35
that some Russian assassin might try to
kill me had now been overtaken by the
very real fear that the President of the
United States would hand me over to
the Russians.
My first inclination was to get the
hell out of America. But my wife Elena
calmed me down and convinced me to
stay. “Right now,” she said, “the world
wants to know: Who is Bill Browder?”
She was right. I spent the rest of that
day on TV, explaining the Magnitsky
Act to anyone who’d listen. My main
message? Putin is evil, and this idea of
his was nothing more than a test for the
West. Would the West pass? Only time
would tell.
The nexT morning, at 6:30 a.m., my
wife Elena jolted me awake, waving a
piece of paper in my face. “You’ve got
to see this, honey!”
Elena is originally from Russia, and
she’d gotten up before sunrise to read
the Russian news. That morning, the
Russian Prosecutor General’s Office had
issued a list of 11 additional people the
Russians wanted the U.S. to hand over
in exchange for the 12 GRU officers.
Russians love symmetry in these mat-
ters. The U.S. wanted 12, which meant
Russia wanted 12.
I propped myself up and took the
paper. The Russians wanted Mike
McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to
Russia; my friend Kyle Parker, the con-
gressional staffer who originally drafted
the Magnitsky Act; three special agents
from the Department of Homeland Se-
curity who had been involved in inves-
tigating a Russian money-laundering
scheme involving a Cyprus-registered
company named Prevezon that had re-
ceived some of the $230 million; Jona-
than Winer, the Washington lawyer and
former State Department official who
had come up with the original idea for
the Magnitsky Act; and David Kramer,
another ex–State Department official
and the former head of the human rights
organization Freedom House, who’d ad-
vocated for the Magnitsky Act alongside
Boris Nemtsov and me. There were four
additional names on the list, but the
main common denominators were ei-
ther involvement in the Magnitsky Act
or participation in the Prevezon case.
What were the Russians accusing us
of? The day before, Putin alleged that
my “business associates” and I had
“earned over $1.5 billion in Russia,”
“never paid any taxes,” and then, to get
Trump’s attention, gave “$400 million
as a contribution to the campaign of
Hillary Clinton.” (The actual amount
was zero.) Putin went on to say, “We
have solid reason to believe that some
intelligence officers guided these trans-
actions.” Putin was accusing Ambassa-
dor McFaul, Kyle Parker, the three DHS
agents, and everyone else on the list of
being part of my “criminal enterprise.”
This was classic Russian projection.
We weren’t the victims; they were. They
weren’t the criminals; we were. Instead
of the Dmitry Klyuev Organized Crime
Group working with corrupt Russian of-
ficials to launder vast sums of money, it
was the Bill Browder Organized Crime
Group working with corrupt American
officials to launder vast sums of money.
It was one thing to go after a private
person like me, who wasn’t even an
American citizen [Browder is British].
That might have been distasteful, but
in the final analysis, how many people
cared about me? It was entirely different
to ask for a former U.S. ambassador, a
congressional staffer, and rank-and-file
DHS agents. If Trump obliged Putin, it
would set a disastrous precedent.
The day after that, at a White House
press conference, Maggie Haberman
from the New York Times asked Trump’s
press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sand-
ers, “Is [President Trump] open to hav-
ing U.S. officials questioned by Russia?”
Huckabee Sanders didn’t waver. She
said that Trump “said it was an inter-
esting idea. He wants to work with his
team and determine if there is any valid-
ity that would be helpful to the process.”
The tidal wave of indignation was
towering, and the Senate quickly orga-
nized a vote on a resolution calling on
Trump never to follow through on Pu-
tin’s “incredible offer.”
The Administration could sense this
wave was about to come crashing down
on them. An hour before the vote, the
White House finally backtracked.
That afternoon, the Senate voted on
the resolution. It passed 98-0.
No one would be handed over to the
Russians.
Adapted from Browder’s Freezing
Order: A True Story of Money
Laundering, Murder, and Surviving
Vladimir Putin’s Wrath, published by
Simon & Schuster
△
Browder testifies before the
Senate Judiciary Committee on
Capitol Hill on July 27, 2017
FROM LEFT: YURI KADOBNOV—AFP/GETTY IMAGES; DREW ANGERER—GETTY IMAGES
