Russia Expert: Putin Destroyed Democracy And Trump's Doing It Too - Jamison Firestone

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1:21Putin went after the universities. Putin pulled Russia's most popular comedy show off the air because it was making fun of him. And Putin spun this myth that without me, the country would be in the garbage can. Now, all of that sounds very much like what Trump is doing right now. And what concerns me is this. Look, there's politics and then there's the system. So as an American, I believe very strongly in the system. Politics is secondary. Whether you want your guns or you're against your guns or you're up for gay rights or against gay rights or abortion, that's what we vote on. But when you start pulling apart the system, you lose everything.

1:54You lose rule of law and you will lose democracy. And that was what was done in Russia. And that seems to be what Trump is doing in America. And it makes me very nervous. It makes me very frightened. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Jameson Firestone. The title of the new book is Rule of Lies. And Jameson is an attorney. He's an entrepreneur and founder of one of Russia's first independent foreign law firms. And so you probably know my good friend, Sir Bill Browder. I'm assuming you know him. Let's start with my wild ride through chaos, corruption, and murder in Putin's Russia.

2:38You know, listen, what a life story that you've had, okay? Let's start with your dad. I want to go there first, if you don't mind. Tell us about your family of origin. You know, you grew up in New York with an extraordinary family, obviously. and then how did it lead you into the former Soviet Union? Sure. So I was kind of a rich kid in New York. I mean, my mom had 11 rooms on Park Avenue. My dad had a six-floor brownstone. We kept a yacht with a crew past Montauk on the island. And all this came crashing to an end one day when I was 15 years old and the police shut up the door to arrest my father and take him to his indictment.

3:15And it turned out that he was a con artist, that he had been defrauding investors in the IRS of tens of millions of dollars. And so while awaiting trial, my dad sent me to a five-day boarding school and started to go a little nuts. And he became a drug addict. He started doing coke, switched to crack. And he bought Manhattan's most expensive brothel. And he filled our house with prostitutes. And then he started hanging around with loan sharks and contract killers. So every weekend I was coming home to this mixture of risky business and pulp fiction. And it was really hanging around with the contract killers and their kids that turned out to be good prep for Russia.

3:59Because a lot of these people saw me as a kid who was going to go to college and they had plans for me. They were telling me they were going to open a dry cleaning business. And a few of my boys, they're going to be working at your dry cleaning business. I mean, they're not really going to be working there, but you're going to be paying them, see? And I, of course, didn't want to do these things. I didn't want to be the front for a mafia operation. And so I learned how to say no to contract killers. I learned to show them respect, to make them laugh, to make them think I was useless and hopeless, and to say no without being killed.

4:32And that was a really big skill for going to Russia in the 90s. I mean, you know, it's a fascinating story, but why Russia? So you're coming out of law school. You're an accompli. I mean, you, you know, in many ways, you are a tale of survivorship because obviously, you know, listen, there's a there's a motto in the Scaramucci family. Let's keep the word fun and the word dysfunctional. OK, so what I get that a lot of families are dysfunctional and I applaud you for surviving your family situation. But why Russia? Why go to Russia? So, first of all, strangely enough, my father had forced me to study Russian in high school.

5:07He thought that the Soviet Union would fall apart and I would go there and make money. And I thought it was ridiculous, but he was paying the bill. But then when I was in, I kind of forgot about Russia while I was in undergrad. But when I was in law school, it was Gorbachev and he was changing the whole world. It was perestroika and glosnost. And he was trying to modernize the system and make it make it more transparent and allow business. And McDonald's was going over there. And I was like, wow. And then I read this article by this tech investor, Esther Dyson, about her time there. And she talked about how the most brilliant people in the country were available for like $10 a month, right?

5:43You could hire physicists and programmers. And I thought, I've got to be there. How exciting. And so I went there to take part in the Gorbachev Miracle. And of course, as soon as I got off the plane, the hardliners rolled the tanks in and tried to stop the Gorbachev Miracle. Is your dad still alive, Jameson? No, he lived till 91. but he died about five years back. Okay. Did he get to see your success, I hope? He did get to see my success. He didn't get to see the book, which is unfortunate. I think he would have liked it. All right. So you arrive in 91. The Soviet Union is collapsing. I want you to take us through the chaos.

6:21This is a moment now where we don't know where things are going. Of course, we're smug here in the West. We think, oh, okay, we won, and we are going to go right into... democratic capitalism that's what we all think but it doesn't really happen that way right so take us through the chaos take us through the uncertainty take us through the middle and lower class uncertainty right because they were used to a certain structure for you know seven eight decades and now you have uh no structure right so we had kind of two revolutions almost one after another so when i got off the plane um the it was still the soviet union and a lot of people didn't didn't like what Gorbachev was doing.

7:03So they kidnapped him and they rolled in the tanks and they said, this is over. And all of a sudden, all these people came out on the streets and they kind of surrounded the tanks and they surrounded the Yeltsin's office building. And they were yelling at these 20 year old kids in the tanks. I mean, it was like grandmothers, Babushki, right? Yelling at them. We're your mothers. We're your grandmothers. You're not going to kill us, are you? And these like 19, 20 year old kids in the tanks, they were miserable and they were like, no. And so that and Yeltsin stood up against on top of a tank and he demanded Gorbachev's return and the coup fell apart.

7:37Tanks rolled out of town and people felt this euphoria. They couldn't believe that Soviet tanks had backed down to them. I mean, even to the point where people were painting, forgive me, on statues of Karl Marx. And Yeltsin became the hero at that point. Everybody kind of forgot about Gorbachev and the Soviet Union voted itself out of existence within months. But what happened at that point was the Russians in control were so afraid that things could go back to communism that they decided literally to privatize and give away everything in the country. And so there was this rapid system of let's sell everything in the country to the people.

8:18But most of the people didn't understand how privatization worked. They lived in this cocoon all their life. They didn't understand capitalism. And so what ended up happening was only a very few bought the resources of Russia and everything and everybody else was was completely broke. There was massive inflation and you had people out on the street putting blankets down with their with their prized possessions and selling them on the streets. And most of the country, I mean, something like 99 percent of the country was bankrupt. And that created this huge social unrest. And so in 1993, two years after the coup, there was a standoff between the Congress and the president.

9:00And the Congress rightfully, I mean, not rightfully, but lawfully impeached the president, who refused to leave office. And the president illegally dissolved Congress, who also refused to leave office. And then we have this thing that nobody could conceive of. You may find it hard to believe as an American that something like this could happen. But the president of the country attacked his own Congress and he rolled tanks up to the Congress and shelled the Congress. And many people like myself and the government of the United States and pretty much every government of every democracy on Earth stood by Yeltsin saying that this was what was necessary to save the reforms.

9:41But we we all forgot about democracy at the time. And that set Russia on the path to where it is today. Well, I mean, listen, I mean, you've got quite a book here. I mean, obviously, you know, if you get a Netflix producer to read this book, I mean, it'll get, you know, you'll be in a huge miniseries. You're the founder of an independent foreign law firm. You're trying to help people with this new legal system. But you're getting hit up, right? I mean, this almost sounds fictional, but let me just go over a couple of things. Mafia threats, armed raids on your office, corrupt officials. You're getting your office secretly bugged.

10:24and they're even bugging police officers. I mean, this is crazy. And you're saying to yourself, I'm going to get killed here. I'm probably not going to get out of here alive. So set that scene for us and tell us the turning point where you're like, okay, I got to get my ass out of here now. This is not the right place for me to be. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. So first of all, yeah, in the 1990s, things really broke down when everybody got poor, except for a few people getting rich.

11:02You had all these mafia groups running around protection rackets and they were shaking down everybody and they tried to shake me down. And criminality was so rife. We even had criminality where my partners in my own firm went insane and I had to hire a private SWAT team and raid my office like the A-team to get rid of them. Right. And and then they they. They put the they bribed the police to cause me problems. And I I flew back to New York and went to Madison Avenue, the shop called the spy shop. And I bought all these hidden cameras and I bugged the offices of the Russian police to catch them in the act.

11:33And all this craziness kind of went on. And Yeltsin was getting sicker and sicker. He was an alcoholic. And it was clear with all these people so poor and with Yeltsin and his family so corrupt that Yeltsin wasn't going to win the next presidential election. And so in 1999, Yeltsin did something crazy and unexpected. He got on TV to wish everybody a happy new year. And he said, happy new year. And by the way, I'm residing. And here's your new president, President Putin. And so he gave the whole country to Putin for a pardon. And the first thing that Putin did was pardon Yeltsin and allow him to keep all his stuff.

12:09So he got so. So that was the deal. And when Putin came to power, it just so happened that the price of oil went through the roof and Russia is one of the biggest oil exporters. So all of a sudden, huge amounts of money started falling on bankrupt Russia. And and all of a sudden the country was rich. And so Putin put in some laws that were good at first and everybody was concentrating again on the money, not the democracy thing. And then what Putin did, the turning point where it really started getting bad, was he decided to put the richest oligarch in the country had embarrassed Putin at a televised meeting and Putin decides to put him in prison.

12:49So he creates, he weaponizes the justice system and he goes after this guy and he puts him in prison and he takes all his stuff. And at that moment, all of a sudden, the justice system was weaponized for the taking. Any government official could use it. Anybody with money could use it. And so in America, you have ambulance chases, right? If you've been injured or you know somebody who's been injured, call, you know, call Johnny. Well, in Russia, they had other lawyers who said, if you're, you know, if you're in the middle of what they call the corporate raid, somebody using the courts to steal from you, call attorney Vladimir.

13:21You had posters all over the place. and they didn't work because what happened was somebody was paying the whole system to put you in prison they were buying a case from from investigation to indictment to conviction and so the only way you could fix that case was to make a deal with them so people like me lawyers our jobs changed our job was to create the argument that would allow you to get out of jail if you could cut a deal and so you had to cut a deal first and if you didn't cut the deal i would give my argument and you'd go to prison. And if I did cut and if you did cut your deal, I'd give the exact same article and you'd get out.

13:57And so that was the state of what happened until you mentioned Bill Browder. Bill Browder was a client of mine. He made a huge amount of money investing in Russia. He went after corrupt people and got chased out of the country. And he said, close my companies. And so he closed. He sold everything he owned. He paid half a billion dollars in taxes. And all he had were empty companies. And I was closing the empty companies. And one day, 30 guys from the interior ministry raid my office with a search warrant looking for companies that have paid a lot of tax. That's a head scratcher because normally the police are looking for companies that haven't paid their tax, but they wanted companies that paid a lot of tax.

14:37They ripped my office apart, beat up one of my attorneys and put him in the hospital for three weeks and um and took all these documents and the next thing we knew bill browder's companies were being sued for a billion dollars um and and we found out that um and not only that we found out that there had all been already been a lawsuit and we're like wait a minute how can there be a lawsuit because you need lawyers we're the lawyers and it turned out that all the police had done when they raided my office they raided it for a special reason they wanted to grab the documents that would allow them to hijack control of three of this guy's Browder's companies.

15:15And we couldn't figure out why. We were like, Bill left Russia. He sold everything, paid his taxes. Those companies are empty. Why would anybody sue them for a billion dollars? And Sergei Magnitsky, this guy working for me, said, you know what? A billion dollars is what they declared in profit. And so if you sue them for a billion dollars, they have no profit, which means they could go, the new people in control could go to the government and ask for a fraudulent refund of the taxes you paid, which was a quarter billion dollars. So Sergei discovered that Russian officials ripped off their own government for a quarter billion dollars.

15:52He turned them in. He was arrested. He was tortured. He was killed. And that's when I decided I got to get out. Right. What a terrible story. Tell us about Navalny. So once I got out, Bill Browder, the man whose companies were stolen, and myself and some other people decided to go after these guys. And so we decided to make YouTube videos showing each Russian official. And these people were making$6 ,000 a year or$15 ,000 a year. And we were showing them with millions of dollars of property and partying all over Moscow and traveling. And then we showed how they railroaded Sergei and how they killed him and how they stole the money.

16:33And so these movies, I needed to distribute them in Russia. And so I found this blogger who was popular, but not a household name, Alexei Navalny, this young kid. And I showed him my videos. He's like, these are so cool. Like somebody is finally going to get these bastards. Right. And I want to be your distributor. They're going to sue me so bad, but I want to distribute these videos on the internet. So he started distributing my videos and then he started making his own anti-corruption videos. And, you know, if I got a million and a half viewers, that was big for me. Navalny was getting 115 million viewers.

17:05So that's how I met Alexei another tragic ending, obviously. So Putin, I mean, what's your prediction on Russia? What's your prediction on the situation in Ukraine? What is your prediction on how Vladimir Putin is, you know, what's his successor look like when he has a successor? Obviously, we all die, so we eventually will have one. Give me your thoughts on Russia today. So everything in Russia today depends on what the West does right now, because really Vladimir Putin single handedly made this war. Nobody knew this war was coming. His whole security council didn't know it was coming three days before it happened.

17:47He made this decision. And this decision has been pretty disastrous for Russia. So Putin thought he'd win the war in days. Instead, we're year five. And not only that, the Ukrainians are now blowing up things in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and the Russians are sanctioned left, right, and center. So what we've done is we've brought, by supporting Ukraine the way we have, we've allowed the war to come to Russia, and we've also starved Russia for money. So Vladimir Putin has a huge decision to make right now. Does he put in a draft? and the Russian people are not up for that. That's not what they signed up for.

18:25And if he drafts people, he's got political problems. So if we keep the sanctions on and we keep the pressure on, I think he is going to have to make a settlement that the West can live with. And if we don't, he's going to pull this one off. You mean he'll defeat Ukraine? Well, sure. If the money stops flowing, he wins immediately. And America, and I think mistakenly, has ceased to provide funding. I mean, Trump, there are a lot of things about Trump's policies I disagree with, but getting Europe to pay for their own way wasn't one of them. That was actually a good thing. And the Europeans have stepped up.

19:02They're not only investing a trillion dollars in their own military now, but they've put in 90 billion for Ukraine. And it's a pity that the U.S. isn't helping anymore in this. Well, I mean, what does Putin have on Trump? It's not a pee-pee tape. We both know that. It's something way worse than that. So what is it? So, you know, I mean, I don't know if there's anything out there. I mean, Fiona Hill and Michael Bolton don't think the Russians have anything special on him. I mean, look, really, if you think about this, there's so much that people could say they have on Trump. I mean, how much money did he just make in crypto at the moment, right?

19:42So I don't think the Russians necessarily have anything on Trump. I think Trump dislikes Zelensky. A phone call with Zelensky led to his first impeachment. And he likes Putin. And he thinks this war is Europe's problem and doesn't see why we should be involved. And all of those things are tremendously helpful to Vladimir Putin in Russia. But I don't think that Trump is, I don't think there's some secret compromise in that Trump is a Russian tool. Okay. All right. I don't know what it is, but I think it's way worse than that because I know Trump's personality. He definitely is kissing Putin's ass for absolutely no reason.

20:19Okay. Everything you've experienced. Okay. The optimism of the 90s, the realities of Putin's Russia. Are you hopeful? Will it one day return to a more open society? Or is this a permanent suppression of the Russian people for the next century? I don't know how long it'll last, but I don't think it's permanent. There are people who remember that magic moment when the Soviet tanks stood down and that they did that. There are people who remember Navalny and the crowds of hundreds of thousands. And again, it's easy to take people's rights away and to creep into authoritarianism and destroy rule of law when everybody's getting rich.

21:03As soon as economic times aren't good and then people ask something of you like go serve on the Ukrainian front, Right. That's a different matter. So I do think that sooner or sooner or later, things will change. But for us as an American and as a Brit and as a member of the Western world, mostly what I want right now is Russia stopped on the battlefield. And I think that if we if we do that, it will bring Putin down. What comes next? I don't know. But Russia will be out of the war and Putin will be down. And that's the first step. Okay. I guess I'm worried about a few things because your book is, it's Trump's playbook in some ways, right?

21:48And before we started, you said to me, hey, I was speaking to a group of people in Las Vegas and you can toggle from Trump to Putin pretty quickly. So tell me what's happening here in the United States that's being pulled right out of the book Rule of Lies. So let me tell you a few things that Putin did. Putin weaponized the justice system and used the justice system to attack his enemies. Putin went after the media. Putin went after the universities. Putin pulled Russia's most popular comedy show off the air because it was making fun of him. And Putin spun this myth that without me, the country would be in the garbage can.

22:32Now, all of that sounds very much like what Trump is doing right now. And what concerns me is this. Look, there's politics and then there's the system. So as an American, I believe very strongly in the system. Politics is secondary. Whether you want your guns or you're against your guns or you're up for gay rights or against gay rights or abortion, that's what we vote on. But when you start pulling apart the system, you lose everything. You lose rule of law and you will lose democracy. And that was what was done in Russia. And that seems to be what Trump is doing in America. And it makes me very nervous.

23:12It makes me very frightened. We're going to stop Trump. They couldn't stop Putin. We're going to stop Trump. You're a lawyer. We have a rule of law and we have a rule of lies. What happens here? this one's up to the american people look uh trump still loses court cases right that wouldn't happen in russia that wouldn't happen in turkey so i mean america has a a democracy that is under huge strain right now um people are fighting back my real wish is for the republicans to realize look look republicans and democrats are not supposed to be enemies where we have different policies we support. We're supposed to be neighbors, right?

23:53The Great American Compromise and all that. And I wish that the Republican voters start to realize that the system is more important than the policies. If you keep breaking the system to get your policies, God help us all when that system is gone. That's very well said. All right. We're down to the five words. If you watch my podcast, I come up with five words from the book, me and my producer. or I'm going to say the word and then you're going to give me a one or two sentences on the word, your first reaction to it. You ready? Okay. I'm going to say the word corruption. You think of what? Putin robbing a country blind.

24:30Okay. Magnitsky. Somebody who believed in the system and whose principles couldn't be broken. You think the Magnitsky law here in the United States holds up or it gets hollowed out eventually by Trump? Already being hollowed out. Already being hollowed Yeah, that's what's happening. Okay. Yeltsin. Unfortunately, not really a Democrat and somewhat corrupt. Right. So, I mean, all roads in Russia lead to some level of corruption, unfortunately, right? Yes, at the moment, almost. Or death or a prison cell or exile. Putin. A man who destroyed the democratic future of his country. Yeah. And made himself, what, a couple hundred billion doing it?

25:12Limitless money. He has an unlimited call on the resources of the Russian Federation. it's uncountable right and for what though i mean is he is he a popular figure in russia it's hard to tell i think right he he was certainly reasonably popular um before the war came home um now that the effects of the war are being felt but you have to remember when you say popular figure it's 24 7 on every channel putin putin putin putin putin and nothing else so people are just brainwashed i mean in america you know if even if you can turn the channel you don't have to hear about trump all the time right right interesting okay mother russia let's talk about russia itself i love russia um and i love the russian people and i look at russia the way um i i look at germany when hitler came to power um and i'm terrified at watching the way russian people are falling for this and becoming brutish yeah i mean i love the russian people too it It breaks my heart to watch this happen.