The Rule of Law Dies When People Get Too Comfortable

Nobody’s talking about Russia right now. Jamison Firestone thinks that’s exactly the problem.

Firestone isn’t analyzing Russia from a safe distance. He was inside it — an American lawyer who hung a shingle in Moscow in 1991, just as the Soviet Union came apart and the country became, in his telling, the “freest place on earth.” 

Over the next 18 years he watched that freedom curdle into its opposite: a state that didn’t abandon the law so much as capture it, until the courts, the police, and the tax collectors all worked for whoever was powerful enough to protect and pay them.

On this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, Firestone — co-founder with Bill Browder of the Global Magnitsky Justice Campaign and author of the new memoir Rule of Lies — takes us inside how it actually worked. 

How a quarter-billion-dollar tax fraud ran straight through his own office. 

How his auditor, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered it, was jailed for it, and died for it in a concrete cell. 

How Russia put a dead man on trial for the first time in eight centuries. 

And why a Trump Tower meeting most people remember as a campaign footnote was, in fact, all about him.

But the story doesn’t stay over there. Firestone’s real warning is about the pattern: Rule of law rarely dies in a coup. It dies slowly, in comfortable countries, while people with big houses and nice cars decide their political power isn’t worth defending — the same way Russians let Putin take theirs. 

He sees that same machinery running now, and not only in Moscow.

Three hundred billion dollars in frozen Russian money is still on the table. So is the question Firestone leaves sitting in your lap: How certain are you that it can’t happen here?

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Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. We tell ourselves that the law is a kind of shelter, that if we keep our papers in order and stay on the right side of the rules, the law will stand between us and the people who might do us harm. It’s the quiet assumption underneath every contract we sign, every office we walk into; it’s the thing that lets us sleep at night. In Russia, not so long ago, that assumption was turned completely inside out. The police carried the search warrants; the courts issued the rulings; the paperwork was all in perfect order; and every bit of it was aimed not at protecting you, but at stripping you of what you owned and then your freedom — and, in one case, your life. There the law didn’t shelter anyone. The law was the weapon.

My guest today, Jamison Firestone, lived inside that machine for 18 years. An American lawyer in Moscow, he watched a country he had come to love move from a land of almost reckless possibility to a mafia state, and then to something colder and more organized than any mafia. He defended his clients against armed men who came through the door with official stamps in their hands, and he learned that survival there meant fighting on the regime’s own terrain with the regime’s own tools. And when a young auditor on his own staff, a man named Sergei Magnitsky, who had done nothing more than tell the truth about a theft, was arrested and left to die in a cell, Firestone refused to let the story end there.

None of this is history. The man who built the machine, Vladimir Putin, is still in the Kremlin. The war he started still grinds through Ukraine. And the money at the center of it — some $300 billion in frozen Russian assets — is sitting in Western banks right now while governments argue over whether they have the right to seize it or only to keep holding it. The sanctions that carry Magnitsky’s name are still on the books. This is not a closed chapter. It’s happening while we speak. And here is the part that should keep an American awake: we listen to a story like this as a foreign story, something that happens over there to other people, in a country that never really had the institutions that we take for granted. But strip it to its frame, and what Firestone watched was this: wealth and power fusing until they were the same thing, the courts and the tax code becoming tools for whoever holds the leash, corruption that doesn’t hide in the shadows but moves in daylight through respectable banks and respectable places. The question his book leaves sitting in our lap: It’s not how this happened to Russia, but how certain are we that it can’t happen here?

Jamison Firestone founded the first independent foreign law firm in Russia. Along with Bill Browder, who has been a frequent guest on this program, Firestone built the Global Magnitsky Justice campaign, the sanctions regime named for his murdered colleague. And today he works on seizing those frozen Russian assets for the benefit of Ukraine. His new memoir is Rule of Lies. And it is my pleasure to welcome Jamison Firestone here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Jamison, thanks so much for joining us.

Jamison Firestone: Hey, Jeff, thanks for having me. Really great to be here.

Jeff: It is a delight to have you here. Thank you so much. First of all, tell us how a kid that grew up in Beverly Hills wound up in Russia in the first place.

Jamison: So, my parents went down and out in Beverly Hills. Actually, I was living in the house that was down-and-out-in-Beverly-Hills hills, right? [I] moved to New York, and then my dad managed to make a lot of money again, but I never knew where that money was coming from; he was always kind of vague about it. And when I was 15, I found out where the money was coming from because the police came to the door and handcuffed him, arrested him, to take him to his arraignment. And it turned out what my dad had been doing was defrauding hundreds of investors and the IRS of tens of millions of dollars. So I’m 15 years old at this time, and my dad has been indicted and will stand criminal trial, at which point he’s now divorced from my mother. He went completely nuts while awaiting trial, put me in a five-day boarding school, so I was home only on the weekends, and he bought New York City’s most expensive brothel. And then he just used it to stock our six-story brownstone with this ever-changing assortment of young women. And so it was very much like that movie that made Tom Cruise, Risky Business. So I was coming home to this craziness. Plus, he started hanging out with contract killers and loan sharks just because he liked that. And he started doing a lot of crack. So that was my high school experience.

And one of the things — it was really kind of interesting — was listening to all these mafiosi stories. I mean, they were horrifying; I didn’t want to have anything to do with them. But it was really fascinating. And they really do have this code of — I mean, I want to call it a code of honor, but there’s no real honor there. They’re in the business of hurting people and killing people, but they have their own code, and you have to kind of learn how to play by it. And so I realized that you have to kind of always show them respect. And also, they don’t take no for an answer. I mean, they understand yes, they understand no, and the problem was that they started to come up with all these ideas for me. I mean, I was going to go to college, I was going to come out, my dad was going to go to prison, he was going to come out. And they had plans on how to put me to work. Like, I was going to get into the dry-cleaning business, and a few of the guys that could be working for the dry-cleaning business, they weren’t actually going to be working there, but I was going to be paying them. And, of course, I didn’t want to be running some money-laundering front for a mafia organization. So I had to learn how to get out of stuff like this. And that was my late teenage years, I was learning how to show them respect, make them laugh, but not do what they wanted me to do without getting killed. And it just so happened that — I didn’t know it at the time — when I went to Russia, that was going to be up there with my legal education as being super useful because Russia became criminalized right after I got there, and there were all these mafia groups running around, and being able to say no to them and stay alive became a super important skill.

Jeff: And it was your father that encouraged you somewhat to go to Russia. He thought there was a lot of money to be made there.

Jamison: Yeah. When my dad put me in that five-day boarding school, he insisted that I study Russian because he thought the Soviet Union would fall apart and I would go there as a young man and make a lot of money. And I was in no place to argue because he was paying. But I discontinued my Russian studies in university when my dad went to prison, and it was only in law school, when the Soviet Union indeed started to liberalize under Gorbachev and he instituted all these reforms, including allowing people to do business and McDonald’s went over there, and then I realized I should study Russian.

The moment came when I just read this amazing article in Forbes by Esther Dyson, the tech investor, and she had been over there, and she talks about all the wasted human potential and how you can hire a nuclear physicist or a computer programmer, the best the country has to offer, for like $10 a month. I was like, “I’ve got to be there.” But I had two years of law school to go, so I realized I couldn’t be there, put that idea out of my mind. And then this envelope comes from my dad in prison, and I open it up, and it’s the same Forbes article. And it’s like, “Jamison, you must go there.” And the article was in there like, “All right.” So I took the bar exam, and I got on the next plane, and I went to Moscow in 1991.

Jeff: And what did you expect to find? Did you have any idea what you were walking into?

Jamison: Yes, but only for two weeks. So what I expected to find was Gorbachev launching this new, semi-privatized economy, small-scale. And I got that for two weeks until the hardliners rolled the tanks in. They took Gorby prisoner, and they said, “Reform’s over.” And the country was in shock, and people were just kind of milling around the streets, looking at the tanks. And then there was this dialogue that developed where old ladies, babushkas, grandmothers, would start yelling at the kids driving the tanks, saying, “Where are your mothers? Where are your grandmothers? You’re not going to kill us, are you?” And this makes them really miserable — whatever they were supposed to be doing, it wasn’t killing their grandmothers. And then Yeltsin stood on a tank, and he said, “Release Gorbachev, the lawful president of the USSR.” And then these coup plotters lost their nerve, and the tanks rolled out of town. They returned Gorbachev, and he was irrelevant. All the power had kind of shifted to Yeltsin and the other presidents of Soviet republics, and the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence within a matter of months.

And so I wasn’t prepared for that, right? This complete — the government ceasing to exist. Every law that had ever been written was no longer… If it was a commercial law, it was no longer relevant, right? And so it was just this complete blank-slate free-for-all, where Russia became the freest country in the world. I wasn’t prepared for that, and that was great because it meant everybody started from zero in a country where nobody had anything. So one of the unintended consequences of that was that a recent law graduate from New York knew as much Russian law as everybody else.

Jeff: After those first two weeks, was there any kind of rule of law that settled in, or a rule of law that started to emerge over time?

Jamison: So, interestingly enough, you know, a law ran on inertia. And so there was kind of law in the early ’90s. It was just ineffective. You had underfunded police with Soviet laws that weren’t applicable to a commercial economy. And these guys wanted to help you, but try and explain a commercial problem to them, like a corporate theft, and they’re starting with, “So, what’s the difference between a shareholder and a director, and who has power to do what?” And you realize, you know, we’re never going to get to… I can’t explain corporate theft to somebody if they don’t know what a company is, right, and how it works. But they were there, and they were not the bad guys.

And then you had, in this vacuum, a whole bunch of mafia organizations that just ballooned overnight in Moscow. There were hundreds of them, and they were quickly doing two things. One was getting new clients, so they would find businesses that looked like they were making money, and they would inform you that they’re now your protection racket, or roof, as they would call it, and how much you have to pay them for the privilege of continuing to do your business and staying alive. And the other thing they were doing was killing each other, right, to try and move in on each other’s turf. And so this was the atmosphere in which I was trying to do law in 1993, where I had just hung out a shingle, essentially taken out an ad in a local English newspaper saying, “Reasonably affordable law firm for foreign investors and entrepreneurs.” And so I wasn’t just leading them through the legal system — like, how do I register a company? How do I open a bank account? What taxes do I have to pay? — but I found my clients calling me in to resolve their disputes with their mafia protection rackets, which was funny because I was never upfront or open with my clients about my dad’s criminal background or that I grew up with mobsters, but I was incredibly effective with dealing with mobsters. And I fired Russian protection rackets using their own logic against them. I was remarkably at home. I didn’t like it, but I certainly could deal with criminal groups.

Jeff: It’s interesting you talk about using their logic against them in a way that was happening in a larger frame, in that the law, little by little, got repurposed to serve the needs of the state and what they wanted. It was rule of law, but a very repurposed kind of law that came to evolve.

Jamison: Well, it took us really 10 years — nine years — to get there. I mean, during the Yeltsin years, we didn’t have the state trying to do that yet. During the Yeltsin years, what you had was an increasingly bankrupt government with dictatorship tendencies, headed by a physically ailing alcoholic, dealing with its own problems and trying to steal stuff and leaving the rest of us to the wolves. And there were a lot of wolves because you had all these criminal groups running around. And so the police would kind of help if they could help, but for the most part, you were left to yourself.

The situation you describe really started under Putin because — many people may have forgotten how we got Putin. Essentially, in 1999, when Yeltsin was sick and alcoholic and realized he’d never win another presidential election, and as soon as he lost the next election, he and his entire corrupt family were going to go to prison, he pulled a fast one on the country. He made Putin vice president, or prime minister, actually. And then he got on national TV on December 31 to do his New Year’s speech, and he wished us all a happy New Year’s, and then he resigned on national television and made Putin acting president. And Putin, within minutes, signed a decree pardoning Yeltsin and pardoning his family and telling them that they could keep all the stuff they stole, and also giving him a big state pension. So that was the deal.

And it was only after that that Putin started this weaponization of law that you speak about, where Khodorkovsky was on national TV with a meeting with Putin. He embarrassed President Putin, and President Putin got visibly angry and then decided, “You know what? I’m going to have an override button. I’m going to weaponize the justice system, and we’re going to get this guy. We’re going to put him in prison, and we’re going to take his stuff.” And as soon as he did that, that was the major turning point in creating the dictatorship of law. And Putin used that phrase, by the way. We all thought, when he said “dictatorship of law,” that meant building a lawful society. But it turns out that’s not what it meant. What it meant was creating a dictatorship by weaponizing the legal system, and it becomes the state that you fear. All these mafia groups kind of disappeared. They just assimilated into business or into government. But the remaining bully boy was the government, and they could take anything you wanted by just railroading you through a show trial.

Jeff: And how did that make working in Russia as a lawyer, or in any other business — particularly for an American — how did that make that situation possible?

Jamison: So, yeah, the most absurd business to be in is the legal business, whether you’re a lawyer or running a firm, when the government is destroying rule of law. So think of it being in an ocean that’s drying up and becomes a great lake, and then becomes a pond, and then becomes a puddle. So I was operating in this dying water body that was getting smaller and smaller. And so I was teaching my clients how to do business legally in Russia. And most of them were doing contracts with businesses that would play by the law. But, as I said, our pond was getting smaller. And so outside of that, you know, we could see, when we looked at the wider world, that there was no law — that if Putin wanted an oligarch taken out, there would be a criminal case against that oligarch, and the oligarch would flee the country, and Putin would get government control of his TV station. And that would just happen over and over again until all the big TV stations were under government control. And so you just had to kind of tell your clients, “Law works as long as you don’t get into an argument with the government.” Now, that doesn’t mean if they question how much tax you’ve paid, you can still win because there’s not a mind driving that process, right? When the tax inspector says, “You owe more tax,” and we say, “No, you don’t, and we’ll go to court,” we’ll win that case. Same thing with any normal legal dispute. But if there’s some powerful guy in government who says, “I want you to give me this, and if you don’t give me this, I’m going to take it anyway,” and if and when you get that deal and you don’t take it, all of a sudden a case that’s basically bought and paid for is brought against you, and you’re gone. And so we watched that happening from a distance until finally we found ourselves in the middle of one.

Jeff: And tell us a little bit about that. What happened? Your offices were raided, the offices of Hermitage Capital were raided. What happened?

Jamison: So what happened was my largest client at the time was a company called Hermitage Capital, run by a guy named Bill Browder. And they bought Russian stocks, so they were investing in the Russian stock market. And a lot of these stocks that they were interested in, you had to have a Russian company to buy. So they had all these Russian companies, which they owned, and the Russian companies bought the stock. And my job was to manage those Russian companies. So if they bought stock and sold stock, you know, taxes have to be paid, tax returns have to be filled out — all that stuff, all that admin, we did. And we had a guy running it, this auditor named Sergei Magnitsky. So we would run that all in the background, and we were running that for billions of dollars. I think we had like $3.5 billion under our administration at the time.

And so Bill Browder, who you’ve interviewed before, he was challenging corruption in the companies he was investing in, many of the people he was challenging were Putin’s friends, and eventually Putin ran him out of town. I mean, Putin essentially declared him a threat to national security, and said, “You can’t come back anymore,” at which point Bill decided to sell everything he owned. So they cashed out of about $2 billion worth of stuff. They paid 25 percent of that, which is half a billion dollars in tax, and that should have been the end of the story. And they just said, “You know, Jamie, liquidate our companies. We have the companies that we use to buy the shares and sell the shares and pay the tax. They’ve done all that. They have nothing. Now please close them.”

And we’re in the process of that when 25 police officers raid my offices. They raid Bill’s offices in Moscow, even though Bill was in London at the time, and they had accountants with them. And it was like this crazy scene where people go rushing through my office, and they’re pulling out the files and they’re ripping them open, and these accountants are flipping through them and looking at these corporate accounts and going, “Ah, this company paid $20 million in tax. Are we taking it?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re taking it.” And we’re sitting there thinking, why on God’s earth would anybody raid an office to find the companies that are paying a lot of tax? I mean, normally you’re interested in companies that aren’t paying their tax. One of my lawyers complained about this; they beat him up. He was in the hospital for three weeks, so we didn’t make any more complaints. So they ripped my office apart. I mean, really, it was just a scene of carnage. When they left, they carried out two truckloads’ worth of documents and seals. Seals are these ink seals that you have to put on contracts or the contract is ineffectual. And we didn’t know what was going on. And we’re filing all these police complaints, like, “What the heck did you just do? Why did you do that? It looks like it’s illegal to us.” And in the middle of fighting the police to try and get to the bottom of it, we find out that three companies belonging to Hermitage Capital have been sued for $1 billion and lost. And, of course, it’s really distressing to us because, you know, in order to lose, you have to have had a court case. You have to have lawyers. Where are the lawyers? We didn’t even know there was a court case; we weren’t there. So how on God’s earth do you have a court case and lose $1 billion and your lawyers don’t know about it?

And so Sergei Magnitsky, who was working for me, kind of figured it out. What happened was, the only reason the police had come in looking for the documents from companies that had paid a lot of tax was that the police were working with criminals who had a scam to refund taxes that had been paid. And since Hermitage had paid so much tax, they wanted control of its empty companies to steal the taxes back. And so, in this case, using the documents they stole from my office, they managed to sue three of Hermitage’s companies for $1 billion, wiping the profits off so that there were no profits, and then asking for a tax refund of the $250 million that those three companies had paid, which they got in one day because they had also bribed the tax inspectors. So everybody was in on this scam to steal from their own government. And what it needed at its very beginning was for the police to come in and get these documents so that they could take control of the companies and do this sham lawsuit to erase the profits, to qualify for the refund. So that’s what Sergei discovered.

Jeff: What was discovered in terms of who was actually behind this? How much did the government know, and how high up did it go?

Jamison: So this is a really interesting thing. And, to this day, we know who organized it, and it’s really interesting. So there was a guy named [Dmitry] Klyuev, and he’s an expert in arranging large tax refunds. And we know that because another huge investment bank called Renaissance Capital apparently hired this guy Klyuev for the express purpose of arranging large tax refunds. And it just so happens that companies that had been owned by Renaissance Capital, which had paid $107 million tax, those companies later hired Mr. Klyuev, who arranged a $107 million refund. So this is the kind of stuff Sergei put together: that there was a criminal group consisting of this guy, Mr. Klyuev, the expert in making tax refunds; and also the police who raided our office to take the documents; and also the judges were in on it, and the tax inspectors. And this whole criminal group just had this scam of, “If you can give us a company that paid a lot of taxes, we can get them back.” And so we know that was the extent of the group.

But a funny thing happened — or a not very funny thing happened — when we reported it. So, you would think in America, if somebody had proof that a group of people ripped off the IRS — I mean, actually got a fake tax refund for a quarter-billion dollars — first of all, you’d be on every news channel out there, the front page of every paper. And this group would be hunted down by everybody. But that’s not what happened. What happened was the Russian government stepped in to protect these people. 

And so we kept trying to get them somehow. And the first way we tried to get them was in Russia. And what we did was, we made a bunch of YouTube videos where I made these videos showing how much money these people… Well, actually, before I get ahead of myself here, the first thing we did was we exposed the fraud. Sergei went out, he went to a journalist, to BusinessWeek, and he said, “These guys are ripping off the treasury. They stole $230 million when they took control of Hermitage’s companies, they stole $107 million before.” And as soon as he did that, they put him in jail. As soon as he did that. So myself and Bill Browder, we said, “We’ve got to get him out.” So we moved to this thing: How do we get him out? So we’re going to expose the crime by making these YouTube videos and showing the whole country what these police officers did, what these tax officers did, what this Mr. Klyuev did. And we made these incredible videos showing how public officials making $6,000 a year or $15,000 a year had millions of dollars of properties and a fleet of cars, and they were flying private jets, and they were dumb enough to basically post it all on their social media. And I found this young blogger, Alexei Navalny, [and] I said, “Would you release these videos for us?” And he saw them. He thought it was a great thing. “This is so cool. You know, nobody’s ever struck back against all these corrupt officials. I’d love to distribute these for you.” So Navalny began distributing our movies. And we still couldn’t get them. What they did was, they absolved all these people. And Sergei’s in jail. He’s testifying. 

And finally, they killed Sergei. After a year, they just broke him. They tortured him so much that his health broke down. And it was like appendicitis — the equivalent of that — except his [was] pancreatitis. But it’s a simple operation that if you… 99.9 percent of everybody who gets the operation lives. But if you don’t get it, your appendix bursts; you might die. And instead of giving him the operation, they handcuffed him. They had eight guys beat him with riot batons, and they left him in a concrete cell for 1 hour and 18 minutes to die. And so when that happened, Bill Browder and I were heartbroken. I mean, I was responsible for Sergei; I was his boss; Sergei was uncovering all these things for Bill. And they kept saying, “Just lie and say that we didn’t do it, Bill did it. And you can go free.” And Sergei didn’t do that. And, you know, Bill would have preferred that Sergei said anything. I mean, say he did it with the candlestick, right? Say Bill did it with the candlestick or something. I mean, just say what you need to get out of prison. And Sergei didn’t do that.

So at that point we decided, okay, we’ve got to… How are we going to get them, since law doesn’t work in Russia? And so we decided we would try and get them sanctioned by the United States so that they wouldn’t be able to come to the United States and their money would be frozen, and nobody from the U.S. could do business with them. And as soon as we did that, the world changed. It was like the Eye of Sauron and Mount Doom and The Lord of the Rings. It was like, all of a sudden, Putin noticed us. All this — they could kill Sergei, they could steal a quarter-billion dollars from the treasury — Putin didn’t care. Medvedev didn’t care. As a matter of fact, they supported it. They let these guys off because they’re buddies. But as soon as we threaten to take away Russians’ right to travel and stash their money abroad, the eye of the state turned on us and said, “This can’t be.”

And that was when the government launched an entire attack on us, where they came up with a whole plan. How do we kill the sanctions? Well, we kill the sanctions by making Sergei Magnitsky a crook. If we can prove — or if we can say — that Sergei Magnitsky is a crook and Bill Browder is a crook, then it would be illogical for the United States to create a sanctions regime after a dead crook. So they then decide, well, we have to make Magnitsky a crook and Browder a crook. We have to have a trial. Now, Magnitsky is dead and Browder is in London, but that doesn’t bother the Russians. So they try a dead man, which hasn’t been done for 800-and-something years. And, by the way, the reason we don’t try dead people in democracies is because dead people can’t defend themselves. So you can make up any story, and dead people can’t defend themselves. So, of course, Sergei is found guilty after he’s dead. Bill is found guilty in absentia. And now they have their story. They’re officially approved, they can go, “Sergei Magnitsky and Bill Browder were officially found to be crooks.” And then they start marketing that narrative in the United States, saying, “Don’t adopt the Magnitsky sanctions. It’s ridiculous. Why would you create a sanctions regime to sanction the honest police officers chasing crooks? And why would you name that sanctions regime after the crook?” And we managed to get it anyway. So we get the Magnitsky sanctions, which sanction the people who killed Sergei and sanction people who abuse human rights, and then we start following the money. And the money is going — you know, we find all this money going to the police officers, to the tax office, but we also find just hundreds of billions of dollars going all over the world. We’re only chasing $230 billion, but we find hundreds of billions. We find this whole channel for laundering money out of the Putin regime, and we blow up all these banks that are participating in this channel, but we only get, like, $43 million frozen.

And so, at that point, we go, “You know what? We need stronger sanctions.” So we’re going to go back to Congress, and we’re going to ask them to sanction corruption. And when we did that — I mean, Putin’s reaction to sanctioning corruption — that was crazy. He sent that Russian lawyer to Trump Tower. If you remember the Trump Tower scandal, it was all about us, that meeting, and that lawyer goes to Trump Tower because Trump is running for president the first time, and she says, “Hey, when you [passed] the first sanctions, Putin made it illegal to adopt Russian children. But now you’re trying to pass the corruption sanctions, Global Magnitsky. Why don’t you just kill all the sanctions, and we’ll let you adopt the kids again, and you’ll have great relations with Russia?” And they wanted Don Jr. and Kushner and Manafort to take that deal to candidate Trump so that if he became president, he’d kill it. And, of course, that’s not what happened. What happened was Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. thought that this woman was a waste of time, and Obama signed the Global Magnitsky sanctions, and we got those sanctions.

Jeff: Talk about the nexus between those that were involved in this whole operation and what became this huge group of Russian oligarchs.

Jamison: So, interestingly enough, not that much. The oligarchs became oligarchs — the original oligarchs — because in the 1990s, when the Yeltsin government decided that they would privatize everything because everything was owned by the state, nobody really understood how it worked, except a very few people. So, interestingly enough, the communists were saying, “Don’t privatize everything because we don’t understand how it works, and it’s all going to be stolen.” And they were right, by the way. Yeltsin resolved that argument by doing something rather undemocratic, which would have been unfathomable for an American to understand until recently: he attacked his own Congress. In Yeltsin’s case, he actually shelled his own Congress into submission, and he privatized everything. And so these small groups of people who understood how to buy up everything did, and they became the oligarchs. They bought the first batch up when nobody understood how it worked, and they bought the second batch in a trade with President Yeltsin because, in 1996, he didn’t have the votes to be reelected, and the oligarchs who owned the media said, “We’ll get you reelected, but you got to give us everything that remains if we do so.” He said, “Fine. If I’m reelected, you can have it.” And that’s what happened.

So, in the Putin era, these oligarchs weren’t involved in the scam against us. But that’s not irregular because what Putin did was, he empowered Russian officials to all run their own scams. So if you’re the minister of taxation, you make your money by stealing taxes or telling people they can get away with paying less tax than they should. And if you’re a customs inspector, you make your money by telling people, “Grease my palms, and I’ll let your goods in without customs duties or low customs duties.” So all these Putin officials have their own scams. And, in a sense, the power in Russia has shifted. We always think the oligarchs run Russia; the oligarchs actually do not run Russia under Putin. The security services run Russia. The heads of the security services are as rich as any of the oligarchs, and these supposedly big private Russian companies that are run by oligarchs and owned by them on paper are… You know, Putin leaves them alone much of the time, but when Putin says, “I’d like you to build a ski resort in Sochi,” or, “Mr. Abramovich, I’d like you to go to Chukotka and build a stadium,” those are not requests: those are orders. And if you don’t do that, the company that you think you own will be taken from you, and then somebody else will own it. And it’s the security services that do that for Putin, and they’re as rich as the oligarchs. And so when you listen to Oleg Deripaska, who controls aluminum in Russia, speak, he says, “Oh yeah, I know I hold this company for the state, and whatever Mr. Putin thinks I should do with it, I’ll do with it.” Now, could you see Elon Musk saying something like that? Or could you see Larry Ellison saying something like that? Or Bezos? No, because they own — they really own — their companies.

So the oligarchs weren’t really involved in the theft, but all these other officials, tax officials… Look, we have the general prosecutor of Russia promulgating this, right, because he’s getting his hands greased by the right people.

Jeff: Talk about Navalny, how he fits into all of this beyond the work that he did for you and Bill. He was also involved in wanting to sanction the oligarchs.

Jamison: Yeah. The great thing about Navalny was, first of all, what a great guy. I mean, he just had this incredible energy about him, and he was funny. He had this righteous anger, but it wasn’t an anger driven by meanness or pettiness. He just hated these people who were robbing us all blind, and he wanted to do something about it. And he motivated millions of people to get out of their chairs.

And so one of the things he did with these YouTube videos, where I was distributing my videos through his blog, at some point, he just went, “You know, I should be making YouTube videos.” And, of course, he wasn’t going to go after the people who were involved in the Magnitsky stuff. I mean, he helped us a lot with that, but he had bigger fish to fry. He was going after Medvedev, and he was going after Putin. And so he started making movies about all the billions that these people stole. Plus, he started to organize people politically. And he said, by the way, that Magnitsky sanctions were pro-Russia: he said they were very pro-Russia because they were the only way to punish these Russian officials who were robbing the Russian people. 

Navalny was poisoned twice. The first time he was poisoned, he was medevaced to Germany; Putin allowed him to leave. And of course, Putin never expected Navalny to return. And to ensure that Navalny wouldn’t return, while Navalny was in a coma, Putin had a criminal case opened against him for parole violations because they had had a cockamamie case against him before that, and apparently Navalny failed to report to his parole officer while lying in a coma in Germany. So they opened that case, making it perfectly clear that he’ll go to jail if he comes back to Russia. And so that was supposed to be the insurance policy that he wouldn’t come back to Russia. But Navalny wasn’t having any of it: Navalny felt very strongly that his place was in Russia, either as a political leader on the streets, or a political leader behind bars, or a political leader six feet under in his native soil. But that was his path, and that was what he was going to do. And so he came back, they put him in prison, and there were huge demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people. But the last thing Navalny did before getting on that plane to go back was, he handed a list of 35 people to his organization that he wanted sanctioned. And they called me. They said, “You know, you did the Magnitsky sanctions. Would you do the Navalny 35?” And I said, “Yes. My friend Alexei has been arrested. Absolutely. I would love to go after these scumbags who have been robbing all of us.” And so I started going after them, and I wasn’t having the best of luck because they were the most powerful people in Russia — until the invasion. And once Putin invaded [Ukraine], that changed everything. [It] became this race: Who should we sanction? And so the first thing I did was let every government know, “The first people… Who should you sanction? Start with these 35.” And then the next thing I did was, I built a website called Nowhere to Run, and I would show who sanctioned who and which of the people who have been sanctioned your country hasn’t sanctioned, so if I got a call from some senator or some parliamentarian in the UK, “Who should we sanction?” I’m like, “Go to Nowhere to Run. Click on the British flag or the U.S. flag, and you’ll get a whole list of all the people that other people have sanctioned that we haven’t sanctioned yet.” So we gamified the whole process.

Jeff: Have the sanctions done any good?

Jamison: Have the sanctions done good? Yes. Are they enough? No. So Magnitsky sanctions are a very specific thing, and they should be separated from the war sanctions. Magnitsky sanctions — against human rights abusers and people who are corrupt — are essentially, for the most part, a one-way ticket. It’s what you do to somebody when they have said, “I’m not going to play by the rules of civilized society.” And so if you’re not going to play by the rules of civilized society — like, if you’re going to torture people, or arrest people for no reason, or steal from your own government — then we’re not going to let you live in civilized society. And that’s all the Magnitsky sanctions do, they say, “Don’t play by our rules? Fine. Don’t participate in our societies. And anything you have in our societies is frozen, and nobody in our societies can do business with you.” So it’s an absolute freeze-out of civilized society in the countries that have them, which is America, Canada, the United Kingdom, the entire European Union, Australia. So it’s a pretty big freeze-out from much of the developed world.

The war sanctions are different. That’s just freezing money because we want to freeze anything that helps the war effort. There are a lot of people who have their money frozen that are going to get it back when the war is over because we haven’t accused them of a crime or anything. We’ve just said, “You know, your business helps the Russian government, and so we’ve sanctioned you and the business so that you can’t help them so much.” Now, that is different from what I think are probably… So let me just enter how Magnitsky sanctions are doing good before I go to the really big sanctions. So where Magnitsky sanctions have done a world of good is, they have been keeping really bad people out of our societies, and it’s not just bad Russians. What’s so wonderful about Magnitsky sanctions is that they’re global, so there are people sitting in Nigeria, and sitting in Uganda, and sitting in Azerbaijan, and sitting in countries all over the world, preparing lists of the scumbags in their country who are human rights abusers and kleptocrats, and submitting those lists with evidence to governments all over the world, and governments choose to act on that. So when the Saudis cut Khashoggi up in the Turkish embassy, all of a sudden, a whole bunch of people get sanctioned under the Magnitsky sanctions. Maybe not everybody who should have been, but a lot. So yes, they’ve made the world a better place.

But the big sanctions now are the ones that have frozen $300 billion of Russian government money abroad, and those are probably the most important. So those sanctions are top-tier sanctions right now in terms of what happens with Ukraine, and the other really important sanctions right now are all the sanctions making it impossible for Russia to make money and get technology. All the sanctions on Russian oil sales, all the sanctions on helping Russians drill for oil, all of that — anything that makes Russia poorer and freezes its money — is where the game is right now.

Jeff: How has this impacted the oligarchs that have managed to get money out of the country, to get it elsewhere?

Jamison: Well, the problem is, they’ve gotten it out of the country, but they find their travel options to be somewhat limited. You got a lot of oligarchs who were very much enjoying cruising the Greek islands and going to Courchevel, and now they’ve got a choice between Turkey or Dubai. But one of the mistakes I think we’ve made with the oligarchs is, we never really gave them a choice. I mean, we sanctioned their stuff, but we never said to them, “We’re prepared to lift the sanctions if you do this kind of stuff.” Now, maybe this kind of stuff would be, “We’re prepared to lift the sanctions if you denounce Putin and move out of Russia.” Maybe that would have had a good effect, but we didn’t. We just kind of froze their stuff. So, I mean, it’s better than doing nothing. But if we really wanted to convert some of the oligarchs to our side, we should have given them a Plan B, but we did not. 

Jeff: Talk about whatever concerns you’ve had through all of this for your own safety.

Jamison: You know, my concerns for my own safety have never… The most concerns were when I was in Russia. I mean, I had serious concerns of my own safety in the ’90s, when it was all mafia-ridden; when I was fighting with my partners, I had serious concerns; when I briefly returned to Russia after Sergei Magnitsky’s arrest, and he was in prison and I was speaking out. But when I live abroad, it’s not that Putin can’t kill me. He can certainly kill me. And if he decided to kill me, I trust that I would, you know, fall out a window or eat a bad sandwich and die.

But it’s more like, I do this thing. I mean, my thing now is to figure out ways, through sanctions, to starve the Russian Federation of money and technology, and also how to develop legal mechanisms to give the $300 billion of Russian money that has been frozen to Ukraine. And that last part is certainly enough to put me on Putin’s S-list, but my feeling is, you can’t do these things halfway. I mean, you just do them. And so I’m 60 years old at this point; I’ve had a really good run; I hope I get some more years; but I’m not going to sit there and go, “Oh my God, someone might kill me, so I’m not going to do this stuff.” I just do it.

Jeff: Is the rot so deep within Russia that to turn it around at any point seems almost impossible?

Jamison: I am a Russian patriot. And I say that as someone who loves Russia, who fought for Russia to be something different, whose first law partner died in the line of fire in a Russian revolution saving Russians, whose law employee Sergei Magnitsky went to prison on principle and was killed in prison. His friend Alexei Navalny was poisoned. Sergei believed in his country, and Navalny believed in his country, and I ultimately believe in the Russian people.

I think that when people are comfortable, it’s easy to take their rights. Look at America right now. We’re comfortable, and Trump comes up with new ways to take more and more of our power, so that the presidency is becoming an imperial presidency and perhaps close to a dictatorship at one point. We’re not there yet, but it’s clear that Trump is taking away these powers and making the presidency almost unassailable — perhaps unassailable. And we’re letting him do it for the same reasons the Russians let Putin do it, because life was good. And if life is good, you don’t really care how much power you have. I mean, you got a big house and a nice car, and you can go to Mexico, and your kids are going to grow up and go to a nice school, and, you know, everything’s great. But when you change that equation — I mean, how would Americans feel if tomorrow President Trump just announced, “You know, there’s going to be a draft; we’re going to war. I’ve started a formal war without asking Congress, in Iran. We’re putting troops on the ground. We’re going to draft all these kind of unconstitutional things.” And then he gets Congress to railroad it all through. I guarantee you a lot of MAGA people would start to question, “Hey, what’s going on? We can’t allow this.”

So that’s kind of where Putin is today. So Putin promised everybody a great life. “Forget about your political power. We’ll pretend you pretend to vote. We pretend it matters.” But what’s important is, you can go to Thailand, you’ve got a nice apartment, you’ve got a good car. Now we’re getting to the point in the war where things are blowing up in Moscow, and we might have to draft people. And if Putin has to draft people, and if Putin might even close the border to people between 20 and 40 years old, to men, so they can’t run away, people start to go, “Hey, wait, you shouldn’t be doing that.” And then, of course, they realize at that point, “Well, we don’t really have any political power. But you shouldn’t be doing that.” And that’s kind of the inflection point.

So do I think there’s hope? Yes, but the hope becomes in creating massive discomfort. So my job and Bill Browder’s job is to create massive discomfort in Russia by crashing their economy and by helping the Ukrainians. And then hopefully somebody’s going to make a different choice than Putin.

Jeff: Jamison Firestone. His memoir is Rule of Lies. Jamison, I thank you so much for spending time with us today.

Jamison: Hey, thank you so much for having me on the show. It was really great.

Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. 

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