Shortly after Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wrapped up their recent summit at the Finnish Presidential Palace, in Helsinki, around two hundred journalists gathered in the building’s neoclassical ballroom. It was July 16th, three days after the special counsel Robert Mueller published an indictment charging twelve members of the G.R.U., Russia’s military-intelligence service, with hacking into Democratic Party servers and disseminating e-mails during the 2016 election. As Trump started answering questions about the interference, and it became clear that he would not accept the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies over the denials offered by Putin, the frenetic sense of anticipation in the room turned to silent confusion.
Trump claimed that Putin had made “an incredible offer” during their meeting: investigators working with Mueller could come to Russia to interview the twelve indicted intelligence officers. In exchange, Putin explained to the gathered press, Russian investigators would question certain Americans who the Kremlin believes “have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia.”
Putin singled out William Browder, an American-born hedge-fund manager who had worked in Moscow in the nineties and early aughts. Putin falsely claimed that Browder’s business associates had earned more than $1.5 billion in Russia and “never paid any taxes,” and that Browder had donated some four hundred million dollars of this money to Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. (Browder has said that he has “not given Hillary Clinton’s campaign or anybody else’s campaign a single penny ever.”) Browder watched the press conference on his computer: Putin’s “forehead was getting all twisted and furrowed, and you could just tell—he was not playing poker,” he said. “He was pissed.”
At the lectern in Helsinki, Putin did not speak of what is surely the true source of his animus: Browder’s decade-long campaign against Russian corruption. In 2009, Browder’s tax adviser Sergei Magnitsky testified that the Russian police and tax authorities had attempted to steal two hundred and thirty million dollars in Russian taxes paid by Browder’s Moscow-based investment firm, Hermitage Capital. Magnitsky was arrested, and died in a pretrial detention center in Moscow. In the years that followed, Browder strenuously lobbied for a law that would punish those responsible. The Magnitsky Act, which sanctions Russian human-rights violators and other officials implicated in corruption and abuse-of-power cases, was passed by Congress in 2012 and has been a subject of furious preoccupation for Putin ever since.
The law has made Browder, if not quite a household name, then a central figure in the Trump-Russia drama. Last summer, news broke of a meeting that took place at Trump Tower in June, 2016, at which members of the Trump campaign team, having been offered damaging information on Hillary Clinton, met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer with close ties to Russian government officials. In Donald Trump, Jr.,’s initial statement about the meeting—which the President’s lawyers later admitted had been dictated by the President himself—he insisted that he, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, who was then Trump’s campaign chairman, had attended simply hoping for “information helpful to the campaign.” The main topic of the meeting was “the adoption of Russian children,” he said, although Veselnitskaya had also “mentioned the Magnitsky Act.” According to Veselnitskaya, she talked mostly about Browder and his alleged misdeeds, to the disappointment of the Trump team, which was, she said, hoping for “some sort of grenade.”
The President has maintained that he was not aware of the meeting at the time, despite recent claims of his former lawyer Michael Cohen to the contrary. Earlier this month, Trump tweeted, “This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics—and it went nowhere. I did not know about it!” Mueller’s investigation is almost certainly exploring the question of whether the meeting was, in fact, “totally legal,” or an attempt to collude with a foreign government, and whether the Administration’s initial version of events and the actions of the President constituted an obstruction of justice.
Since the Magnitsky Act passed, the Russian government has charged Browder with myriad crimes, and has periodically tried to lodge warrants for his arrest via Interpol. “Their main objective is to get me back to Russia,” Browder has said. “And they only have to get lucky once. I have to be lucky every time.” In 2012, in Surrey, England, Alexander Perepilichny, one of Browder’s chief sources of information on the movement of the stolen funds, collapsed while jogging near his home and died. The case is still under investigation. Browder, who has taken to relating to as large an audience as possible the danger he faces, has called this “a perfect example of why you don’t want to be an anonymous guy who drops dead.”
In Helsinki, Trump’s apparent openness to handing Browder over seemed to play into Browder’s fears. (It also raised practical questions: in 1998, Browder, who lives in the U.K., acquired a British passport and renounced his American citizenship.) The next day, Russian prosecutors added Michael McFaul, a top adviser on Russia policy in the Obama Administration and, later, the U.S. Ambassador to Russia, to the list of those they wanted to question. That the White House considered the proposal was an extraordinary breach of diplomatic protocol. “I couldn’t believe it,” McFaul told me. “So being involved in a policy process is now somehow considered criminal behavior?” The State Department’s spokesperson Heather Nauert called the notion “absolutely absurd,” and, after lawmakers from both parties raised an outcry, the White House rejected Putin’s offer. Browder was reassured by the bipartisan response. “The whole world knows that Vladimir Putin hates me, Vladimir Putin wants to get his hands on me, and, if anything happens to me, Vladimir Putin is going to be blamed,” he told National Review.
Browder, who is fifty-four, with a dusting of silver hair and rimless eyeglasses, has a forceful yet understated authority and a talent for telling a coolly suspenseful tale. In 2015, he published a memoir, “Red Notice,” which sold three hundred and fifty thousand copies in the U.S. and was described by a reviewer in the Times as “riveting” and “marred only by Browder’s perhaps justifiable but nevertheless grating sense of self-importance.” He is a persuasive speaker, and careful in selecting the details of the story he presents. (He declined to talk to me for a profile.) As an anti-corruption activist, Browder has spoken out against the exploitation of offshore tax havens—for example, the ones detailed in the documents that were leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, in 2016. Many companies listed in the so-called Panama Papers were entirely legal. Still, Browder tends not to mention that Mossack Fonseca set up at least three firms for him and Hermitage.
“Well, like they say—if you don’t like New York weather, wait twenty years till it’s all underwater.” Link copied
In April, 2016, Robert Otto, a top intelligence official at the State Department, wrote in one of many e-mails that were later leaked online, in a hack widely linked to Russia, “I am beginning to feel we are all just part of the Browder P.R. machine.” That machine has been singularly effective, allowing Browder to turn his experiences into a fable for why the West should confront Putin—a tale he has told as a frequent guest on cable news shows and as a speaker at congressional hearings. Browder is obviously nothing like the cartoon villain that Putin portrays him to be, and yet his political influence means that his every move, past and present, has global reverberations. Putin’s actions, too, can seem to prove Browder’s case about the need to combat the Russian state’s corruption and malfeasance. His singling out of Browder in Helsinki, McFaul told me, “only gives Bill a bigger global platform—it was a huge public-relations coup, which of course Bill will use.”
As Browder often points out, he has an improbable background for a millionaire hedge-fund manager. His grandfather Earl Browder became active in socialist politics during the First World War and lived in the Soviet Union for five years before becoming the secretary-general of the Communist Party of America. Earl’s son Felix was a noted mathematician. William Browder took an interest in business while in boarding school in the seventies. “I would put on a suit and tie and become a capitalist. Nothing would piss my family off more than that,” he writes in “Red Notice.”
Browder studied economics at the University of Chicago, and then did a stint at the management-consulting firm Bain & Company. In 1989, he got his M.B.A. at Stanford before going to Poland as a consultant for the Boston Consulting Group. He became entranced by the opportunities in the country’s newly privatized industries and bought up shares of formerly state-held enterprises. In the early nineties, he spent several years in London as a trader at Salomon Brothers, and met his first wife, who is British. In 1996, Browder moved to Moscow and founded Hermitage Capital.
