Oligarch Post-Script: Dollar Bill

I made this little filmlet as a result on the penultimate piece in my series of articles on Timothy Snyder's Yale course on Ukrainian history, and that piece including some of the segment in the Netflix propadoc Turning Point on the cold war where it addresses the '90s Russian oligarchs, and features Bill Browder as an "expert". Here is the url for that piece on my substack: https://men56.substack.com/p/ukraine-russia-and-the-bending-of-c56Show more

A few things to note in the segment on the beginning of Browder's deposition:

- The matter involved is, as you can hear, US vs Prevezon Holdings, which evolved into one of the more notable issues involved in the Russiagate story, linked to the Don Jr. meeting at Trump Tower.

- The deposition took place in April of 2015 and the video of Browder fleeing the subpoena serving into the snowy darkness of Manhattan was posted (by the server) in February of 2015, so I assume that these are regarding the same matter. You can hear from his attorney that Browder is only testifying because he’s been subpoenaed to do so.

- He also clearly wanted the deposition to be confidential, which likely was because he was going to say things that contradicted what he’d been saying (and continues to say) in public. For instance, he always refers to Magnitsky as his lawyer, but I believe somewhere in the deposition he admits Magnitsky wasn’t a lawyer at all, he was an accountant and didn’t have a law degree or any certification to practice law.

- At the swearing-in Browder raises his left hand and has to be told to raise his right - one assumes he did that to avoid being prosecuted for lying under oath, based on a faulty swearing-in.

- At one point the defense attorney mentions Browder’s law firm Firestone Duncan, which includes his attorney in Russia Jamison “Jamie” Firestone (Feuerstein?). Later two of the people listening are identified as Denis Katsyv (owner of Prevezon) and Natalia Veselnitskaya (the Russian attorney who also attended the Don Jr./Manafort Trump Tower meeting).

It's important to remember this lump of feces because he's still out there...