The Daily Beast Podcast - Putin’s Hunted Me Down All Over the World

Episode Date: April 17, 2022

‘Freezing Order’ author Bill Browder, one of Moscow’s most wanted, joins this bonus episode of The New Abnormal to talk about “evil” Putin and why the former American banker still chooses to speak out against the Russian president despite being targeted and followed for it. Plus, co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Andy Levy react to a few very bizarre clips of Republicans and a rap about Matt Gaetz. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic InVo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. And on The New Abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. Hello, and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we have a really special episode.

We're going to talk to Bill Browder. He's, of course, the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management. We're going to talk to him about his new book, Freezing Order, a true story of money laundering, murder, and surviving Vladimir Putin's wrath. But first, let's have some fun. You guys ready to listen to some clips? Never. I mean, yes. Always.

So we're going to do things a little different this week. There's some musical numbers. I think you guys should really hear. The first one comes from the current singer of the band, Leonard Skinner, and a founding member of 38 special. And there you sing a song for one, Ron DeSantis. Why? The press don't like him, but it sure does get my business. stands up for what he believes.

So don't come down here trying to change things. We're doing all right in the sunshine state. Say out of our business, leave our guvallones. I don't think that's going to stop people from yelling out play Freebird at their concerts. I don't think they've found a solution to that problem. Wow. You know what I like about it? Everything.

It's just what you'd think a Ron DeSantis song would sound like. Well, that's true. Oh, it's so embarrassing and they put sweet in sweet Florida, like Sweet Home Alabama. Like, it's just, oh, it's just, it's embarrassing when musicians pass their sort of sell-by date and keep going. Like, a lot of them don't. A lot of them legitimately keep going and are great well into their, you know, 70s, ladies, whatever. But then there were the ones who you had your time and, you know, you should be counting your

money. Oh, my God. Or as they say, shut up and play the hits. Yeah. I guess. I guess the only fun thing about this song is watching, you know, the fact that they were, like, guests on Fox News promoting this and watching the Fox News personalities having to pretend to like the song.

So one of the better parts of conservatism today is, like, pretending to, like, these songs and, like, rap songs. Yeah. Yeah. It really is special. My favorite part of the song is the last lyric of the chorus is that what they like about him is he tells the truth. Tells the truth. Yeah. Think Mr. Desantis is known for.

Yeah. Known for telling the truth. Well, I'm assuming that's going to be the worst song I hear this week. I got bad news for you. I was just talking about those rap songs. And we have another song about a Florida politician won Matt Gates. Y'all ready to rock? Wait, why?

What? Tell these snow plays on my Matt Gates of Madison called on. Tell these bones come and take my guns as a call for. Trump did four years in the office. He ain't never Star Wars. Y'all living in a fantasy like this shit is Star Wars. Bez and only snowflakes like mad gays in my rake. Maga rap in my trunk bloaters.

Public is hiding. The pressure they tree in me. And it's successful. Michigan was going to. I don't even have a joke for this. For the audience that doesn't know, I'm a former record producer. You know, we're often thinking about what we should write about. I could just see it like, who's a baller who's having a lot of sex?

That's a politician. I think they pick the wrong one. And it's under FBI investigation. Why not Matt Gates? I was surprised to find out these guys are white. I'm not surprised. I'm sure. I was sure they were white. I was sure.

If you're making a song for Matt Gates of Florida's first district, you're going to be white. One of the better lines is when they brag about him growing up at the Truman Showhouse. But another really great details of the video is that the guy has the new modern like Florida Man facial hair where you have the full facial hair, but you've decided to just shave off the mustache.

Right. Oh, yeah. It's a hell of an accessory with that. What I also appreciate is he's wearing a knockoff MAGA hat, so it's like kind of fucked up the font. Amazing. Good for him. Yeah, the modern twist on the neck beard, though, is really something. Oh, yes.

I like that for the definition of that. That's good. Yeah. Well, the good news here is I have no more songs, but I do have some hot takes. Oh, thank God. Bali, you have children, you know, roll bottles. Who do you think of the sky ate off Hitler? It's not high on my list now.

Well, that's because you're... Especially as Jews, we're not so big on Hitler in this house. Well, you're not a Tennessee state senator, so let's listen to this. That's certainly true. I haven't given you all the history lessons. and a while, and I want to give you a little history on homelessness. 19 and 10, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language

and how to connect with this is, and then went on to lead a life that's got him in a history book. So a lot of these people, it's not a dead end, they can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life, or in Hitler's case, a very unproductive life. I support this bill. I mean, you know, there are a lot of people besides Hitler to use here. I'd just like to point out, I mean, I know Hitler's the go-to in Tennessee. Because of all his work in Tennessee, but, you know, perhaps you'd like to pick Stalin or Pinochet. My favorite thing is at the end when he says, or in Hitler's case, an unproductive life.

like he realized at the last second. Oops. And then I can just picture him like he goes back to his seat and he's like, saved it. Totally saved it. Oh my gosh. And he started that by saying, I haven't given you all a history lesson in a while. So I want to know what other history lessons. I don't.

I want a YouTube compilation of his various history lessons. One of the few good things about not living in Tennessee. But, you know, look, their Senator, Marsha Blackburn, really, you know, image consultant to senator. I mean, they're not sending their bass from Tennessee. Okay. Oh, God. Well, the takes keep coming, and brain genius Charlie Kirk has one about how he should reshape our society. Guy with the big head and the tiny face.

I say this is a big-headed person myself. We have a huge housing crisis in our country, the likes of which we have not seen in a long period of time. But I believe that we need to build horizontally, not vertically. It's one of my speeches. Developers don't like it when I say this, but it's true. The higher the building, the more liberal the voter. It just is. So if you are, the closer to the ground you are, the more conservative you are.

We should encourage people to spread horizontally and not vertically. Look at Denver. The higher the high rises, has Denver become less free or more free? It's become a dystopian nightmare. Now, you might say, Charlie, that's a correlation of the causation. Think about it. If you're on the 32nd floor renting not owning, if you're not in the weeds and in the yard and understanding what it takes to grow food and to maintain land, are you going to be more or less likely to actually be a conservative? The higher the building, every single study shows they become more liberal over time. It's happening in Phoenix, happened in Denver, happen in Atlanta, happened in Dallas, happening in Chicago, have everywhere, and yet few people actually say that out loud. Because it's not true. That's why they don't say it. There's even a way in which it is true. I mean, where are the high buildings?

They're in cities. Are cities more liberal or conservative? They're mostly more liberal. But there are lots of suburbs where people aren't growing food. No, of course. Of course. Everything he says is stupid. Like, whether it comes from the slightest grain of truth or not.

But, like, he wants to encourage people to spread horizontally as if there's, you know, oh, we should try that in Manhattan. We should try spreading horizontally. That'll work. Yeah, let's do it, man. Even in the suburbs and the exurbs and in rural areas, there's not infinite amounts of places to spread horizontally. That's the whole point of tall buildings.

That's why you build them. He's just amazing. I mean, the guy has been running this grift. You know, I mean, I just, I respect the hell out of him for his incredible stupidity and his, you know, full of shitness. I really like that he's so young and hip that he's unaware that you can actually own property inside buildings. No, I don't think you can.

Yeah. Well, he should know that because, as someone pointed out on Twitter, he bought a Florida condo in a high-rise building. Of course, he did. That feels like peak Charlie Kirk. I mean, the peak Charlie Carle. Kirk is that the guy who put the money up to, one of the guys who put the money up to start Turning Point USA died of COVID.

As people like Charlie Kirk were saying, you know, COVID's not that bad and we need to not have restrictions on people. Yeah. Good stuff. Good person. Smart kid. Great kid. You really stuck it to college.

Bill Browder is the CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital Management and the author of Freezing Order, a true story of money laundering, murder, and surviving of a lot of I'm your Putin's wrath. Welcome to the new abnormal, Bill Browder. I'm happy to be here. Thank you. I wanted to have you on a bunch of times and just our schedules haven't aligned. But first tell us about the book and how you got to write this book.

So this is my second book, Freezing Order. It follows my first book, Red Notice. And I should point out that I'm not a natural writer. I never set out to be a writer. I never set out to be a human rights activist either. I started out as a hedge fund manager. But my first book was very, very painful to write. And after it was over, I said never in a million years, am I ever going to write another book? But then so much really terrible stuff happened since my last book

was published in terms of how the Russian government has behaved, that more people have been murdered, more people, they've attempted to murder more people, more unbelievable discoveries that I kind of felt like I had to write another book because I have to tell this story, because people really need to know what Vladimir Putin was capable of. And this was before the, invasion of Ukraine when I was still sort of chiseling away at this wall of indifference in relation to Putin and Russia where people were just didn't want to hear it. They thought of me as some kind of extremist and I wanted to present the evidence that no I'm not. This guy is really a, he's a serial killer and needs to be stopped. And so that's kind of the, that was the motivation for writing this

book was to lay it all out. Now I understand that a lot of people don't, you know, want to read books and there's a very small market of people who want to know about that specifically. And so I I wanted to write this as a book that would appeal to a wide audience. And so it took me three years to write because it had to be something really easily readable so that people who don't care about this stuff would want to read it anyways. And as my publisher once told me, you want to hide the vegetables and the dessert. And so I've written a book which I think anybody who reads will read it and think this is like any, this is like a, you know, John La Carray book or whatever, a detective story where you kind

of walk away with a very intense impression of the criminality of the Putin regime. I mean, how worried are you about your own safety? Well, very is the answer. I wouldn't say I'm very worried. Worry is the wrong word because if I spent time worrying, then I wouldn't be calling Putin out. People who worry self-censor. I would say that I'm very vigilant about my safety.

I'm understandably targeted. I've been threatened with death, with kidnapping, with eight interpol arrest warrants, with all sorts of other terrible things from Russia. I've been arrested while traveling in Spain and Switzerland. But, and, you know, and I've had to spend a lot of time dealing with all these issues and preparing and avoiding and all that kind of stuff.

But it hasn't stopped me from doing what I do, which is calling out the Putin regime for the terrible crimes they've committed. I carry on doing that, and I will carry on doing that. Do you feel safer in New York or in London? Putin has a certain, like, he has not attacked people in the United States. like he has these sort of weird boundaries of what he'll do and not do. Have you noticed that? And do you think that's a real thing or not? No, not at all. And I don't think it's true. There was a guy named Lesson. He was a former minister in the Russian government. And he was,

he died in the DuPont Circle Hotel of massive head wounds. Oh, right. Oh, that's right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And for that matter, while the Russians have been targeting me, they, I've been in America, and they've hired Americans to surveil me, chase me down, find my location, etc. I was, you'll see in my book, they found me in Aspen, Colorado. They ambushed me outside the Daily Show when I was launching my first book. There's no safety anywhere when these people are after you. You were talking about this friend of yours who went back to Russia, who's a Putin critic. Will you talk about that because he was just arrested?

Yeah, this is really important. So one of my main missions has been something called the Magnetski. Act, which is to freeze the assets and ban the visas of human rights violators in Russia and around the world. And one of my main partners in achieving this mission is a man named Vladimir Karamorza. He's a Russian national, and he's an opposition politician. And he went to many lawmaking bodies around the world with me. And I told the story of why we need sanctions from a Western perspective. And he told the story of why we need sanctions from a Russian's perspective. And he told the story that sanctioning Putin and his cronies was the best thing that Western governments could do

for the Russian people because these people shouldn't be stealing from their people and ruining their lives. And he was very persuasive. He's an incredible young person. He's in his mid-30s. In retaliation for doing this work that he did with me, they tried to kill him. They poisoned him twice, and he nearly died twice from his poison. And it turned out in subsequent investigations by Bellingcat, that the people who poisoned him were the same people who poisoned Navalny and the same people involved in the Salisbury poisonings in England, same exact team from the Russian FSB. So here's a guy who has really been threatened beyond belief.

I mean, and he was disabled from his poisonings. I mean, it's unbelievable. He had to use a cane and at strokes. It was just horrible. Convierte your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has heard of it?

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coms. And in spite of that, he has kept on going back to Russia to fight for, to fight the Putin regime, to try to stand, up to them. And two weeks ago, we were in London together. I live in London, and he was on his way

through London. He came to an event that I was speaking at. He also spoke about Ukraine and what Putin was doing in Ukraine and trying to give everyone some perspective on that there is a large group of Russians that don't approve of this war. And we had dinner afterwards, and he said he was on his way to Moscow, and I couldn't believe it. I begged him, don't go. And he said, how can I not go? I'm asking, I'm an opposition politician, I'm trying to stand up to Putin, I'm asking the Russian people to stand up to Putin, how can I ask them to do that if I'm so afraid of going back to my own home country? And he not only went, but he gave interviews. He gave an interview on Ali Valshi on MSN and on CNN, and he called Putin a murderer,

he called Putin a war criminal and all sorts of various things. And an hour after his CNN interview, he was arrested. This was two days ago. He's now in custody. They've sentenced him to some minor technical violation and kept him for 15 days in jail, but we don't know what's going to happen to him. Will they kill him in jail? Will they extend his detention? What will they do to him? It's terrifying because he's one of the last remaining voices,

one of the last remaining brave people who is standing up to Putin. Can we talk about Navalny because Navalny is also in jail? Indeed. And Navalny has a similar story where he went back to Russia. I never understood why he went back to Russia. So Alexei Navalny is probably. the most popular opposition politician in Russia. He's extremely well supported by everybody who hates the corruption of the Putin regime. He's gotten to that place by standing up to Putin and by being

totally uninteriminated. He makes movies about Putin's billion, $1.3 billion palace in the Black Sea. He exposes everybody in that regime. And in retaliation for all of this work that he's done, they tried to poison him as well. They poisoned him with Novichuk, same thing they used in Salisbury. He nearly died and it was only through an accident of bad administration of the poison and the fact that the airplane that he was traveling on

landed on an emergency landing in order to get him treatment because the pilot wasn't in on the scam that he was saved. He was in coma for like a month. They sent him to Germany. His family got him out of Russia after begging and pleading

and international pressure that took him to Germany where he was able to overcome the poison, came back to life, recovered, and then they said, if you come back to Russia, we're going to arrest you, and he went back to Russia, and they arrested him. Now, we all would, I don't think any of us would have done what he did. I don't think any of us would have subjected ourselves to the idea of just walking right into their jail.

But this is a guy who's just unbelievably brave. And in doing so, he did something which could change the course of history, is he elevated himself to a person who is at the same level as Putin. And he said, the national interest of Russia, my patriotism for Russia is more important than my freedom and potentially my life. And so if he survives, and that's a big if, if he survives and Putin self-destructs, I believe that Alexei Navalny will be the next president of Russia and Vladimir Karamurza will be the foreign minister. How would that even happen? I mean, there are a number of of scenarios, I'd love you to just sort of game out what you think could happen there.

Well, there's very few scenarios where that actually happens. So the most likely scenario is that Vladimir Putin stays in power in the same way as Kim Jong-un in North Korea has stayed in power and that Russia becomes increasingly more of a pariah state and it just goes on and on and on. That's the base case scenario. That's the 70% probability scenario. And the war in Ukraine goes on and on and on. But there is a sort of minor scenario, maybe a 15% scenario, that Putin loses the war in Ukraine, definitively. And that's not impossible. I mean, if we give the Ukrainians the weapons to fight, they'll actually win this war. I mean, the question is, will we give them the weapons to fight?

If they win the war, Russians love a strong man, and that's how Putin has sort of, that's what he's capitalized on. The Russians hate anybody who's weak and who's a loser. And if Putin is presented as a loser, the man who lost the war, war in Ukraine, he'll get taken out one way or another in either mass demonstration or some other thing. And that's when Alexei Navalny has his moment. How do you think this plays out? Well, I think the 70% scenario is the North Korean scenario where this just goes on and on and on. Unfortunately, that's, and that he's a menace for more than a decade to come, that the atrocities that we've seen in Ukraine are committed in much more horrible ways than we could ever imagine.

and we end up with just horribleness going forward and forward and forward. That's the base case scenario. And the worst case scenario, which we haven't talked about, is that if Putin wins in Ukraine, then he goes on to the next country. And the next country is a NATO country, Estonia. And he points his guns at Estonia.

He points his nukes at Washington, Berlin, and London. And he says, do you guys want to go to war with me over this country that most people couldn't locate on a map? But they have to, right? I mean, if it's a NATO country, there's no true. choices. Of course there's a choice. I mean, I can imagine, I can easily picture that scenario. And then all the talk shows in America and all CNN and MSNBC and Fox are all saying, well, wait a second, do we want to risk nuclear annihilation over this country just because we signed a treaty?

Maybe we should just let him have it. Why do we care? That's what some people will say. Yeah, I mean, it's certainly possible. It strikes me that the Biden administration sees how high these stakes are. Even since yesterday, they've upped the stuff they're sending to. Ukraine, they're sending more heavier weapons, and are you seeing that too? Do you think that's right? I'm always very critical of every administration in every country. Government's always

disappoint me, but in this particular moment, I'm actually impressed with the conduct of the Biden administration. I think that they're acting as I would if I were in their shoes. I mean, there's more to be done and they seem to be doing more on a daily basis. There's always a bit of too little, too late. But, you know, on pretty much overall, you know, they're being as tough as they can be.

I love the rhetoric of the president. He's calling it genocide. He's calling Putin a war criminal. All this type of stuff, which basically, once it's said by the president, you can't unsay it. So there's no way that we can go back to a scenario of business as usual with Putin.

You can't say those things. You can't call him a war criminal. You can't call it genocide and then go back to business as usual. It's not possible. And that's really important, because that's, I mean, there's nothing more horrifying. And then the idea that Putin could, we could end up carrying on as usual.

That would just be unforgivable. So let's just talk about the oligarchs for a minute. Sort of the original intent of the Magnitsky Act was to sort of close the spigot with Russia. Do you feel that the oligarchs have been sanctioned enough? Do you feel that the Magnitsky Act has, that people have, have been, following the letter of it, has it pushed that along? The answer is that a lot more can still be done. We've sanctioned about 20 oligarchs,

and there's 118 Russians on the Forbes Rich list. And for what it's worth, everyone asks, is so-and-so-and-so a good oligarch or a bad oligarch? Basically, anybody who's an oligarch could only be an oligarch with the permission of Vladimir Putin. And the permission requires that they share half their money with Putin and that they do whatever bidding Putin asks them to do. And so they all, with one or two exceptions,

are part of his operation and should be sanctioned. Since they hold Putin's money, effectively, all of them minus one or two, should be sanctioned. And what that means is there's a lot more sanctioning to do. There's also a lot of sanctions evasion that has gone on and will go on. And I think we need to up our game in terms of dealing with the sanctions evasion.

There are family members that are being given the assets. They need to be sanctioned. There's trustees, nominees that are given assets. They need to be sanctioned. And so there needs to be a lot more of the satellite people sanctioned, and there needs to be a lot more enforcement of sanctions. And I think we also need to lean on some of the countries that are supposed to be our allies that are not participating in this thing.

I mean, what in the world is the United Arab Emirates doing, harboring all these Russian oligarchs? Someone should go down there and have a very strong, quiet word with them about what what will happen if they continue to do that. I know this is not very popular to say in New York, but why in the world are the Israelis sitting on the fence on this one? That's not right. Why are the Saudis not turning on the spigot right now to get some more oil out there so the oil prices come down from this whole thing?

Yeah, that's a good point, too. Were you surprised at all at how impressive and how successful the president of Ukraine was at messaging? it just seems like not only the president, but the entire country has been extremely good at really getting their plight out there. This is one of these true stories of greatness. You never really can judge any individual

until you see them in a moment of duress. And what I've seen with Vladimir Zolensky is an unbelievable character to be under such risk, under such threat, with teams of assassins coming after him and his country being bombarded and him sending this message to his people

that he's not scared and he's going to stand up to Putin and they shoulds too. And it's such a powerful message and it's had such a dramatic effect on the outcome of this war. And, you know, history will be extremely complimentary

to this man. And you would have never guessed it. He was a comedian. I mean, how would we have ever known that he was such a hero? but it turned out that he was. And I believe that what he's done has changed the outcome.

Putin thought he was going to win in three days, and Putin has definitely not won't win and probably won't win. Yeah. Tell our listeners one more thing about the book that they will be totally fascinated by. Well, we all know that Vladimir Putin is evil. That's clear. What most people don't know is that in order for him to exercise his evening,

evil is not just being done by his secret police and army and others. They hire Americans openly to help them execute their vendettas, to launder their money, to launder their reputations, to go after their critics. And I know this because I was one of the people on the other side that they were going after. And they have lawyers in New York and PR firms in Washington and investigators all over the country surveilling me, defaming me, suing me, trying to get my information indirectly, but on behalf of the Russian government.

Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. We'll help us understand what's happening

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