Producers’ Pick | Bill Browder: Money Laundering, Murder and Surviving Putin’s Wrath

Bill, you're one of the people to unwind who Vladimir Putin was, what he was up to, and how dangerous he was early on. Is this the Vladimir Putin that you knew and were trying to get through America's heads, how dangerous he is?

Yeah, I've known Vladimir Putin to be a murderer and to be a serial killer for many years. I went around the world trying to get the United States, the European Union, the UK, Canada, to get tough on Vladimir Putin, to treat him as the killer, as the mafia boss that he is. And nobody wanted to listen. Nobody wanted to hear me.

They thought, there must be something wrong with you. You're out of your mind. We deal with him. He's the head of state. He's a sovereign leader. We have to deal with him. And this is what's happened, is by Molly coddling him, by not responding to his previous atrocities, by not doing things, by not sanctioning him the way we should have, he got empowered.

He realized that he could do whatever he wanted, and he could get away with it. And that's why he is in Ukraine right now. Tell everyone the Magnitsky Act and how that is, up until this invasion, the most serious thing to really hit Vladimir Putin's pocketbook. So I had a lawyer in Russia.

His name is Sergei Magnitsky. He uncovered a $230 million government corruption scheme. He exposed it. He testified against the officials involved. And in retaliation, he was arrested, tortured for 358 days and murdered on November 16, 2009.

Since then, I've put aside my activities as a businessman and have made it my life's mission to go after the people that killed him and make sure they face justice. And the Magnitsky Act, named after Sergei Magnitsky, is the law passed in Washington in 2012, which freezes the assets and bans the visas of human rights violators in Russia. It's since been expanded to 33 other countries. There's 34 countries with Magnitsky Act.

It is the basis for which, it's the template for which we are now going after the Putin oligarchs. So one of the blessings was, that you didn't think at the time, was that Barack Obama didn't sign into an executive order. He wasn't really too into this. But Congress was and John McCain was.

Yeah. And so I was blocked at every step of the way. Obama had this thing called the Russian reset. He wanted to reset relations with Russia after the bad relations between Bush and Putin. And they had invaded Georgia already.

They had invaded Georgia already. And Obama tried to stop me. And it's interesting because in America, there's two sources of power.

There's Congress and there's the executive branch. And in Congress, we had a total bipartisan Democrats and Republicans supporting the Magnitsky Act. And we overcame the Obama reset and we got the Magnitsky Act in place as a law. And because it was a law, it couldn't be repealed, rescinded by the stroke of a pen. And it's been in place in spite of all sorts of efforts by Vladimir Putin to get rid of it. And he made it his single largest foreign policy priority to get rid of it. And it survived all sorts of craziness and Russian interference to try to get rid of it. Bill, give me an example of how it's exercised, how it's used, for example.

Well, I mean, the main way I've seen it used that, I mean, it's been used in many, many ways. It's not just against Russians now. It's against all sorts of people.

But it's been used against the killers of Sergei Magnitsky. They're all on that list, but not just them. They freeze their assets, don't let them travel.

Right. So their assets get frozen. And when the U.S. Treasury says your assets are frozen, it doesn't even matter if you have assets in the United States. No bank in the world wants to do business with a person who's on the U.S. Treasury sanctions list because those banks will be in trouble with the U.S. government.

So you could have a bank in Dubai or in Switzerland. And all of a sudden the accounts are frozen of that person. And it's extremely devastating for anybody who's put on the sanctions. And do you think that Putin's felt this?

There's no question he's felt it. This has now been applied not just to Magnitsky's killers, but to all sorts of oligarchs. There's about 20 oligarchs who are on this list. One of them, Roman Abramovich, one of the richest oligarchs. Just today, he had $7 billion frozen in the Channel Island of Jersey off of Britain's coast. He had $7 billion, maybe even a little bit more, frozen in the Cayman Islands. Forced to sell Chelsea? He was forced to sell Chelsea. There was even a story in The Sun, one of the newspapers in London, that he was begging friends for money. A million dollars a day?

Yeah. He's got a high burn rate for running his lifestyle. And so the way I look at it is that we've done a lot of good things so far, more than I could have ever imagined in terms of sanctioning these people. But the one thing that we haven't done, and this is the really upsetting part of the whole story, is that the war is costing Putin a billion dollars a day to run. And he's getting a billion dollars a day from the Germans and the French and the Italians buying his oil and gas.

And so it's kind of a wash at the moment. He can carry on with his war for a long time if our allies don't stop buying his oil and gas. You used Vladimir Putin talking about Bill. And by the way, Bill Browder's got a brand new book out.

Go grab it. Freezing Order, a true story of money laundering, murder, and surviving Vladimir Putin's wrath. Here's Vladimir Putin talking about you. We can actually permit official representatives of the United States, including the members of this very commission headed by Mr. Mueller, we can let them into the country and they will be present to this questioning. But in this case, there is another condition. This kind of effort should be a mutual one. Then we would expect that the Americans would reciprocate and they would question officials, including the officers of law enforcement and intelligence services of the United States, whom we believe are, who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia. And we have to request the presence of our law enforcement.

For instance, we can bring up the Mr. Browder in this particular case. Business associates of Mr. Browder have earned over one and a half billion dollars in Russia. They never paid any taxes, neither in Russia nor in the United States. And yet the money escaped the country. So he says, you didn't pay any taxes.

He would like you back. That was a meeting. It was the postgame of the Trump-Putin press. This was the Helsinki Summit 2018. President Putin, President Trump had a secret meeting. Afterwards, a journalist asked about these 12 military intelligence officers. And Putin said, I want Bill Browder and his U.S. intelligence officers. So on one hand, it's terrifying. On the other hand, I say to myself, I've really achieved something because if I've gotten under Vladimir Putin's skin, then the Magnitsky Act really, really upsets him. There's no question. Here's what Joe Biden said yesterday.

Cut 25. Your family budget, your ability to fill up your tank, none of it should hinge on whether a dictator declares war and commits genocide a half a world away. So he brought up genocide for the first time. And good for him to do that. He brought up genocide. He called him a war criminal previously.

He said Putin's got to go. I mean, the thing that I always worry about is I watch these terrible images. I mean, just the most heartbreaking things I've ever seen on television, you know, children, women raped. I mean, just it's just so awful.

It's not even it's just hard to describe how awful it is. And my worry is that somehow we end up going back to normal with Putin. And we can't do that if the leader of the free world has called him a war criminal and declared it as genocide.

There's no way that that's possible. And I mean, I thank God that we have now defined it. So and now that is defined, we have to finish this off. I just yeah, I think the president's slow to understand that the weapons are coming way too slow. He has backed off sending up these attack helicopters, according to our reporters, even though the Washington Post talked about it and considering it. We can't let I mean, the Brits are saying, you know, with America's not going to give you harpoons. We will give you we will give you rockets to be able to take out ships in the Black Sea from shore. I don't know why we're going so slow. On some level, I think we fear him losing power.

We should not fear it. Bill Browder is going to be back with us another segment. Go out and order his book. I know you love the first one.

This one's called Freezing Order. Don't move. If you're interested in it, Brian's talking about it. You're with Brian Kilmeade. One of the spokespeople of the invaders said they are considering using chemical weapons against the defenders in Mariupol. We take it very seriously. I want to remind world leaders that a possible use of chemical weapons had been already discussed by the Russian military.

And they might have used it already in Mariupol. With me right now is Bill Browder. His brand new book Freezing Order is out now. It's the true story of money laundering, murder and surviving Vladimir Putin's wrath.

And Bill, a lot of people said to me, you know, are asking me, oh, just now clued into your passion in life. Who is Vladimir Putin? What's he up to? Can he be reasoned with?

And has he changed? First off, before I get to that, on Zelensky, he's saying that I want everybody to know that my intelligence says they're going to use chemical weapons. They have already, don't you think? Apparently in Mariupol there's evidence of use of chemical weapons. Will he go further?

There's no question. But Vladimir Putin cannot be seen to be weak. And he's weak now. He's lost lots of troops.

And the only thing that he's got going for him is his ability to kill civilians. And that's what he's going to do. And it's going to be heartbreaking.

Whatever heartbreak we've seen in Buche, in Mariupol and Kharkiv is nothing compared to what he's going to do going forward. And we should prepare ourselves. And we, in an ideal world, we should do more for the Ukrainians militarily so that they don't have to suffer these terrible human tragedies.

Because they're fighting for all of us. They're fighting for the next stop, the Georgia invasion, the Moldova invasion. You talk about those invasions. What about the Estonia invasion, where Estonia is a member of NATO? I mean, you think Putin will be there. And, you know, Putin looks at what happened here. And he says, okay, you know, America let Afghanistan fall to the Taliban for the sake of 3,000 troops who weren't even in combat.

Does America have any appetite to have a fight with us over Estonia? Probably not. That was his logic for starting this whole thing. Miscalculation, clearly. Clearly miscalculation. He's lost at least about 20,000. According to the Ukrainians, he's lost 20,000 people.

Which is twice as many troops that were lost in Afghanistan over a nine and a half year war. Zelensky leaves. Ukrainians probably just collapse.

He stays. That is the difference, in your view? Well, I mean, there's a lot of differences. But you can't have, I mean, so first of all, Zelensky is an amazing leader. And you never really know a leader until somebody is put under duress. And this man was put under duress and he just rose to the occasion. And it's just remarkable and laudable and brave.

And he's truly a brave and amazing leader. And he has led the Ukrainians to fight back the Russians. And the Russians have been totally decimated. And humiliated.

Humiliated beyond belief. But the people have rallied around Putin in Russia. I should believe those poses as his 83 percent approval rating?

Unfortunately, you should. I mean, it's hard to imagine, but the Russians are all thinking that Putin is a good guy, that the Ukrainians are subhuman. They should be killed. Putin is killing these subhuman people. And I mean, I've seen these interviews that just shock me.

I mean, this is like Nazi Germany now. Tell me about your book. So I've just come out with a book. I spent three years working on a book tracking how the Putin regime and Putin launders his money in the West. And then the book was finished and coming out in the seven-week period where the whole world is trying to figure out where Putin's laundering his money in the West. And we found it out. And we found that in the case of the Magnitsky murder, which is my lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered a 230 million dollar corruption scheme, we discovered that Putin got some of the money. And we also discovered that this one scam was one of, like, thousands of scams.

And Putin has stolen hundreds of billions of dollars. Has the government got in touch with you? I've been in touch with the government. And this government- In a way that you think they're listening?

The Treasury? The best way to get a government to listen is not to have private meetings, but is to come on your show. Then the government listens. And if I'm saying something and I know that a million other people are hearing what I'm saying, then the government will listen.

Understood. So right now, they're sanctioning a lot of oligarchs. You said they've only sanctioned 12. There's over 100.

That's correct. And I think the numbers now may be up to 20. But there's 118 Russians on the Forbes Rich List. And what you have to know is that when somebody is an oligarch, they can't be an oligarch unless Putin gives them permission to be an oligarch. And the deal is that he gets half the money. And the deal is that they do whatever he tells them to do. And so everyone says, well, are there any good oligarchs? Who are the good oligarchs?

The answer is that unless an oligarch is ready to go on the record and say Vladimir Putin is a war criminal, they're all part of his criminal enterprise. You optimistic? How do you think this ends?

Everybody asks me that. What's the endgame? How does it end?

And the answer is, I don't think it ends. I mean, I think that it's a very low probability outcome that the Ukrainians win, maybe 15 percent. I think it's a low probability outcome that the Russians win.

I think the more likely outcome is that this just carries on and on and on in the most horrible way. Finland and Sweden join NATO? Finland and Sweden absolutely join NATO. And it's remarkable that they haven't joined NATO so far. I mean, why would you not be a member of NATO when I mean, you know, it's like, you know, Russia, Russia goes into Ukraine. We say, you know, Ukrainians have to fight by themselves. Why would Finland and Sweden not want to, you know, not want to be a member of NATO? And what I love most about that's exactly what Vladimir Putin threatened and said did not want. Pick up Freezing Order. Thanks, Bill.