Instant Alert: Inside the battle between an anti-Putin banker and the firm that produced the Trump-Russia dossier

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Inside the battle between an anti-Putin banker and the firm that produced the Trump-Russia dossier

by Natasha Bertrand on Jan 9, 2018, 10:00 PM

A fierce, but muted, battle erupted last year between banker-turned-human-rights activist Bill Browder and the opposition research firm Fusion GPS.
Fusion is the organization that produced the explosive, unverified dossier that detailed President Donald Trump's alleged ties to, and escapades in, Russia.
That battle escalated on Tuesday when the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, unilaterally released the transcript of an interview the committee conducted with Fusion's cofounder, Glenn Simpson.

A fierce, but muted, battle erupted last year between banker-turned-human-rights activist Bill Browder and the opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which produced the explosive, unverified dossier that detailed President Donald Trump's alleged ties to, and escapades in, Russia.

That battle escalated on Tuesday when the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, unilaterally released the transcript of an interview the committee conducted last August with Fusion's cofounder, Glenn Simpson.

In the interview, Simpson said his work for the American law firm BakerHostetler — which was representing the Russian holding company, Prevezon, accused by the US government of laundering money into New York City real-estate — was focused "on trying to get William Browder to testify under oath about his role in this case and his activities in Russia."

Browder, according to Simpson, had told the Justice Department that the laundered money was stolen from Russia as part of the tax-fraud scheme that his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, had uncovered in 2008.

Magnitsky was arrested and imprisoned that year, and Browder's reputation has become inextricably linked to the global human-rights campaign he launched after Magnitsky died in prison in 2009. Browder and other independent human-rights organizations have said that Magnitsky was beaten to death after he discovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme that implicated high-level Kremlin officials.

Simpson told lawmakers in August that Browder would not answer any of BakerHostetler's questions about Magnitsky and Prevezon's purported involvement in the tax-fraud scheme. Browder also evaded subpoenas, Simpson said.

"So we subpoenaed his hedge fund," Simpson told the committee. "He then changed the hedge fund registration, took his name off, said it was on there by accident, it was a mistake, and said that he had no presence in the United States."

Browder, a wealthy investor who renounced his US citizenship in 1998, has characterized Fusion's work for BakerHostetler as a "smear campaign" and tweeted on Tuesday that Simpson repeated "old and false Russian government attacks on me and Sergei Magnitsky."

"He then whitewashes his accused Russian money launderer clients who received money from the crime Sergei Magnitsky was killed over," Browder continued.

"Glenn Simpson admits in his testimony to a number of facts that show he was part of the Russian anti Magnitsky lobbying campaign in D.C. that were summarized in our DOJ criminal complaint about his conduct filed in 2016."

A fight over FARA

In December 2016, Browder lodged a formal complaint with the Department of Justice alleging that Fusion's work for BakerHostetler on behalf of Prevezon violated disclosure requirements.

That complaint caught the eye of Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who wrote a letter to then-Acting Deputy Attorney General Dana Boente demanding to know whether the Justice Department was investigating Fusion for alleged violations of FARA.

Grassley's interest in the firm wasn't limited to its connection to the Prevezon case. He also wanted the Justice Department to investigate Fusion's role in overseeing "the creation of the unsubstantiated dossier of allegations of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians" — the Trump-Russia dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

Fusion has said that it was hired by an American law firm, which the firm argues would not put it in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Fusion said in a previous statement that the president's "political allies are targeting Fusion GPS because the firm was reported to be the first to raise the alarm over [the] Trump campaign's links to Russia.”

Grassley and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham sent a criminal referral about Steele to the Justice Department last week asking officials to probe whether Steele had lied to federal agents about his contacts with the media. But a spokesperson for Grassley, Taylor Foy, disputed last year that Grassley's interest in Fusion is politically motivated.

"Fusion GPS allegedly failed to register under the law for work it was doing to advance Russian interests by repealing sanctions against human rights violators, and it was doing this work at roughly the same time it was producing the unverified Trump dossier, which relies heavily on Russian sources," Foy said in an emailed statement.

"So of course it would be relevant both to the committee’s review of FARA enforcement and the dossier," she said.

Fusion has denied that its opposition research against Browder on behalf of BakerHostetler was an effort to undermine the Magnitsky Act. The basis for that claim is that Browder was never able to prove that Prevezon engaged in the tax-fraud scheme Magnitsky allegedly uncovered.

But Simpson acknowledged during his testimony in August that BakerHostetler had instructed Fusion to give its Browder research to the Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin. Akhmetshin then lobbied Congress against the Global Magnitsky Act along with Prevezon's Russian lawyer – Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Simpson and Natalia Veselnitskaya

Veselnitsksya and Akhmetshin met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016.

The New York Times disclosed the meeting last summer, prompting reporters to scrutinize Veselnitskaya's relationship with Simpson in an attempt to understand who she is, who she works for, and who works for her.

Simpson told the committee in August that he had known Veselnitskaya since 2014, through their involvement with the Prevezon case, and had known Akhmetshin since he was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Simpson testified that, despite having met with Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin both before and after the Trump Tower meeting to discuss the Prevezon case, he was not made aware of her rendezvous with the high-level campaign officials.

"The lane that I was in was the court case and this fight over whether Browder would have to testify," Simpson said.

Asked about Veselnitskaya in an email last summer, Browder responded with a PowerPoint presentation that he said highlighted the role she played in trying to get the Magnitsky Act repealed in 2016. She had help, the slide deck asserts, from some of the "best and brightest minds" in Washington, including Simpson.

Browder characterized Simpson as "a bit player" and said his vendetta was against "Vladimir Putin, who murdered Magnitsky and covered up the crimes of his officials."

Some, primarily those sympathetic to Moscow, dispute Browder's story about Magnitsky. People close to Simpson contend he is not necessarily one of them. Indeed, Simpson told lawmakers that he was "extremely sympathetic for what happened to Sergei Magnitsky."

But Simpson and Browder have a somewhat bitter history that has become increasingly politicized amid the intensifying probes into Russia's meddling in the presidential election and the Trump campaign's possible role in it.

Simpson told lawmakers in August that Browder "was willing to, you know, hand stuff off to the DOJ anonymously in the beginning and cause them to launch a court case against somebody, but he wasn't interested in speaking under oath about, you know, why he did that, his own activities in Russia."

He said Fusion had uncovered evidence that Browder sought to evade taxes in Russia using "dozens of shell companies in Cyprus and other tax havens," adding that one of his "interests or even obsessions over the last decade has been corruption in Russia and Russian kleptocracy and the police state that was there."

"So I became personally interested in where Bill Browder came from, how he made so much money under Vladimir Putin without getting involved in anything illicit," Simpson said. He characterized Browder's behavior in the Prevezon proceedings as "a determined effort to avoid testifying under oath," which included "running away from subpoenas and making "lurid allegations" against Fusion.

"All of that raised questions in my mind about why he was so determined to not have to answer questions under oath about things that happened in Russia," he added.

Browder pushed back on that claim in a tweet on Tuesday: "Simpson forgot to mention in his testimony-that subpoena was quashed by the court," he wrote. "He also forgot to mention that I was scheduled to be a witness for the DOJ to prosecute accused Russian money launderers (his clients)."

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