The Jordan Harbinger Show - 681: Bill Browder | Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath

Episode Date: June 7, 2022

Bill Browder (@Billbrowder) pioneered a brand-new market after the fall of The Iron Curtain while making powerful enemies — including Vladimir Putin. He is the author of Red Notice and Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath. What We Discuss with Bill Browder: The real purpose of disinformation: not to convince you that it's presenting accurate facts, but to cast a seed of doubt over the credibility of the position it's opposing. How a timely tweet upon being arrested by potentially Russia-corrupted police officers in Spain may have saved Bill Browder's life. How the Magnitsky Act came about and what it does to sanction Russian human rights violators and kleptocrats. How the power of Interpol is regularly abused by genocidal policymakers to retrieve escaped prisoners from "safe" havens. Bill's thoughts on why Putin is making his move in Ukraine now, and what he hopes to accomplish there. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/681 See Jordan (with Ryan Holiday) Live in L.A. June 13th!: Go to jordanharbinger.com/tickets for more info Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy med yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

An interesting episode to check out is called Speaking Truth to Goop, where Jen Gunter breaks down the pseudoscience behind the wellness industry in a way that is super entertaining and eye-opening. It's sharp, funny, and makes you a lot harder to fool, which, if you listen to this show, you know I'm all about that. From exploring cults to analyzing our cultural and political landscape, the Conspiratuality Podcast will help you stay informed against misinformation and resist fear tactics.

Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you do. get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. So we're driving through the streets and then we come to a square and the car slows down and pulls to a stop in front of a nondescript office building. There's no flags, no insignias of the Spanish National Police in front of it. And then the guys order me out of the car. I say, what are we doing here? They don't speak good English and they say medical exam. And here I could just picture, I'm going into some thing that someone holds me down, some guy in a cheap suit and injects me to something. And then I wake up, in that shipping container on a slow boat to Russia.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional organized crime figure, former cult member, drug trafficker, or tech mogul. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about it, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic to help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show.

Topics like persuasion and influence, disinformation and cyber warfare, criminal justice and law enforcement, scams and conspiracy debunks, crime and cults, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Hey, special announcement, by the way, I'm going to be doing a live show, like live, in person, in real life. I'm going to be interviewing Ryan Holiday, author Ryan Holiday. That's going to be in Los Angeles at the Venice West on June 13th. So tickets are available. I'd love to meet you in person. Tickets are available at Jordan Harbinger.com slash tickets.

Again, Jordan Harbinger.com slash tickets. June 13th at the Venice West in Los Angeles, I'll be interviewing Ryan Holiday, and I hope to see you there. Today on the show, Bill Browder returns. He used to be the largest foreign investor in Russia. Now Putin mentions him by name and wants him handed over to Russian authorities, or just dead. We've had him on episode three of this show, which I recommend you have a listen to after this one. This is a tale of rampant corruption, theft, murder, and of course what it's like to go up against Vladimir Putin, one of the most powerful men in the world.

And frankly, it's not really a seat you want to be in. Always a great conversation here with Bill Browder. I know you're going to enjoy it. I really enjoyed recording it for you. And this is just one of those that makes you think. And also makes you darn glad you're not in the shoes of the guest with a target on your back. Here we go with Bill Browder. I do upload videos of shows and interviews like this. And I just uploaded something with the Ukrainian soldier. This is where the comment was on this video. Well, I don't see you interviewing the fascist contingent over in Ukraine. This is a bunch of BS. And I was just thinking, even if we assume that the worst possible version of what the Kremlin says is partially true or 80% true, and that like, let's assume for the sake of this hypothetical that a huge number of Ukrainians are Nazis sympathizing fascists, which is ridiculous. And there's no evidence for this. It still doesn't really justify the invasion and the current behavior that we're seeing. I'm curious what you think. How do you handle that when someone says, oh, well, Putin's right.

and everybody else is just brainwashed. You just have to look at the videos. I mean, there's like 50,000 dead in Moriupol, civilians, you know, killed by Russian rockets. There is no argument. It's 100% clear that Putin is a war criminal. Yeah, you look at the people in Boucha and hands behind their back killed and the women raped.

I mean, there's no argument. It's hard to say, believe it or not, the same video, similar comment. What we're seeing right now is the use of precision weaponry, and this is actually, the Russians could be so much worse if they really wanted to. You know, this is all being spun by the West. And I just thought, like, one, they're not using precision weaponry very much. They're using artillery and they're shelling civilian targets, and we can see that plain as day with the execution of civilians. It's just crazy to me that people think this, but also given the level of disinformation from Russia, I've just always sort of

50-50 on whether I'm looking at a comment from a kook or somebody who thinks they're an independent thinker or just an absolute Russian bot that's based out of a suburb of St. Petersburg, sitting in a cubicle next to a bunch of other people posting comments like this on every YouTube video they can find. You know, like, is this just someone's job or what? Yeah, no, so definitely someone's job. I mean, I used to get these comments from like Swiss television. I would go on Swiss television and tell the Magnitsky story. This is a long time ago. And then I see the journalist the next year. I would do this in Davos. And then I'd go to the next year, and I see the journalist. And he's saying, it's so interesting. Every time I interview you,

you know, like I get tons of emails. And I was like, those aren't real emails, dude. Yeah. Last time I interviewed you, there was a guy or somebody, some organization who claimed to be like a, I'm going out of memory here, but like a French journalist was like, I've exposed Bill Browder and here's all this evidence. And I looked through and it was just kind of confusing. And I thought, okay, it's translated, you know, give the benefit of the doubt. What could this person be saying? And then I realized, I'm not even sure how coherent this is or if it's just somebody who says they have evidence for something so that it plants a seed of, well, maybe Bill Browder's line, because they just don't even expect people to look at the evidence. They just go,

there's 18 attachments in this email. There must be something to the story. And I'm like, but these aren't just kind of like weird, like spreadsheets. What is this for? What am I looking at, you know? That's the purpose of disinformation. It's not to convince you that they're right. It's just a a plan of seat of doubt. Right. And that's the whole point. It's just to like pollute your mind. So you think, well, maybe, maybe there is something wrong with that argument. Yeah. The argument that, and we'll get into this a little bit in the show, the argument that they're making, which is that the Kremlin likes to point on you, oh, well, Bill Browder actually, and his fund stole all this money, and now this is a big smokescreen. And I was talking to some

investigator friends of mine, and I was like, you know, what do people do when they steal hundreds of millions of dollars? Do they stay in the spot light as much as they can, write books about the whole thing, lobby Congress and make a bunch of high-powered connected friends and get in the media as much as possible? Or do they vanish, refuse to comment to anyone, sit on a yacht, live a low-profile life. That's what they do. They vanish. They go and they vanish and they spend their money. They don't sit around spending 60 hours a week away from their family and friends doing shows like this to convince everybody that they didn't steal the money. That's like the most inefficient use of a financial criminal who's essentially gotten away with its time, right? Like it just does the

behavior doesn't match. Well, but moreover, the money has been tracked down and went to Russian government officials. We know who I went to. So I stole the money that I put it in the accounts of the tax officials and Putin himself so that I could somehow steal the money and blame it on them. And then it's the absurdity of it is just, and this is what they do in Ukraine. They're saying to the extent that you believe any of these, anyone believes any of these trolls, it's like, well, actually the Ukrainians killed all these people in Bucha. That's what they said. I was listening to this Russian parliamentarian the other day. He was being challenged by BBC. And they were saying, well, what about all these people in Buccia had their hands tied behind their back? And he said, no, we withdrew on this day. And these

are killed by Ukrainian soldiers. It's just like, yeah, to make a big media incident, to gain sympathy, et cetera, et cetera. And it's like, wow, that's a pretty heavy lift to assert that Ukraine did this because they just didn't have enough sympathy for their war effort. It's like, man, probably we wouldn't have seen what we saw on satellite photos. And it's like, oh, and the West is colluding, which is why we see evidence on satellite photos of the Russians actually doing it. And then they say, those were private companies.

Those were private companies. They always stress those were private companies that provide those satellite photos. Somehow that makes it like if they. Yeah, they're private companies so they can totally make this stuff up to collude with the U.S. government. It just like none of it really adds up. It's almost like, you know that scientific, I should say psychology principle where somebody wants to cut in line at a print shop?

And so they say, can I cut in front of you? And people say, no, why I'm waiting in line? But if you say because I need to do something else, like 87% or whatever, if people say yes. But then they found out that you don't have to have a valid excuse. you can say, can I cut in front of you in line because I'm thirsty? And it's like, that is nothing to do with you getting printed faster. But people will say, okay, because you have a reason for it. This is almost like what the Kremlin does, right?

They go, well, here's this reason for this. And you go, if you think about it for two seconds, you go, this reason makes absolutely no sense. But they don't even care about that because they don't need to be convincing. They just, by virtue of the fact that they've made some BS reason up, another double-digit percentage of people who hear it go, okay, sounds plausible. And they just move on with their lives. And then they're like, well, I haven't made my mind up about who's bad now because it was a private company. Well, why would that affect anything? I don't know.

I haven't put that much thought into it. What else is on the buffet of news for the day? And that's kind of like the extent of critical thinking I'm seeing with a lot of this stuff. Now, the book starts with you, the newest book, starts with you getting arrested in Spain. Tell me what happened there, because this is, one, a hell of a way to start a book. And two, a terrible way to start what probably would have been a decent vacation or at least business trip. Well, it wasn't a vacation. I was actually invited to Madrid by the chief anti-corruption prosecutor of Spain. We had found money connected to the murder of my lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, that had gone into buying luxury real estate on the Spanish coast.

I had written a criminal complaint to the prosecutor. He invited me to give him a formal testimony about the evidence. And so I showed up in Madrid. I go to my hotel. I sleep there overnight. I wake up the next morning. I'm about to go to the prosecutor. I opened my door, and there are two Spanish police officers, uniformed, standing outside my door. They asked me for my ID. I show it to them, and they say, you're under arrest. I say, what for? Interpol Russia.

So basically, I've been arrested by the Spanish police, one branch of the Spanish police on the instructions of people in Russia who were being investigated by another branch of the Spanish police for money laundering. So thankfully, I tweeted out that I was being arrested. They throw me in the police car. By the time we get to the police station, 50 journalists have called up the Interpol, 50 more have called up the Spanish Interior Ministry, and everybody realized what a complete, unbelievable mess they had gotten themselves into.

And a few hours later, I was released. But my God, I mean, you're right. It's a terrible way to start anything. And that's been the story of my life for the last 12 years. You're so fortunate that you thought to tweet this out. It makes me want to get more Twitter. followers. I barely use that platform. I answered DMs from show fans and stuff like that. But by the way, I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter for everyone listening. I post somewhat funny memes and other nonsense

in the occasional report of my unjust arrest and detention overseas. So you tweet this out, and everybody who sees it, it's like, wait, you got arrested by Interpol. So they're interested in why what they probably also have figured out what's happening, if they're a journalist that covers this. And then thankfully, the Spanish police slash Interpol is inundated with enough calls that they take another look at the arrest warrant and realize that it's just Russia trying to, what, abuse Interpol's red notice system? Well, in fact, this was like the sixth time I had been put on Interpol's red notice list since Russia started trying to chase me. So after the Magnitsky Act was passed, this is legislation that sanctions, freezes assets of Russian human rights violators and

kleptocrats. Putin has gone after me in every way possible. And he's been chasing me all over the world with these Interpol arrest warrants. And so this is a lot of the world. And so this is, like the six one. And it also raises some pretty disturbing questions about Interpol. This is supposed to be the international police organization. They're supposed to be chasing fugitives. They're not supposed to be chasing people who are reporting crimes of Russian government officials. Right. On behalf of the Russian government trying to shut them up, get them back to Russia and kill them. Interpol has effectively become weaponized by the Russian government slash Russian mafia to go after their enemies. This is terrifying because I can imagine a country like Iran or China saying,

oh, we have a political dissident that's speaking out on social media. Let's get him arrested on his way from Mexico to the United States. This is exactly what happens over and over and over again. And those two countries plus a whole bunch of other really bad ones, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, you've mentioned Iran, and China in particular, you've got all these people, Uyghurs, Muslims from Xinjiang and China, and the Chinese have decided to pull a Hitler on these people, and they're now trying to basically exterminate the entire population, not just the population in China. They put them all

in concentration camps, but anyone who escapes, they chase them down in Dubai and all sorts of places with Interpol. And this is supposed to be the organization that the International Police Organization is shocking. Yeah, it's really, do you think it's malicious or is it, I mean, of course the country's doing it are malicious, but with respect to Interpol, Is it just, it's a bureaucratic nightmare and nobody's really paying attention? Or is it like somebody in there has it out for you or has one? Is on the take maybe from these countries? Like, how is this happening?

Is it sort of like negligence or malicious malice? It's kind of a combination. So on one hand, Interpol is not like a being. It's just like a, it's a collection of countries that belong to it. 192 countries belong to it. It is a bit malicious. So they have all these different committees. So one of the committees they have is the committee to review the fine.

of cases that are deemed to be politically motivated, like mine. And like one of the seven people who used to sit on that committee was the guy from the Russian Interior Ministry who issued these politically motivated red notices. I mean, it's like Saudi Arabia sitting on the UN Human Rights Council. I'm just going to use that exact same example. It's Saudi Arabia sitting on the UNHCR and being like, yes, we believe in human rights, except for that guy that we chopped into little pieces at the embassy, but let's not talk about that. So you'd think, well, they're going to have to select these folks better. No, no thanks. We're just going to, I mean, it's almost like, hey, we want to get somebody on that committee by having them, that's their career goal,

to sit on that committee so that they can push things like that, restaurants for people like you through Interpol and make this international organization that's supposed to catch human traffickers turn it into something that can be used to catch people that Vladimir Putin doesn't like. That's terrifying. That's exactly what happens. And I'm a very high profile guy. I've written two bestselling books. I'm, you know, on TV. I'm on your show. I'm on this stuff. And also, I've got the money to hire lawyers. There's a lot of people, you know, some journalist from some small town who exposed, you know, the regional governor who doesn't have all my resources, you know, who finds themselves arrested by Interpol. And there's nothing they can do. They sit in a Spanish

jail sweltering for six months, begging for mercy. And maybe the Spanish give it to them. Maybe they send them back to Russia, where they're then killed back in their regional prison by the regional governor. Horrible. Horrific. When you got arrested in Spain, did it occur to you that the cops that arrested you might not even be police officers because I would, the level of paranoia that I would have if I was an enemy of Vladimir Putin would be higher than up. This is a mistake made by the Spanish police. I'd almost be thinking, are these actually Spanish police? Or is this FSB officers posing his Spanish police? Or are they Spanish police that just accepted a hundred thousand dollar bribe from the FSB? And I'm actually going to end up in a container going back to Moscow.

Well, that was exactly my fear. So interestingly, they didn't pat me down or take away my phone, which was very unpoliced like. They threw me in the back of the police car. And in fact, I had an opportunity to take a picture of the back of their heads and then tweet that out just in case nobody believed my first tweet when I was first arrested, just so everyone could see what was going on. And then what was really scary is so they put on the sirens, we're sort of going through the streets of Old Madrid.

It's a lot of traffic. We're ground to halt for a little while. And I'm looking around for any kind of sign of a police station because I'm thinking to myself exactly what you said, which is, what if these guys at just, bought a couple uniforms, stolen a police car, pretended they were police officers, came into the hotel. What if they are just a bunch of kidnappers? So we're driving through the streets, and then we come to a square, and the car slows down and pulls to a stop in front of a nondescript office building.

There's no flags, no insignias of the Spanish national police in front of it, and then the guys order me out of the car. I say, what are we doing here? They don't speak good English, I don't speak good Spanish. And they say medical exam. Oh, yeah. I'm thinking medical exam. And here I could just picture, I'm going into some thing that someone holds me down, some guy in a cheap suit injects me to something, and then I wake up in that shipping container on a slow boat to Russia. I, like, balled my fists, and I kind of got into this, like, you know, adrenaline mode. These guys could see that there's about to be trouble. There's two of them, one of me. They're definitely bigger than me, but then one of them starts frantically making a call. And he makes a call

and then he comes back and puts his phone in front of me and with a Google translate and says, this is standard protocol. And I say, I want my lawyer. And he said, no lawyer. I say, no medical exam. It was sort of standing off there for a little while. And then he makes another call and then they push me back into the car and off we go again. And then we finally arrive at the police station.

And even though I'm being arrested on a Russian warrant, I'm relieved. I'm at the police station. Yeah. And not being, you know, carted off, put on a rendition flight or in a container back to Russia. No kidding. Yeah, it's almost like I'm imagining being there and going, oh, thank God you guys are actually the police and they're just confused, right? Like you get arrested, you're freaking out in the beginning and then you end at the police station. You're like, oh, yes, thank goodness.

I'm actually at the police station, not at a small airport with a rusty plane about to take out or whatever, the equivalent thereof. At that point, though, people are doing a lot of work while you're, I guess, I don't know, sitting there staring at your shoes, right? And finally, they end up letting you go, which seems like a really lucky brain. How long were you in the police station? Not long, like a couple hours maybe. Okay. What's interesting about it is when I walked in there with these police officers, all these guys in the police station were like, there was like this air of excitement.

They thought that they had like, I mean, it's not every day that they catch an international fugitive wanted by Russia. They thought they had like had the modern day Carlos the jackal or something. And so everybody's sort of popping their head into the holding cell to get a good look at me and all this kind of stuff. And you could kind of feel the excitement of the air. This was like a big deal for these people. And when they finally got the notification from Interpol, let me go.

You could feel the whole place had deflated. Like, you know, somehow this guy's going to walk. And then interestingly, the guys who had arrested me, one of them came up to me with a translator. And she said, you know, we posted a picture of the back of his head on Twitter. Can you remove it? And I said, is it illegal for me to do that? And they kind of both looked down and sort of shrugged.

And I said, no, I'm not going to do it. And that picture is still up on Twitter as of today. But the most interesting part is then they said, well, we'd be happy to offer you ride wherever you need to go. And I said, well, I don't really want to do that at this point. Yeah, no care. And they said, where are you going? And I said, I'm going to meet with prosecutor Grinda. This is like this big name in the attorney general practically or whatever of Spain. And all of a sudden, they're like faces drop like, oh, my God.

And they said, no, no, no, we don't have to go in that car. We have a much nicer car to take you there. And they took me to the prosecutor's office. And let me tell you, the prosecutor was so unbelievably mad. I bet. If there was any uncertainty about him investigating this case before that happened, he was going to investigate this case until the final freeze. That is, he must have been so embarrassed. Like, yeah, come and meet with me. It's going to be great. You get arrested on the way to the meeting, and then you get dropped off at the meeting by the

cops that arrested you. And he's like, what's going on? Because he's on the fence, but he's willing to hear you out. Well, what happened was, we got a red notice for this guy. So he went to his hotel, took him out of the hotel in front of the manager and all the staff. And then we told the whole police station that we arrested this big criminal. And then we got an email from, I don't know, a bunch of emails from 50 different places at Interpol saying, actually, this is a huge mistake. Sorry about the. And then it's like, oh, okay, I no longer really need you to convince me that the Kremlin has its tentacles into this, because if they had you arrested on the way to my office, I think maybe you're on to something, right? It's like where there's, they don't need to sniff for the

smoke anymore. There's already flames. I think he was going to do it anyways, but he sunk his teeth into this case as hard as one can because that doesn't happen. That shouldn't happen. Yeah, I'm going to keep your phone number and email on speed dial in case I get arrested overseas for some of these interviews that I'm doing with people like you. I mean, everybody criticizes Twitter, but Twitter saved my life. Yeah, I guess you're going to stay on it no matter what happens with Elon here, at least it's going to take a lot to get you off the platform now, I suppose. Elon's not a big friend of Putin, so I think that's good for me. True. Yeah, you know, I thought about that. I had, I got Tesla stock. And I was thinking, what are the risks involved with having a lot of Tesla stock? And I thought, who else makes rockets? Latimer Putin and Elon Musk, and that's pretty much it, maybe some Chinese company that won't sell internationally. And maybe that, you know, what kind of quality are there? And I thought, okay, so the only competition to SpaceX is a Kremlin-owned, state-backed Soviet-era rocket company. I hope he's got good personal security. So, yeah, he's probably no friend of the Kremlin, or at least the Kremlin's

friend to him as well. A lot of people might be surprised by the fact that you started off as a major investor in Russia. And you came on this show as episode number two. We're going to have a trailer for it at the end of the show so people don't forget if they want kind of a full background. But essentially, and correct any points that I get wrong here, you discovered massive corruption, you researched the corruption and the graft. You used it to expose the graft to the international media, naming oligarchs, shaming these guys, getting them arrested with the aid of several years ago, Vladimir Putin, and then he just sort of became the king oligarch, right? And then decided, actually, I don't really want a watchdog authority activist investor anymore. And he raids your

office and murders your lawyer who lives in Russia. There's obviously a lot more to this story, but this is a really interesting investigation. And I have a few more questions about it because I think it is such a fascinating story. And Sergei Magnitsky, your lawyer, who's like this young guy, really principled going after the stolen funds because he believes that Russia should not have hundreds of millions of dollars of tax money stolen from the people, he ends up dying in jail. Tell me how you started to investigate this, because it became not just where's the money, but also who killed my lawyer? After Sergei died, it was the most traumatic, heartbreaking, life-changing thing that ever happened to me. And I shouldn't say after Sergey died. After

Sergey was brutally murdered because he was killed by eight riot guards with, rubber batons as they beat him to death after they had deprived him of medical attention for six months after he had developed pancreatitis in jail. They tortured him by denying him medical attention and all sorts of other terrible things, and then they killed him. And for me, that was just an unforgivable act of malice that I just had to do something about. So I've put aside all of my business as a fund manager and became a full-time activist using all of my time, all of my resources, and all of my energy to go after the people who killed him to make sure they face justice. That's what I started doing.

And so a lot of the things that we knew about what they did to Sergei, he had actually written down. During his 358 days in detention, he wrote 450 complaints documenting who did what to him, where, how, and when. And he would file these complaints. He'd write them up by hand. He would give them to his lawyer. His lawyer would file them.

They would ignore them. But his lawyer gave us copies. And so after getting these things, we had. the most granular case of torture and abuse that's ever come out of the Russian prison system. And then when Sergei was killed, it was 2009. And so it was during a four-year period that Putin wasn't in power. From 2008 to 2012, I shouldn't say it wasn't in power. He wasn't the president.

He was the prime minister when a guy named Dimitri Medvedev was president. And Medvedev is a total corrupt POS. He was not sort of as ruthless as Putin. And during this time of Medvedev, there was like this. NGO that had been set up to review prison deaths. And normally these NGOs are all kind of fake, but this was a real one, and they hadn't had time to cover anything up. And so the NGO went in, and some very brave investigators from this NGO went and interviewed everybody and looked at all the documents. And there is a document that the prison kept where the guys who beat him

signed a form saying, you know, as instructed, we beat the prisoner with all eight signatures on it. And so, I mean, it's like, you know, they weren't even trying to cover it up. Wow. And then there's pictures of his body. You can see him beaten. There's all this terrible stuff they did to him. We have all the evidence. But they don't care about that. Even with factual documentary evidence, they just make stuff up. And they say there was no sign of violence. You know, Sergei Magnitsky died of natural causes, no sign of violence. This was the announcement from the prison service. And then the Russian prosecutor's office says, we've investigated and found no foul play. And everybody just repeated it all the way through the line, right up to Vladimir Putin. It was this remarkable cover-up. which was just so brazen because all the evidence said that there was this terrible crime committed. And, you know, the crime is one thing, but the cover-up was just as much of a thing, which is we could see Vladimir Putin personally getting involved in the cover-up of murder. You know, Vladimir Putin didn't hit him with a rubber baton, but Vladimir Putin participated in the exoneration and the false narrative that they then started

spreading that Sergei Magnitsky died of natural causes and there was nothing to it. It's crazy to see this kind of mafia state behavior, but now we're used to it, and we'll talk a little bit about how much more brazen Russia, I should say, the Kremlin has become. The investigation itself was pretty interesting. Tell me about this 1782 subpoena and how you use this to trace the money trail. I'm a lawyer, so I'm a little bit nerding out on some of this legal stuff, but I think this was interesting enough even for non-lawyers, because I'd never heard this. There were two parts of the investigation. The first part was the physical violence, the murder, and the second part the investigation, which took place after he was killed, was who got the money, who got the

$230 million that Sergey Magnitsky had discovered, exposed, and was killed over. And we knew that none of these guys kept that money in Russia. They keep the money outside of Russia, where it's safe. After they've stolen it, they want to keep it safe. And we knew that they kept it in dollars. And there's something really unbelievable about the world financial system that most people don't know, which is that anytime a bank, any bank in the world, wants to send a dollar to another bank in the world. So let's just say there's two Russian banks. One wants to send a dollar from one Russian bank to a second Russian bank. They don't send it directly to the bank.

They've got to send it to, let's say, an Austrian bank that has a correspondent account within J.P. Morgan in New York that then sends it back to another Austrian bank with it. And for a split second, the money between those two Russian banks goes through J.P. Morgan in New York or Wells Fargo, or there's one of seven, they call them money, money center banks. And what's interesting is all those banks are in New York. If you want to get information on money flowing from one Russian bank to another, as long as it's in dollars, you can go to the court in New York and you can file something called the 1782 subpoena. And the 1782 subpoena says, we want J.P. Morgan to hand over all dollar transfers between this bank and that bank.

And guess what? G.B. Morgan doesn't care or Citibank or whoever it is your subpoenaing that they're being asked by a court to hand over, they handed over him. And we did that. And we got all these dollar transfers between all these Russian banks. And we can start using that. And we have this amazing database. And we can start using that database to start tracking down who got the money. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Bill Browder. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book guests like Bill Browder, It's because of my network and I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at

Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. The course is all about improving your networking and your connection skills, but also about inspiring others to develop personal and professional relationships with you. It'll make you a better networker and a better connector and also a better thinker. That's all free at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course and most of the guests on our show subscribe and contribute to the course as well. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. back to Bill Browder. This database, this money tracing database that you created, I think, is really interesting because I'm imagining that it just shows a pretty clear, this genius guy who, if traces

money laundering, I guess, that you'd hired. It really is impressive, because you can see the money, and I'm visualizing it, of course, because I read about it in an audio book, but you can see the money go from Alpha Bank or whatever into these other accounts, and because everything is sort of pinging this bank in New York. It's almost like blotizing it. It's almost like blotizing. where it's like, well, we just have to have a record in New York. That's it. No big deal. We're not going to step into the transaction. We're not going to do anything with the transaction. It's just a little line in a spreadsheet, but those things add up to just a map of where the dollars are. It's incredible. It's incredible, but it's also worth pointing out that you have

to be highly motivated to figure it out because it's so complicated. It's like a huge puzzle that you have to spend a lot of time to recreate. The guys who put it together didn't expect that anyone would have the time, the energy or the resources to put it all together. But the other thing that's really important to know is that when someone launders money, there's no such thing really of money laundering because all dollar transfers leave an indelible trail. The only real way of laundering money is to do it in cash, but you can't take out or deposit more than $10,000 in cash without filing all sorts of things with the regulatory authorities. And so all money gets transferred. And so what money launderers think is that if they just make it complicated enough,

and nobody is ever going to figure it out. But they never anticipated that Phil Browder and my colleague by Dean Kleiner and a bunch of other guys who are heartbroken about the murder of our friend and lawyer, we're going to spend our lives recreating the trail so that we could then take that information and get them prosecuted. Yeah, it's really incredible. I mean, we're making almost sound like these guys are sort of geniuses with their dollar transfers. The bulk of these guys that are doing this are kind of, they're not really trying that hard to obfuscate what they're doing, right? There's public servants on a $15,000 a year or less salary flexing on Instagram and V-contact, which is like the Russian Facebook with a picture of a yacht

and a villa. And it's like, well, where'd you get the money for that? You could work your entire career and not make the down payment on this. These guys are just like knuckleheads. I mean, true knuckleheads up and down the chain. So, so brazen. So you've got these guys, they don't seem to care. They go on first-class vacations to Paris and staying at five-star hotels for $1,500 night rooms and wearing Armani suit. on their police raids and their Porsche cayens on $15,000 a year salaries. What do they think that nobody is going to notice? It just shows you that the culture of corruption is almost the desire to show status

in that culture outweighs the desire to hide the fact that they're stealing the money, right, which is incredible because it just shows you that there's so little consequence for actually stealing the money that the benefit from flexing online is actually larger because they've made that calculation. There's no question. And by the way, so we've just been talking about these sort of knucklehead cops, but you go up to like the minister of something in Russia who's sitting on a $500 million super yacht.

I think it's actually an important part of their whole culture. They have to show off because that's the only way that they can sort of show who's more important than the other guy. It's kind of like wealth begets wealth. And anybody who doesn't do that is assumed to be a weak loser. and then they just gobble them up. And so they're much more worried about each other than they're worried about consequences for their actions.

They're worried about like somebody saying, you're a nobody, I want to steal from the people you're stealing from. So they've got to be like doing all this super yacht, Porsche Cayenne Armani suit stuff. It reminds me of some of the like old school Middle Eastern culture where they try and outgift each other because the more you're able to sort of waste, the more you look like you can afford to waste it.

Right? So they're like, oh, I'm going to invite you over for a meal and there's like enough food for 150 people and they send you back with your annual salary worth of gifts on Campbellback or whatever. And you're like, why do that? And the whole point, and it's like their enemy or somebody they don't like. And the whole point is to be like, I'm so rich and powerful that I can waste all of this on you without batting an eye. Yeah. I mean, it's some version of that. And by the way, everyone always asks me when you take it right up to the top, why does Putin need all this money? They're saying, why does he need $200 billion? And my answer is always that

You can't be the most powerful person in the country unless you're also the richest person and the most brutal person and the most everythingest person because that's just how it works. And so it's just one of these sort of you've got to just be showing everything off at all times about everything. And it's not just that. You know, like there's not a person in the world that Putin has ever met with on time. He leaves the U.S. president sitting for an hour and a half just to show him that like his time is more important than the other guy. Yeah, it's just a more advanced version of like the guy who shakes your hand by putting his hand on top and then they do the same thing and then they put their hand on top of yours and it's like, okay, all right, I get it. You know, the stuff you outgrew in high school or college, the guy who tries to grip your hand really strongly, they're just doing that, but they're 70 years old and they've never outgrown it. It's part of the culture. It's interesting that you mentioned that Putin has to be the everythingist guy, right? Because when I think about what he's doing now in Ukraine, my initial thought was, oh, now he's thinking about his place in the history. book, but I sort of scratched that idea now because what is a guy who's going to be remembered for stealing everything from his people, murdering his opponents, clamping down on free media and

ideas? I don't know. I'm on the fence. Like, is he going to, is he trying to be remembered for something more than just being a horrible, you know, Stalin 2.0? Or is this whole thing having nothing to do with legacy? Because a guy like that doesn't care about legacy. He just cares about, like, not getting murdered. You hit the nail on the head. And I'm so glad you said that. I mean, there's so many people that are all these specialists saying he's trying to create this grand imperial Russia or he's something about NATO that's caused him to do all this. No, the reason he's doing this is because he's a scared little man. Vladimir Putin is tiny, by the way. Sometimes he actually wears platform shoes and he still looks tiny. I mean, he's a tiny, tiny little man who's like been

picked on and beaten up as a child and brutalized in all sorts of terrible ways. And he's got unbelievable psychological problems. And he thinks everybody's out to get him. And after a period of time, everyone is out to get him because he's stolen all the money and done all this stuff. And so every once in a while, when he starts getting really scared, he starts a war. He started a war in 2008 and his approval rates went up. He started a war in 2014 with taking Crimea. His approval ratings go up and he starts this war and his approval ratings go up. This is all about a scared little man, a greedy scared little man who's stolen a lot of money,

who was desperately afraid that his people at one point were just going to snap. He looks at those pictures of what happened to Chochescu. the dictator in Romania hanging from a lamppost or watching what happened to Gaddafi getting killed in an underground tunnel. And he thinks, I don't want that to happen to me. And the best way to make sure it doesn't happen to me is to create a war straight out of dictators' playbook 101, start a war, get everyone to rally around the flag, do a whole bunch of propaganda. And by the way, let's get rid of all other media so nobody knows what's really going on. And that's what this war is about. And it has nothing to do with legacy, has nothing to do with the grand vision. This has to do

with a scared, little greedy man who doesn't want to get overthrown. I understand his perspective, not that I'm not approving of it at all, but of course, if I'm looking at Chochescu or Gaddafi, I mean, I think Gaddafi was executed, and might be a little crude here, but I think someone literally like shoved a pistol up as keister and shot him in a drainage ditch. I mean, it was pretty undignified, and I think it was probably a little bit slower than you'd want to go out as well. Saddam Hussein was lucky to get hanged after being captured by the United States and allies. And that was also a pretty bad way to go too, right? They found that guy in a hole.

So it makes sense what he's doing, but it also seems like Russia constantly overplays their hand. During the Magnitsky case, they did the same thing, right? They're sending crime bosses to meet with government officials in public, and you found like a camera crew in the lobby of a hotel to go and film it, right? They're lobbying officials to remove discussion of the Magnitsky Act and sanctions to get it off the docket of the U.S. Congress. And it just seems like Russia constantly overplays their hand, just like with the Ukraine

war. But on the other hand, they get away with it a lot, right? They poison people in the UK. They poison former FSB agents or dissidents, and they poison Alexei Navalny and throw them in prison. And it's just, what do you think about this? Because they do seem to get away with a lot, but they also really seem to miscalculate. And is that just the pitfalls of being a dictator who's surrounded by people who are afraid to tell him, hey, this is a bad idea, man.

You're going to get caught. No question. So it's like the people who end up working for Putin are like, see students, from D universities that have like no motivation. They're only motivated by money. And so every operation that they execute on is just a failure. My whole story, if you read my book, it's just like one unbelievable sort of mess up after another

when they're trying to get me and trying to get my colleagues and trying to do all this things that they're doing, they can't get it right once. Because they have an unlimited amount of money, nobody gets into trouble for this. They just say, okay, we can do 100 operations. All we have to do is have one of them be successful. and we're happy. And we don't care how much money has been wasted. There's no government accounting

office that's going to look into seeing, well, how many of these surveillance operations or influence operations succeeded and how many didn't. They just try everything and see what happens and nobody cares. And they've been doing that for a long time. And every once in a while, they succeed and do something really horrific. And as you said, nothing happens to them or nothing has happened to them. For 22 years, nothing happened. Putin poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium 210 in London. but did the British authorities do nothing. They poisoned Sergei Scripal with Novichuk. It was a chemical weapons attack.

They had to close down an entire town in the UK. What happened after that? All sorts of British people went to the World Cup six months later. Nothing happened. And on and on and on. They shoot down passenger planes invade Georgia, do all this kind of stuff. Nothing happens. And so Putin was very much of the opinion that he could go into Ukraine on a full-scale invasion

and were also scared, timid, appeasing, and greedy, not wanting to upset the flow of Russian money, that we're just going to protest, say we condemn this thing, sanction a few soldiers and go back to business. And that's what gave him the confidence to do this. And this is the first time that something is happening. I mean, there are real dire consequences for Putin and for Russia as a result of finally waking up to, you know, his evil. But boy, oh boy, if we had just woken up earlier, we could have avoided such unbelievable tragedy that we're watching on our television screens every day. I was just going to ask you, I have it here for the end of the show, but it's got to be a little

irritating, I guess, I'm trying to find the right word. You got to be a little annoyed, for lack of a better word, that you spent 10 years going after these oligarchs and all their illicit and stolen funds. And very few people, or at least not enough people, cared, until there was this invasion. Or does all of it just sort of make sense given a context and circumstances? Because he has done so many horrible things. Georgia, Crimea, poisoning in the UK, let's not forget to mention he murdered your attorney, right? That's why we're talking, one of the reasons you wrote the book and that we're talking right now.

And it's like, you must just be thinking, for God's sake, how many times do I have to shake you before you wake up? Well, you know, you say annoyed, furious is probably the right, beyond furious, infuriated to the degree you can't even imagine. And not for my own vanity or anything like that, but infuriated because I'm watching all these children and women and men and everybody just getting obliterated in Boucher. that people being shot with their hands tied behind their back and women raped, you know, this didn't

have to happen. And all these so-called leaders that were just not leading us, they were just sitting there, you know, twiddling their thumbs and talking self-important policy talk in their own bubbles when this guy with this mass killer was on the loose for 20 years and nobody wanted to do anything. And it just breaks my heart and it infuriates me to see that what he's been allowed to get away with. And now everybody's acting, it's way too little, way too late. God help us. We're just beginning to see the tragedy of this situation. A lot of people in Russia have also been killed for opposing Putin, Alexei Navalny, who many people have heard of got poisoned and then went back to Russia and now ended up in prison as well. So there's a lot of people have been asking me like, why does nobody oppose this guy? And the answer

is they do. They end up dead or in prison. And those are just two examples that come to mind. When he was trying to cover up the theft and the murder of your attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, he banned adoption, and a lot of people don't really understand what that all means. Can you speak to that a little bit? The adoption thing is kind of like a, it's almost like a code word, right? But also, it does end up killing real children in Russia. No, it's horrifying. So the Magnitsky Act, which is this legislation that I've been working on after Sergei Magnitsky was killed, passed on December 14th, 2012. And Vladimir Putin was just apoplectic. He just couldn't have imagined anyone would disrespect him in such a way. And his immediate reaction was to ban the adoption of Russian orphans by

American families. Now, that sounds bad on the surface, but it's actually a hundred times worse than you can imagine. The way the adoption system worked in Russia was that only the sick ones were put up for adoption, the ones with Down syndrome, spina bifida, fetal alcohol syndrome, the ones that Russian families didn't want, they would put up for adoptions. And Americans would come with open arms and open hearts and take these sick children back to America and nurse them to health and provide them with a good life. And by banning the adoption, what he did was basically sentenced some of these kids to death because in orphanages, they don't have the resources to deal with these problems.

And so Vladimir Putin was effectively killing his own orphans in order to protest a piece of legislation that would sanction corrupt officials in his government. And if that didn't tell you what kind of person Vladimir Putin was, I don't know what would. I mean, you know, killing defenseless children to protect corrupt officials is the definition of evil and the definition of Vladimir Putin. So he's a big fan of you for reasons we've discussed here. you get sentenced in absentia to nine years hard labor by Russia, which is probably like not even the worst case scenario of what might happen if you actually ended up getting caught by them anyways. You're very successful with this legislation, right? The European Union starts to take comparable legislation on board.

They start freezing apartments in the old building. I used to live in J.P. Morgan's old bank on Wall Street. It's an apartment building now, and there's all these empty units in there. And we just assumed they were investments. And I guess we were kind of right. Many of them were later seized by the government because they were kind of just wallets for corrupt officials that would go and buy a really expensive condo and then just say, well, it's better than having cash in a Russian bank or in a foreign denomination. And the legal case here that you go through

is really something else. You're fighting these Russians in U.S. courts, but they are throwing so much money at this. I'm wondering, was it hard to retain counsel just because of who your opponent was. I mean, when there's hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially billions in legal fees going anywhere, you're going to have people who just don't want to work with you because the other side has so much money. Even worse than that. So get this. So in order to find the money from the Magnitsky murder that went to America, we hired the best money laundering specialist that existed on the planet. At the time, it was a guy named John Moscow. I'm not making a joke because he was John Moscow. He was a former New York district attorney prosecutor who did all sorts of famous money laundering

cases. So we hire him to find the money for us. He does a bunch of stuff to help us find the money, then disappears when the Madoff bankruptcy comes in because they make so much money on Madoff. He just let us hang out to dry because he wasn't a good guy. But that's kind of horrible and sleazy, but not the worst thing in the world, but pretty bad. Then all of a sudden, once we get a few more leads, we find out where all the money has gone. We file a complaint with a New York district attorney's office. They pass it up to the U.S. Department of Justice. The Department of Justice seizes $20 million worth of real estate in Manhattan,

including in that building and the J.P. Morgan building you lived in. And then who shows up on the other side, but none other than John Moscow representing the other side. He switched sides in the same case. Okay. Talk about Sleazy. And so he knew, and by the way, at this point, I'm being threatened. I'm getting all sorts of death threats and other threats from the Russian government.

He knew about that because we talked about it when he was my lawyer. The first thing he does is the issues a subpoena asking me to hand over unbelievable numbers of documents, including my own personal security arrangements, my travel records, all this kind of stuff. I mean, monstrous, like, you can't believe. And why is he doing it? Because they're paying him a lot of money. Yeah.

It's so, first of all, for people going, wait, lawyers can just switch sides. No, they can't actually do that. It's called a conflict of interest. you're supposed to be conflicted out. I've had to switch lawyers because a lawyer that was representing me in something joined at the law firm with another lawyer who used to represent another client who I'm also in a dispute with years ago. And they go, yeah, just to be safe. We're going to, I'm going to have to refer you to someone else. And it's like this is just a very remote chance that there might have been some overlap, not even with the same person, but now with

the same firm. And this guy just switches sides with the packet of documents you gave him in one hand in a packet of instructions from your adversaries in another and is trying to pretend like there's nothing wrong with that. It's like the most unethical thing you can possibly do as an attorney, one of. And why did he do it? Because he got paid millions and millions of dollars by the Russians to do it. And millions and millions of dollars to basically to try to subpoena me for all information that the Russians wanted to get hold of, which could, in theory, put my life in grave danger. Yeah. And so what do you have here? You have an American lawyer who's basically subcontracting to the Russian security services.

Right. Trying to figure out how to get your location so that he can go, well, I don't know. Maybe they did misuse the information. You could end up in a, like you said,

in a container on the way back to Russia or just dead in the street somewhere like other opponents of Putin. And that would be because of the information that he tried to get out of you with a subpoena. And he just didn't care enough about anything other than money

to think that that would be a problem. I mean, the guy sounds like a sociopath. That's just my non-professional opinion wouldn't want to get in any trouble saying anything like that. But it certainly sounds that way. It sounds like something a sociopath would do. I mean, you talk about going to Aspen, people tailing you, chasing you, people approaching your children when they were playing outside, trying to see if you were home. They accosted you after the daily show. Tell me about that. That's not usually something you hear. You know, usually you go to a talk show,

you go back to your hotel or a room service, and that's that. You had more excitement. So my first book, which was called Red Notice, had launched the book. It was just at the same time that John Moscow and all of his Russian backers were trying to subpoena me for all of my personal documents, all my private information. And why were they subpoenaed? I mean, because I was the key witness to the government in the case. And so they were saying, okay, we need to depose him and subpoena him for our defense, which is like, why do you need to know my security arrangements for your defense? Why do you need copies of my passport where I travel to for your defense? Why do you need all of my conversations with government officials for your defense. Anyways, they're chasing me all around.

And my assistant was really good. I had this great assistant named Sophie. And she would contact like Fox News or MSNBC and say, listen, we, you know, we have some security things we've concerned about. You know, we don't want to come in the front door. We want to come in like the loading dock. And they say, yeah, yeah, no problem. We completely understand. And so for the full day of my first day, you know, I was going into the loading dock at John Moscow and his colleagues would see me on TV and send someone over to Fox and I'd already be over MSNB. BC by the time, by the time they got over. And the last show of the night was on the Daily Show. And the Daily Show, we said, you know, don't advertise me in advance. So we show up the Daily

Show. They have a side entrance for us. And we like drive up and down the street, nobody there, jump out of the car, going to the side entrance. And the Daily Show is a pretty big deal. And I've never done a comedy show. So, you know, I kind of started forgetting about all the John Moscow and all his nonsense. And, you know, it's like, what do you do in a comedy show? You're supposed to like try to, you know, I've got really serious stuff to talk about it. Am I supposed to be funny? No. So John Stewart was in charge of the Daily Show at the time. He comes in. I say, well, I'm a bit confused here. He said, don't worry. Just tell your story. As you always tell it, I'll do the comedy. You just be yourself. Anyway, so I go in a studio audience. It's like, you know, clapping. I sit down, all the lights shining on me. I do my thing. And, you know, it went really well. He runs a great show. And he really brought out the issues and did it in a good way and a funny way and a respectful way to Sergey. And I'm so relieved after the show was over. Go back into the green room.

My, you know, Sophie was there. Some other friends of mine were there, we're all like, you know, beaming. And I completely forget about the whole John Moscow thing. We step out of the side door to the car. And some guy who's like 300 pounds comes running towards me. And he physically pushes out of the way. Sophie and the other person is with me. And I'm getting into the car.

I'm trying to close the door to the car. He's watching the door open. I'm not even sure who this guy is. Yeah, you could just be getting robbed at this point, right? Or not robbed, but this could be some kind of. And so I scurry out the other side of the car. I kind of make my way up the snowy. I eventually find a taxi. I jump in the taxi and like tell him to go to some hotel I'm not staying

at. And it turned out that this was John Moscow's subpoena guy trying to serve me after the Daily Show. Yeah, just a processor. I'm surprised they don't have more security at the Daily Show because they also have really big A-list celebrities there that could get accosted by somebody on the streets of New York. If it's that easy to just walk up to the car that the person's going into, it's a little bit like, really? It's a little bit surprising. Yeah, well, I mean, in fact, you know, the guy gave me the all clear, it didn't look like anyone was there, he'd just like come out from behind a car. I mean, it's, you know, I mean, I guess anything could happen, but these guys were, were definitely playing for keeps. These guys working for the Russians.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Bill Browder. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers is what keeps the lights on around here. And frankly, well, I kind of needed to pay the team, right? So to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you've heard so you can check out the sponsors for yourself. all in one page, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. All the codes, all the special URLs are right there. I know there's kind of a pain to remember. You don't have to remember anything. You can also search for the sponsors using the search box on the website as well. Please do consider supporting

those who support this show. Now, for the rest of my conversation with Bill Browder. You hire this lawyer, by the way, Michael Kim, whatever you paid this guy, it was absolutely worth every penny, right? This guy seems like a genius. He decides, okay, we can't avoid the subpoena because the judge is sort of, we'll spare the poor judge here, but he was too old to be doing a good job, and he just couldn't even follow the case. So he lets the subpoena go through. And this lawyer, Michael Kim says, oh, you want all that? All right, we'll give you everything you want and more. So he, what, sends over, it's like malicious compliance. Tell me what happened here. This was genius. So they wanted all this stuff, like all this dangerous stuff that I didn't

want to hand over. But they also couched it in a list of like 45 different categories of information. So Michael said, okay, let's just calm down. You know, I was like really agitated. You know, what the Russian intelligence couldn't get by hacking my computers because we had such good computer security, they were going to be able to walk in the front door of a U.S. courtroom and get an 83-year-old senile judge to demand that I hand over, which they succeed in doing. So I was really just bouncing off the walls with like worry and worry for me, my family, my colleagues, and everything. And he said, Bill, just calm down. I've got this. But let's just look at what they want. And so there's like 43 categories of,

documents. He says, is there anything on this list that wouldn't put you in danger? Then I said, yeah, actually this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. And he said, okay, let's give them the stuff that doesn't put you in danger. And so I handed over like the first day, 345,000 documents. On paper, I assume, right? Not on a thumb drive. Of stuff that didn't put me or my colleagues in danger. And then four days later, we handed over another 100,000 documents of things that didn't put us in danger. These guys started to like, you know, understand what was going on. They wanted the stuff that was going to put us in danger. So we just kept on handing over the stuff. And they also wanted to do a deposition. And so deposition is where they put you into a room and they have a video recorder.

And then you have to answer every question they ask. And if you don't, then you're in contempt of court. And the Russians really, like, they had been so desperate to get me into a Russian court and it never succeeded. They wanted to get me into a New York deposition at least and like put me on trial. However they wanted to, the deposition was coming up. And the lawyers, We had given them everything they asked for. We just, I mean, not everything, but we given them what they asked for, just not in the order that they asked for it. And the deposition was approaching.

And so my lawyer, Michael Kim, said, we can delay, you know, if you want to just delay the deposition, we can delay it for as long as you want. And the Russians were so eager to get me into that deposition room that they said, the lawyers, no, we have to have him. And at that point, I hadn't handed over a single document that would put me in jeopardy. So then we go into the deposition room. And Michael Kim, he has all sorts of other good advice. So we did our little deposition training before the deposition

and he hands me a document, which was the complaint I filed. And he said, pretend on them. Here's a document. What's this document? I said, this is the complaint I file. I said, no, no, no, Bill. And it was like a 50-page document. He said, how do you know what they handed you as the complaint you filed?

Maybe it's the front page of the complaint you file with 50 pages of stuff you've never seen before. He said, it's your job to read through every page. And I said, but that will take me like half an hour. And he said, well, whose half an hour is that? They only have seven and a half hours to depose you. And so, it said, you have to read through every page. And they came back and said some other thing like, you stole the money, didn't you? The 230 million, which is what the Russians have been accusing me of.

And I said, of course I didn't. That's ridiculous. They said, no, no, that's not the answer. Any time they ask you a question, you just say yes or no or I don't know. And just remember, you're not talking to people. Pretend you're talking to a mannequin and just say, yes, no, I don't know. And so when I got into that deposition room, the first thing they did was hand me a copy of that complaint. You know, and I read the first page, and I read the first page.

And I read the first page. And everybody was just sitting there like burning. And you could just tell them they were starting to like just within minutes. They were already getting furious. And then every time they asked me a question, I said, yes, no, or I don't know. And they had spent like literally millions of dollars getting me into that room. By the end of it, they hadn't done a single thing to put me or anyone else in danger. And so it was like a total success. Man, it must have been so, I know it was really stressful, but how satisfying was it to have them waste millions of dollars of Russian money a ton of time? And then, you know,

later on, your spoiler alert, the judge says, well, you complied with everything. and, you know, there's nothing here, so you can leave now. And you're leaving, and they're just like, the whole point of this was to get this guy in trouble, and he's walking out the door. And we've probably spent five to seven million bucks in legal fees and all this other crap at this point, and we have nothing to show for it. And I can imagine these FSB agents and these sort of crooked lawyers sitting behind the glass in Moscow or St. Petersburg watching this via live feed and just having a terrible day.

And even worse, for John Moscow and his colleagues, like getting ripped a new one. by their clients who spent all that money and they didn't deliver the goods. Right. He's thinking, oh, I'm going to make these Russians happy. They're going to hire me for everything else. And now he's like, I really hope they don't kill me for this. Guess I'm not going to sleep well for the next decade. You know, couldn't have happened to a better guy, right? Indeed. Your wife, she must be very patient. I know she has crisis PR experience. And given that a decent percentage of your life, especially at that time, is a legitimate crisis. It probably makes her the perfect partner for you at this point in your life, at least. So my wife was a crisis manager in Russia

at a big American DR firm. And being a crisis manager in Russia, there was a lot of crises. And we ended up getting married. And I kind of think it's similar to marrying a tropical disease specialist and then encountering the exact tropical disease that that person specializes in. I mean, she was just, you always knew what to say, knew what to do, knew how to support me. I would be in Russian prison or dead if I hadn't married my wife. I mean, she's just the best person in the world. They've actually tried to meddle with you on the romantic front as well, right? You went to Monaco.

Tell us what happened in Monaco, this kind of ridiculous ham-fisted attempt to honey trap you. So I go to Monaco. Monaco in 2012 was the country hosting some big international political conference called the OSCE parliamentary assembly. It stands for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. I think there's only like 10 people in the world that actually know what the organization does. But the OSCE is a very important human rights body that brings together parliamentarians from all different countries.

And it was a great, great place for me to go and meet members of parliament from all these countries to pitch them on doing a Magnitsky Act in their countries. And so I've been invited to go to this OSCE parliamentary assembly. And I had been given a platform to show a movie, where I showed a movie about how a major organized crime figure had basically merged with the Russian government and had become part of the Russian government to do all these dirty deals like the theft of the $230 million, which led to Sergei Magnetsky being killed. So I go and show this movie. I show it at the OSC Parliamentary Assembly. There's like 50 members of Parliament in attendance. Everybody was quite impressed with the

movie. And at the end of the movie, one of the parliamentarians comes up to me and says there's a dinner taking place at Le Meridian Hotel on the water, we'd love for you to attend. It's being hosted by the government of Monaco. And so I said, great, that sounds like a good opportunity, meet some more parliamentarians, have a nice dinner. I and my colleague, we go to the dinner. As we walk into the hotel, there's all these people speaking Russian. I'm with this guy who works for me, and he knows one of the U.S. staffers, a woman, and he says to her, who are all these Russians? And we're out by the pool at this point, and she says, you know, those guys are by the bar, the fat ones, those are the parliamentarians from Russia, you know, those women with all the jewelry over there, those are the

wives. Over there, the much younger women, really, really attractive. Those are the mistresses and the kids are up in the room with their iPads. Okay, and some things never change. Some things are consistent across international borders, yeah. And so we're, I'm thinking, we've got to get out of here. And my colleagues said, no, no, no, this is really an important thing. We're going to meet lots of other parliamentarians. We've got to make our pitch. I had to skip lunch that day. My stomach was growling, so I go after the buffet,

and the Monaco government has spared no expense. They have got the best fish and shrimp and sharkouterie and all sorts of good stuff. And I grab my napkin with the fork and stuff in it and grab my plate, and I'm standing in line. And I feel something bumping into my back. I'm sorry, I kind of just move forward. I don't know what's bumping in.

And I feel bumping in again. And I turn around, and there's this six-foot blonde model standing behind me, Russian. And she starts talking to me and she says, what do you hear for? And I'm here for this human rights for this conference. I said, what do you hear for? She said, well, I'm normally involved in fashion, but I find politics so interesting. Says no one ever. Correct. And so we're talking a little more. And then a bunch of parliamentarians eventually come up to me and I start talking to them. And she's sort of hanging on the side. And we're talking about the film and all this kind of stuff. And at the end of the

conversation, we really want to get involved in your Magnitsky thing. We have your card. And I I said, yeah, of course. And I hand my card to the first one, the second one, the third one. And there's this Russian girl, and she's got her hand out looking for my card. I handed her my card. Anyways, I stuck around for a while, finished my dinner. I go back to my hotel room, exhausted. And I get this email from Svetlana Melnikova.

And she says, you know, dear Mr. William, this is William on my card. I thought we had a real connection. Would you like to meet for a drink? And I'm thinking, real connection. This is ridiculous. I met this girl for a total of like five minutes standing in line. we have no connection at all. This is like, what is this? Nonsense. I don't reply. A half hour later, she says, dear William, I can't stop thinking about you. Can we please meet? And I'm thinking,

this is ridiculous. I mean, I'm a five foot nine, bald, middle-aged businessman. 21-year-old six-foot blonde models don't throw themselves at me with five minutes. It's ridiculous. It's so clumsy. She's not used to having to try. She's used to having to sit there and guys fall all over her. And she's like, what do I do right now? It's funny. It was ridiculous. It was ridiculous. And of course, it was a honey trap. And the purpose, I don't know what, you know, she would have done if I had given into it. But what I did know is that the Russians were ready to, like, throw resources at this situation in Monaco with a honey trap. You know, it's one of the many, many failed operations that they had executed in these 12-year period. It's got to be scary to have that kind of thing happen because you're thinking, wow, what other things do I think are normal that are traps? Like that was ham-fisted, clumsy and obvious. But what about the old friend that invites you out for a drink that you think is going to be an interesting person to catch up with? Or what about the, I don't even know. I mean, if someone's sitting there all day trying to think about this, they're going to come up with a more convincing example than I can come up with on the spot. And you might not even be thinking about it. I mean, you must be on your guard for all kinds of things almost all the time.

Yeah, there's no question. I've got to be on guard, and I just don't do a lot of things that normal people do. I don't just meet strangers. Everybody has to come through somebody. Everybody has to be vetted. I don't go to the same restaurant twice. Many, many things that normal people just take for granted that I don't do. Yeah, I can imagine. I assume also you would never fly over Russian airspace, or not even just Russian airspace, or not even just Russian airspace, Belorussian, the stands in Central Asia. Is there other places you probably can't even fly over, right? Of course. I would never go anywhere near Russian airspace. or any of these air spaces, or Iranian airspace, or any airspace where, you know, you have a corrupt dictatorial regime. So, you know, if I wanted to go to Australia from the UK, I'd have to fly via Los Angeles because I couldn't fly over the other direction. Oh, yeah, good point. I didn't even think about something like that. For people who don't understand why, in Belarus, there was a, you might know this story better than me. I think there was a flight from like Latvia or something or Lithuania to Poland and they were flying over Belarus. And there was a journalist to Belarusian dissident journalist on the flight and fighter jets were scrambled in Belarus because of

a fake bomb threat. They forced the plane to land in Minsk and the guy gets taken off the plane. And I don't think anybody's really heard from him since except for these fake videos where he says he's fine, but he's in jail. Well, I was not flying over these countries long before that ever happened because it was obvious that that's something that could happen. And I remember watching that and just my heart sunk. I just tried to picture what it must have felt like to be him. He was flying from Greece to Lithuania and they were like 12 minutes or whatever. into Belarusian airspace, and they obviously had been tipped off about him flying. It took down, it was Ryanair flight.

Yeah, he's a kid. He's 27. I mean, he was 27. Like, he's literally just a young dude who is probably, unfortunately, either going to stay in prison for years or just die in there and we'll never see him again. And they took his girlfriend, too. Right. Just shocking stuff. Yeah, dictator playbook. Psychopath, dictator playbook. And, you know, earlier, it seemed like Vladimir Premier Putin had one foot in the civilized world, or he like at least pretended to be civilized, and now most of that pretense is gone. Do you agree with that at all? It seemed like before he would kind of like make headfakes to be like we're part of the international community and we care. And now it's like, you know what, screw it, get rid of all opposition media, even the appearance

of having fair media and trials. Just forget it. We don't have time for that crap anymore. They're just going all in. This was the thing that frustrated me the most was that he would do enough sort of normal stuff, you know, attend the World Economic Forum and the G20 and invite people for summits and host international sports events so that people who sort of wanted to be doing business with him could say, look, you know, it's just a normal guy. He's, you know, okay, so maybe he's a little tough, but, you know, you have to be tough in Russia. Of course, you know, in between, you know, the World Economic Forum and the World Cup, he's like plotting assassinations with banned chemical weapons, but everybody wanted to give him a pass because they all kind of wanted to deal with him

on that basis. And so he had one foot in the civilized world and one foot in the criminal world. And I mean, it was frustrating beyond belief. But at one sense, that's probably why I'm still alive today because, you know, if they killed me, they wouldn't do the World Cup there. You know, I don't know, something like that. But now, he's put both feet in the criminal world and it's really terrifying. That makes me wonder, I was going to say the same thing, right? Maybe that's why you're still here. Do you feel like you're in more danger now than before? Because he's kind of already facing most of the consequences from sanctions that the world can put on him. Sure, there's other levers, but he has less and less to lose now than he did before.

There's no question that I'm in greater danger. On one hand, so he's given the instruction to get Bill Browder as of 10 years ago. And once he's given that instruction, the apparatus acts of that instruction. Now, I can argue on one hand that he's, you know, got a lot of other enemies as bad as I am right now. But on the other hand, he's already given the instruction. And there's no, you know, whatever restraint they had before, they're not going to exercise now. Right. Like before maybe they wouldn't do something horrible. I apologize for bringing up these kinds of examples. But before it, maybe they wouldn't just like try and run you over in your driveway. But now it's like, well, screw it. What do we have to lose? And it's not like he cares about

the person doing it in the UK going to prison. Well, he doesn't care about his own troops. He's sending tens of thousands of them to get slaughtered over in Ukraine anyway. So what's one more, right? in getting arrested and spending life in prison in the United Kingdom, especially if they're just going to deny it and make it, you know, say, we don't know that guy. I think a lot of people are wondering, why are we sanctioning oligarchs if they don't have any real influence over Vladimir Putin? A lot of people think, oh, these guys, you know, they put him there, but it's actually the other way around with the oligarchs, right? They sort of serve at the pleasure of the king, so to speak, in exchange for having no political ambitions. Why are we going after these guys if they can't

actually do anything? Well, it's real simple, because the oligarchs are the custodians. of Putin's fortune. If you want to go after Putin, we put sanctions on him shortly after he declared war, but he doesn't have any money in his own name. He has money held by these guys. And so if you want to freeze his money, you freeze their money. And we basically have to make it so he doesn't have access to any money so that we degrade his financial ability to execute this war. That's why you go after the oligarchs. They're never going to rise up. They're so scared of Vladimir Putin. They behave like, you know, they're practically pissing in their pants when they're in his presence. They're so scared. Yeah, I think a lot of people,

People don't realize that early in the game, Vladimir Putin put one of the top, the richest men in Russia behind bars for like a decade, Mikhail Kortikovsky. The idea behind that was, hey, look what I can do to the number one guy and you're the number 15 guy? What do you think you're going to do? How do you think you're going to fare at the end of this? So what you get to do now is run an aluminum company and give me whatever I want, whenever I want it, and hold the assets in your name or in your company so that I don't look like I have money. And if you don't want to do it, then you're going to die of radiation poisoning and somebody else is going to take the company. Exactly. That's the deal. That is the Russian system. And that's why no oligarch is ever going to rise up and say anything to Putin.

Too scared. I know you have to run, but one final question here, has this war in Ukraine, I apologize for phrasing it this way, opened more doors for you in terms of getting the Magnitsky act passed, you know, getting legislation and sanction of Russian officials, has this sort of woken up the world, because it seems like anyone sitting on the fence or burying their head in the sand has now been roused from their ignorant slumber, willful or otherwise. Yeah, the doors are swinging wide open, both in terms of new Magnitsky Acts and in terms of implementing the Magnetsky Acts in the 34 countries that we have them so that governments actually start sanctioning people properly. I mean, I was just in Washington recently, and it used to be that I'd have to beg for meetings

with, you know, senators and members of Congress. And then when I get into the meetings, I would have to beg them to, like, take some action to call on the government to do something. And then I'd have to, like, call up their staff member 10 times. And then we'd get something done. But it was only like, now all of a sudden, they're, like, asking me for the meetings.

What can we do? You know, how can we push this further? What can we do? It's a whole different environment. Thank God, I'd been patient enough so that I'm here to be able to, like, continue to work on this thing with these people now that there's a red carpet out to, like, do it. Yeah, I think the world is lucky that you didn't give up when they tried to kill you,

kidnap you, get you arrested the first, I don't know, dozen times. Yeah, well, and the reason I didn't give up was because of Sergei Magnitsky. He was 37 years old. He was in much more dangerous circumstances than I've been in. He stood up to them, and he died for doing that. And I owe it to him and his legacy to make sure that I don't, that fear doesn't take over me. Bill Browder, thank you very much. Really appreciate your time and your expertise and your work on this very important cause

that is now just finally starting to come to light in a big way. Thank you. Good questions and real good in-depth stuff, so appreciate it. If you're looking for another episode of the Jordan Harbinger Show to sink your teeth into, here's a trailer for another episode that I think you might enjoy. Making 10 times your money is the financial equivalent of smoking crack cocaine.

And once you do it once, you just want to repeat it over and over and over and over again. It was completely, absolutely Wild West, chaos, gold rush type of situation. The companies were run by these oligarchs, and these oligarchs said, well, we might as well just cheat everybody on everything. And so while I was sitting there down 90%, they were going to steal my last 10 cents on the dollar. I took a decision which nobody had ever taken before, which was to take on one of the oligarchs. I did.

I fought back big time. And I ended up with 15 bodyguards. There was a lead car, a lag car, a side car, three-armed guys in my car. When we got close to the home, they would go and scout the rooftops for snipers. They would look for bombs under the cars and secure the stairwells and then escort me into the apartment. Then I had two guys with automatic weapons sitting in my living room. It was very, very intense, very scary. And after that, I hired a young lawyer named Sergei Magnitsky to help me investigate it.

Sergei and I exposed the crime. The same people who Sergey testified against, arrested him, and then tortured him to try to get him to withdraw his testimony. And they thought, you know, here's a guy. He buys his Starbucks in the morning. He wears a blue suit and a white shirt and a red tie, and he works in the tax practice of an American law firm. He'll buckle in a week.

And it turns out that they got him wrong completely. He's the most principled guy in the world. He was really a man of steel. On the morning of November 17th at 7.45 a.m., I got the call from Sergei's lawyer, and it was the most horrifying, life-changing, soul-destroying news that I could have ever gotten. And if you want to hear more about how Bill Browder took on one of the most powerful men in the world, Vladimir Putin, and continues to fight for change, check out episode three of the Jordan Harbinger show. This story is bananas. And in the book, it really, he goes into a lot of detail about witnesses in the cave. and experts in the case, literally falling off of roofs. The police won't investigate it.

Really, it's just cliche Russian corruption. Oh, the guy fell out a window while tied to a chair. Literally things like this. It's just crazy. The Magnitsky Act further, it doesn't just sanction Russians. There are now sanctions on Saudi assassins who murdered Jamal Khashoggi, that journalist who went into an embassy to get a visa in Turkey and didn't come out alive, came out in pieces

after they killed him and chopped him up. a horrible story. Officials structuring the genocide in China. Burmese officials are also on the sanctions list. Cleptocrats in South Africa, hundreds of others. This really is a very useful piece of law because kleptocrats and some of these horrible, horrible people that are stealing from their own people and murdering those who try to investigate it, they are now finally in fear that they will be next. Because, yes, they might have all the money in the world, but if you have to spend it in your own country that you are busy ruining and you can't go and buy a villa in France or Spain to hang out with your family on your super yacht? Well, that cramps your style a little bit. And finally, something is being

done about this. Also, the Panama Papers, I'd love to do a show about this, but it exposes a lot of financial documents that have these name and shame people from all over the world, especially cutouts and wallets of Vladimir Putin, lots of shell companies where Russian oligarchs keep their money. And Bill is just always, always a great interview. He said something really smart in the book. He said, in my years as an investor, I realize that most people act rationally. If someone appears to act irrationally, it just means you don't have all the information. I find this brilliant. It can be applied to politics, business, police investigations, just about anything.

So that, I thought, was a nice little bonus takeaway from the book. Because as crazy as this story is, we have to remember, Bill is really an expert investor and has done exceedingly well, despite getting robbed by the Russian government. So there's a lot to learn from people like this. And I love having people like this on the show. By the way, if you're into the money laundering thing, I'm going to be doing a lot more on this. I also did another episode about money laundering through London with Oliver Bolo. That's Moneyland, Episode 228. And don't forget Bill Browder, he was on episode three of this show.

So just scroll down in the feed and go ahead and listen to that one right afterwards if you're interested in his story and getting more of the backstory with Sergei Magnitsky. Links to all things Bill Browder will be on the website and the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Please use the website links if you buy books from guests on the show. It does help support the show. Don't forget, I'm going to be interviewing author Ryan Holiday live in person in Los Angeles at the Venice West on June 13th. I'd love to see you there in person. Tickets are available at Jordan Harbinger.com slash tickets.

That's Jordan Harbinger.com slash tickets again. June 13th, Los Angeles at the Venice West. That's me and Ryan Holiday live on stage. Hope to see you there. Transcripts are on the show notes, videos on YouTube, advertisers, deals, and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or just connect with me right there on LinkedIn. Speaking of connecting, I'd love to teach you how I manage my network using software systems and tiny habits. That's our six-minute networking course. The course is free. I don't want your

credit card information. I don't sell anything, remember? I just shill mattresses and egg McMuffins over here. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you can find it. I'm teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty. And most of the guests on the show subscribe and contribute to that course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's into financial crime or is really into the Putin-Russia kleptocrat thing,

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