked on a lobbying campaign last year that ensnared the president’s eldest son, members of Congress, journalists and State Department officials, according to court and Justice Department documents and interviews.

[] A day before, Mr. Snowden's protectors offered a lesson in modern Russia's respect for human rights. A court in Moscow convicted Sergei Magnitsky, who had exposed a $230 million embezzlement scheme run by Russian officials, on tax fraud charges. He received no prison term, but not because the Moscow judge had gone soft. Beaten and suffering from pancreatitis, Magnitsky died in agony four years ago while in pre-trial police custody. He was a brave whistleblower who exposed abuses and sought no glory for himself. This was the first posthumous prosecution in modern Russian history, complete with an empty steel...

It would be pleasing to write about an anti-American war Senator who finally saw the light. But McGovern was not actually flip-flopping. He was consistently representing the interests of what he described in an August 25, 1978 speech on the Senate floor as, “Ho Chi Minh’s popularly-based revolution for independence in Vietnam.”

WASHINGTON – Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is asking whether a suspected former Russian intelligence officer-turned U.S. lobbyist and the firm behind the unsubstantiated anti-Trump dossier should have registered as foreign agents for their efforts to bring down a U.S. law on behalf of the Kremlin. According to a complaint filed with the Justice Department, Fusion GPS, which was also involved in the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians, was involved in the pro-Russia campaign to kill the Global Magnitsky Act around the same time. In 2012, President Obama signed into...

Stuck in a recession and with no sign of a reprieve in the oil price, Russia could quickly descend into chaos if the money runs out, William Browder, a well-known critic of the Kremlin and chief executive of Hermitage Capital, told CNBC. "I don't think you can underestimate how bad the situation in Russia is right now, you've got oil below any measure where the budget can survive and you've got sanctions from the West. Russia is in what I'd call a real serious economic crisis," he said on Thursday. Speaking to CNBC in Davos where global business and political...

More than three years after he died in prison, whistle-blowing Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was found guilty of tax evasion by a Moscow court Wednesday. The posthumous trial of Magnitsky was a macabre chapter in a case that ignited a high-emotion dispute between Russia and Washington that has included U.S. sanctions against Russians deemed to be human rights violators, a ban on the adoption of Russian children by U.S. citizens and calls for the closure of Russian non-governmental organizations receiving American funding. Magnitsky was a lawyer for U.S.-born British investor William Browder when he alleged in 2008 that organized criminals...