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protecting himself.
Out of $230 million, $800,000 is a
pittance. But sums like these add up.
It’s like charging $5 for a toll. For one
car, it’s nothing, but after a million cars,
you’ve collected a fortune.
Mossack Fonseca was merely one
of hundreds of offshore trust compa-
nies. If these other companies’ books
were similarly exposed, I was sure we
would find other trustees of Vladimir
Putin who had received other tranches
of the $230 million. And this was just
one crime among thousands and thou-
sands of crimes that had taken place in
Russia since Putin took power.
We were looking at the tip of an enor-
mous iceberg.
The Magnitsky Act says that Russian
human-rights violators will have their
assets frozen in the West. It also says
that beneficiaries of the $230 million
crime will be sanctioned. That Putin
was a human-rights violator was not in
dispute, but now he ticked both boxes.
The Magnitsky Act put all of his
wealth and power at risk. That made
him a very angry man. His crusade
against the Magnitsky Act wasn’t just
philosophical, it was personal.
We had genuinely hit Vladimir Pu-
tin’s Achilles’ heel.
At 8 A.m. on Monday, July 16, 2018,
Trump and Putin were in the midst of
their summit in Helsinki. I was in Aspen
with my family. I set up my laptop at the
end of the dining room table, a view of the
mountains to the west over my shoulder.
I needed to get some work done,
and I didn’t want any distractions. My
kids usually run riot all over the house,
but that day I put the dining room off-
limits. I also put restraints on myself,
laying down my phone. After two hours
of work, I turned over my phone. The
screen was flush with notifications. I
had dozens of messages—texts, emails,
DMs, voicemails, everything.
I opened the first email. “Bill, are you
watching Helsinki??”
I scrolled through my inbox. “That
was the scariest, most f-cked-up thing
I have ever seen,” one friend said. An-
other wrote, “If you need a place to hide,
we will put you in our mountain house!”
What the hell was going on? I found
the earliest email about Helsinki, from
help Trump win.
Putin smiled and nodded confi-
dently, looking like he’d spent the whole
weekend preparing for this moment.
“We can meet you halfway... We can
actually permit representatives of the
U.S., including this very commission
headed by Mr. Mueller. We can let them
into the country. They can be present at
questioning. In this case there’s another
condition. This kind of effort should be
a mutual one. We would expect that the
Americans would reciprocate... For in-
stance, we can bring up Mr. Browder in
this particular case.”
I had to watch it several times to make
sure that I’d heard it correctly. Somehow,
Putin, standing next to the President of
the United States, was suggesting swap-
ping 12 Russian GRU officers—for me!
I waited for Trump’s reaction. Surely,
he would reject this out of hand.
But he didn’t. “I think that’s an in-
credible offer,” he said, suggesting he
was ready to trade me.
Rationally, I understood the gravity of
the situation, but emotionally I was too
shaken to take it in. It was like being in a
serious car accident. I knew I’d just been
injured, but I had no idea how badly.
As I tried to assess the damage, the
main thing I kept coming back to was
whether it was safe for me to stay in
America. My original, nebulous concernESSAY
the journalist Ali Velshi at MSNBC. The
subject was to the point: “Putin talking
about you now.”
F-ck.
I put down my phone and went on-
line. It didn’t take long to find the post-
summit press conference. The two
leaders were onstage at twin lecterns,
and their body language couldn’t have
been more different. Putin looked like
he owned the place, while Trump glow-
ered and slumped his shoulders, looking
anything but presidential.
The shocking moment came when
a Reuters reporter asked President
Putin, “Will you consider extraditing
the 12 Russian officials that were in-
dicted last week by a U.S. grand jury?”
Robert Mueller, the special counsel who
had been in charge of investigating Rus-
sian involvement in the 2016 presiden-
tial election, as well as possible Russian
links to the Trump campaign, had made
an unexpected announcement the week
before. His office was indicting 12 Rus-
sian officers of the GRU, Russia’s mili-
tary intelligence wing, accusing them of
hacking the Democratic National Com-
mittee and interfering in the election to△
President Trump, left, and
President Putin after their meeting
in Helsinki on July 16, 2018