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MSNBC killed reporter Ken Dilanian's exposé of the Wm Browder-Magnitsky hoax. State Department knew about it.
By Lucy Komisar | December 4, 2024
On Thursday Dec 5, William Browder testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on implementation of the global "Magnitsky" laws.
The chair of the committee Ben Cardin (D-Md) wrote the U.S. law. Or rather former State Department official and Browder collaborator Jonathan Winer wrote the law. Browder will likely repeat the assertions of his Magnitsky story, on which the law is based.
Maybe you've heard of William Browder and his alleged "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky, who he says the Russians murdered in 2009 after he exposed a multi-million fraud by officials. Browder has told the tale all over the U.S. and Europe. But MSNBC reporter Ken Dilanian had proof it was a fabrication.
This is the time to tell, for the first time, how MSNBC killed a story by its own national security reporter on Browder's Magnitsky hoax. It killed the report after a legal threat from Browder. And MSNBC has continued to run stories supporting the Browder hoax though it had evidence was not true. The U.S. government and the Congress, including in this hearing, also promote the Browder-Magnitsky hoax. Because it fits U.S. anti-Russia policy. Truth appears irrelevant.
This is a tale of international corruption by a western financier who cleverly used Congress to protect his tax rip-off. This matters, because this relatively unimportant person – a citizen of the UK not the U.S. – in trying to keep millions in tax evasion gains out of the hands of Russian authorities, has had an out-sized impact on American foreign policy.
William Browder was born in 1964 in Princeton, NJ, but in 1998 he traded his American passport for one in Great Britain, which doesn’t tax citizens’ investments held offshore. That was convenient, because his Hermitage Fund was built on offshore companies set up by Mossack Fonseca of Panama Papers fame.
But he still owed Russian taxes on profits from his hedge fund's Russian stock buys, and the Russians' detailed charges now add up to an evaded $100 million.
So, Browder built a wall against Russian tax collectors by getting Congress in 2012 to pass the Magnitsky Act (aka the Browder Protection Act). Browder claimed his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death in prison for having revealed that Russian officials were involved in a tax refund fraud that scammed the Russian Treasury for $230 million. (Note Magnitsky didn’t discover the tax fraud, a pensioner named Rimma Starova did, as Dilanian pointed out. He was jailed because he organized Browder's Hermitage Fund’s $40-million tax evasion.)
This is the time to tell, for the first time, how MSNBC killed a story by its own national security reporter on Browder's Magnitsky hoax. It killed the report after a legal threat from Browder. And MSNBC has continued to run stories supporting the Browder hoax though it had evidence was not true. The U.S. government and the Congress, including in this hearing, also promote the Browder-Magnitsky hoax. Because it fits U.S. anti-Russia policy. Truth appears irrelevant.
This is a tale of international corruption by a western financier who cleverly used Congress to protect his tax rip-off. This matters, because this relatively unimportant person – a citizen of the UK not the U.S. – in trying to keep millions in tax evasion gains out of the hands of Russian authorities, has had an out-sized impact on American foreign policy.
William Browder was born in 1964 in Princeton, NJ, but in 1998 he traded his American passport for one in Great Britain, which doesn’t tax citizens’ investments held offshore. That was convenient, because his Hermitage Fund was built on offshore companies set up by Mossack Fonseca of Panama Papers fame.
But he still owed Russian taxes on profits from his hedge fund's Russian stock buys, and the Russians' detailed charges now add up to an evaded $100 million.
So, Browder built a wall against Russian tax collectors by getting Congress in 2012 to pass the Magnitsky Act (aka the Browder Protection Act). Browder claimed his "lawyer" Sergei Magnitsky was beaten to death in prison for having revealed that Russian officials were involved in a tax refund fraud that scammed the Russian Treasury for $230 million. (Note Magnitsky didn’t discover the tax fraud, a pensioner named Rimma Starova did, as Dilanian pointed out. He was jailed because he organized Browder's Hermitage Fund’s $40-million tax evasion.)
The law bans some Russians from U.S. financial dealings and visas if they are believed to have played a role or benefitted financially from Magnitsky's death or were involved in the criminal conspiracy he (allegedly) uncovered. But Browder supplied no evidence of Magnitsky's "beating" or "revelations." Or even that he was a lawyer. He wasn’t. In fact Browder put out a report that called Magnitsky an auditor. And admitted in a sworn deposition to U.S. federal court 2015 that Magnitsky hadn’t gone to law school or gotten a law license.
Dilanian in the MSNBC News Investigative Unit in Washington had collected evidence that Browder was a tax evader and that his “lawyer," Magnitsky, was the accountant who had cooked his tax books for a decade. He said the story about the murder was also false. Dilanian’s heavily-documented exposé was ready to go in May 2016.
Opposition to the "Magnitsky" law had prompted Russian lawyer Nataliya Veselnitskaya, to get a meeting with Donald Trump Jr, the famous Trump Tower meeting, in June 2016. Her client had been targeted by the Justice Department acting on Browder's supplied but never documented claims. That meeting jump-started the Muller report and was one of its named "key events."
If Dilanian’s story had been broadcast in May 2016, there might have been no Trump Tower meeting, as the Russian lawyer would have had other options. No targeting of Paul Manafort, who was at the meeting. Even an end to Magnitsky Act sanctions which ramped up US-Russia antagonism two years before the Russian annexation of Crimea. And perhaps no Robert Mueller investigation which initially focused on Manafort.
In fact, the Mueller Report repeats, without evidence, Browder’s fabrications about hiring Magnitsky to investigate a tax fraud and being charged by Russian authorities after exposing it.
But Browder's lawyers threatened the conglomerate NBC with a lawsuit, and unlikely as it seems given the network's superior resources, it caved. The letter by Browder lawyers Kobre & Kim was written to Steve Burke, CEO NBC Universal, Mark Hoffman, Chairman of NBC Broadcasting, Andrew Lack, Chairman of NBC News and MSNBC, and the company's counsel, Kimberly D. Harris.
State Department officials dealing with Russia knew about Dilanian's findings and Browder’s threats as they were unfolding, because Browder copied them on his email traffic with the reporter. The cache of messages was revealed by an unknown hacker who obtained the emails of State Department official Robert Otto, Russia Domestic Affairs Division Chief in the Office of Analysis for Russia and Eurasia, which prepares analyses for policy-makers.
His boss, office director, John P. Williams, was also in the Browder-Dilanian email loop. Foreign Policy magazine revealed the hack in July 2017, without naming the target or subject. The facts of the hack and some emails, but not the substance of Dilanian's reporting, have been cited in twitter posts, but not by western media. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California, who was defeated last November, was the only U.S. politician who challenged Browder's story.
A key element is the tax refund fraud, a scam in which fake lawsuits demanded money from complicit companies for defaulting on contracts. The companies used the "payments" to liquidate their profits and zero out their taxes. Several of Browder's shell companies had been re-registered in new names and used to get a refund of $230 million from the Russian Treasury.
Please go to The Komisar Scoop to continue reading.
________Before tomorrow's appearance of conman Wm Browder before Senate Foreign Relations Committee, read this exclusive of how MSNBC reporter Ken Dilanian exposed Browder's lies and the network killed the story. https://t.co/AAx8sH6uNi
— Lucy Komisar (@LucyKomisar) December 4, 2024
More:
Conman Bill's Russian saga:
What does Magnitsky conman Bill think of this interview by Tucker Carlson with the always articulate Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov? Does Browder (MI6 asset) even speak Russian? If Russia wants to "normalize relations" with the US, Browder will do everything he and his MI6 handlers in London can do to prevent that from happening.
Browder's grandfather Earl Browder was involved in the Silvermaster spy group that penetrated US institutions.
Silvermaster Group
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