Campaign for justice -- or something else?
NBC has posted written testimony submitted electronically to the Senate Judiciary Committee by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who is the media's appointed super-agent of Trump-Putin "collusion," primarily as a result of her June 9, 2016 meeting with Don Trump Jr. and others at Trump Tower in Manhattan. I still consider her beyond my own powers of evaluation but a person of considerable interest nonetheless.
Here are some highlights from just the first few pages of of the 52 page document.
Veselnitskaya's November 20, 2017 statement begins with an explosive charge:
Since 2013, I have been investigating the activities of William Browder in the Russian Federation. And the fact that today, the Senate Committee and at least three other bodies – two intelligence committees and a special attorney – are investigating me and my colleagues, as well as the US President himself and his friends and family, is a well prepared entrée served by William Browder – a tax fraudster who has been under investigation for 12 years, who was convicted in Russia and sentenced to nine years in prison without the right to ever conduct business again, whose name is on a federal wanted list, and who is a former US citizen who renounced his American passport in order not to pay US taxes1 -William Browder.
Bill Browder bears responsibility for the investigation of the President, his friends and family? Is this possibly true? We don't know. The committee should try to figure that out.
I will interject here that I also find William Browder to be a person of considerable interest. I first became aware of the billionaire banker only after he had already switched from "Putin stooge" (I believe is the operative term) to anti-Kremlin crusader and quite miraculous engine of Russian sanctions laws the world over. Curious, I opened his best-selling book, Red Notice: How I Became Putin's No. 1 Enemy, and almost physically recoiled from the first few whitewashing lies Bill Browder told about his family's extensive Communist Party/Comintern/KGB background -- whitewashing lies that he continually repeats as part of his public persona. More about the Browder clan -- Earl, Kitty, Raissa, Helen, William -- some other time. However, as Vladimir Bukovsky wrote in his book, Judgement in Moscow, "When you make a serious break with the past, there is no need to conceal that past."
I mistrust all people who conceal the past. I wrote a whole book on the subject of our concealed past (betrayal), and then had to fight off a campaign of lies and slander, seemingly a mission designed to reconceal the mechanism of that same betrayal. I sense in Bill Browder a similar tendency. (That Bill Browder's son Joshua's latest tech invention is being funded by David Horowitz's investor-son Ben is just too ridiculous a coincidence.)
Back to Veselnitskaya, who writes:
2. Until recently, my name has been known only to a relatively small circle of my clients and colleagues.
However this summer thanks to Bill Browder’s direct and indirect efforts the world has found out about me and my meeting with Donald Trump, Jr. on June 9, 2016,
Is she suggesting it was Bill Browder who leaked the news of this meeting to the media? It sure sounds like it. I'd like to know more about that -- and will hope, at least, that the committee does, too.
She goes on to pour out the Alternate Magnitsky Story -- not the one Bill Browder himself created (as we learn in the fascinating Andrei Nekrasov film, The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes), and will recite on cue before chat show hosts, political bodies, campus events, local libraries, last night at the Carter Center, along the way presto-creating Magnitsky laws sanctioning mainly Russian individuals (of Browder's choosing?) in the US, UK, Canada, Estonia and Lithuania.
Then this.
Despite ... the far-fetched view promoted in the media that I have fought against the sanctions – it is not true. Fighting against something that has absolutely no legal bearing makes no sense, and my client has never been listed in those “Magnitsky Lists.”
Not a single penny has yet been frozen under that law, and the prohibition of entry to judges, prosecutors and investigators (for their work that would be similarly done by their American colleagues) is a matter of their personal defamation. These people were simply slandered. Not a single penny has yet been frozen under that law.
Fighting against something that has no legal bearing is for many a calling and lifelong preoccupation -- as we see codified in the appeals court process, for example -- so I cannot say I find the lady's logic convincing here. However, she does make an extremely interesting point:
"Not a single penny has yet been frozen under that law."
Could that be so? If she is correct, the various Magnitsky Acts are themselves shams upon probable shams.
What is really going on here? Does anyone know?