173. The man Putin can’t silence: Bill Browder and sanctioning Russia

16:52Bill Browder:Well, I would go much further than too slow. I mean, it was just sickening the way that the establishment in the UK from every different political party embraced dirty Russian money, looked the other way. And in my own story, my story goes off the rails. We'll get to that. And as I would go around to the government and to institutions in the UK, trying to explain that these are crooks, these are murderers, these are thieves, these are con men, everybody shunned me in the most explicit way. I couldn't even get a meeting at the foreign office for many years. Just because my message was, Russia is a criminal regime and nobody wanted to come anywhere near me because they were so enjoying all this oligarch money coming into London.

17:46Rory Stewart:What are we actually saying? Are you saying that the diplomats in the foreign office were themselves taking bribes in Swiss bank accounts?

17:53Bill Browder:No, no, not at all. What I'm saying, it was the policy of the UK that it was good for the UK to have all this dirty money flowing. We're not going to look at where the money came from. We can enjoy our white tablecloths and our gentlemen's clubs and live very nicely. And we're just going to look the other way. And I attribute this to the sort of colonial culture of the UK where - I like the way he looked at you in particular

18:18Rory Stewart:on that one, the colonial culture. I thought you were going to say this was the time of the Blair government. Is that what you looked at me and said, the colonial culture?

18:25Bill Browder:I mean, the Blair government, the Brown government, the Cameron government, the everything government. This was not a party political thing. This was a British national policy to let this money flow. And it's not just the governments, the people who were getting the money. This was lawyers all representing Russian oligarchs suing each other, were getting rich with these guys fighting over their dirty loot in London. And then anytime anyone wanted to do something, all these fancy lawyers would show up and whisper in the ears of their minister friends, you know, this is too good for us. Don't mess this up.

18:58Alastair Campbell:How did you feel when Roman Abramovich did suddenly become this big figure in British cultural life by owning one of our biggest football clubs?

19:05Bill Browder:You know, and I wanted to say to everyone, you don't understand where this guy comes from, this guy's background, how he made his money, who he's involved with. I mean, nobody wanted to hear that because everybody wanted. Chelsea now has a well-funded sponsor. We're getting good players. Look how the team has turned around. We love football.

19:24Rory Stewart:Maybe we can loop back to this in a bit, but let's get straight into your story. You arrive, you set up Hermitage Capital, you're going, and then things begin to go wrong. Tell us the story.

19:34Bill Browder:So I get to Russia, I start investing in these companies, and my 10-bagger in Poland gets repeated multiple times in the investments that I'm making in Russia. And I get really successful. And I'm successful in terms of, I was running an investment fund. The way you determine success is how much money you're managing and the returns you get on the money you're managing. My fund was up in the first 18 months, 865%. I was managing more than a billion dollars, which these days, people don't even get out of bed for a billion dollars, but back then it was a lot of money. And it was all just a huge success.

20:08Bill Browder:But then what I started to see was that the oligarchs were just robbing blind the companies that I was investing in. I owned 1 % or a half a percent or a quarter percent of a company. The oligarch would own 51%, and they would steal 100 % of the profits for themselves.

20:24Alastair Campbell:And just could you be, was it possible for some to be successful in the way that you were without at least embracing corruption in some form? Did you have to be aware of, conscious of, and in some instances actually take part in what we might define as corruption?

20:40Bill Browder:So the answer is to be long-term successful in Russia, you do. And that was my problem is that I didn't embrace it. I bristled against it. And I said, I can't tolerate this. This is outrageous. This is wrong. How can you treat your shareholders this way? And so I started to, first of all, I said, well, how do I fight this? It wasn't like you could go to the SEC of Russia and have them clamped down, nor could you go to the police or anybody. But I had this one great skill, which is that I was good at doing analysis. And I had really, really smart people working for me who were even better at doing analysis.

21:17Bill Browder:and we started investigating how the oligarchs went about doing the stealing. And what was interesting is that they were not covering it up. It was just out in the open.

21:27Alastair Campbell:I feel another parallel with Today in America, but carry on.

21:29Bill Browder:We'll get to that in a minute. And so I'm sitting there seeing this and we were gathering the data and I said, well, okay, well, we need to get this out there. And so I was an expat in Moscow and I had lots of friends who were foreign correspondents and I would share with them the information that we got. And they loved it because I was saving them, you know, three weeks worth of investigative work and they would they would publish the stories. And what was interesting is that when I first started to expose the oligarchs was right around the time that Vladimir Putin had come to power. Well, a little bit earlier, but but he was just just coming into his own.

22:04Bill Browder:And when he came in, he was fighting with the same guys I was fighting with. The oligarchs were stealing power from him at the same time as they were stealing money from me. and there's there's an expression your enemy's enemy is your friend and so Vladimir Putin and he wasn't this this tyrant he is now the back then he was this kind of insecure guy trying to figure out how to how to make his way in this position that he had so he was fighting with the oligarchs I was fighting with the oligarchs and when I would publish a scandal he would step in and do something about it using whatever the limited power at the time of the presidency of Russia, not because he believed in me or believed in what I was doing, but because he didn't like the oligarchs.

22:45Bill Browder:But every time he stepped in, the value of my portfolio went up. And so I'm sitting there thinking, God, he's a pretty cool guy, this Vladimir Putin. He's like clamping down on the oligarchs and I'm making money. And this is a pretty great situation. And it worked for a couple of years. And it worked until the day that he decided he wanted to win his war with the oligarchs.

23:09Alastair Campbell:And that's the famous meeting where he gets them all and he basically says, I'm the capo de capo. Well, he did that at the very beginning. And a lot of them didn't respect him.

23:17Bill Browder:But this is when he basically gets in the cause and lays down the law and he goes for them. This is when he goes for the biggest oligarch in the country. His name is Mikhail Hordakovsky. He's still around. He was worth 20 billion at the time, owned the biggest oil company in Russia, Yukos. And he arrests him off his private jet in Siberia. He arrests him. He puts him on trial. And this was at a time when everyone thought the oligarchs controlled everything, which they had up until that moment. And so everyone was saying, well, he'll be out of jail in a week because he just needs to, like, share a little, I don't know, do something.

23:48Bill Browder:A week goes by, he's not out of jail. Two weeks goes by, a month goes by. And eventually he gets sentenced to 10 years for tax evasion. And he's sent to a pretty uncomfortable situation. Well, there's no comfortable situation in Russian prison. But he gets sent to a particularly nasty one. And, like, up in the far north, you know, Russian prison is torture. I mean, it's really just horrible. And so all the other oligarchs are sitting out there yachts off the hotel dukapping. They're just saying to themselves, I don't want this to happen. And so they go back to Moscow and say, Vladimir, how do we stay out of jail?

24:23Bill Browder:And he says, real simple, 50%. And not 50 % for the Russian government, but 50 % for Vladimir Putin. And that's the moment he becomes the richest man in the world. And that's the moment the oligarchs are totally subordinate to him. And basically, their money is his money.

24:37Alastair Campbell:And it's really interesting what you said there about how your first impressions, because we've interviewed in the podcast before the widow of Litvinenko and also of Alexei Navalny, both of whom said that they thought that we, the Blair government, were very naive when we tried to sort of bring Putin into the G8 and we tried to sort of present a sense of this being a relationship that could work for both sides, etc. Do you think we were naive? Were you naive? Or was it just that this guy changed once he realized that corruption was the only way for him to go, that he wasn't going to be able to reform the country?

25:10Bill Browder:Well, and he's never changed. And nobody ever changes. I mean, there's this famous movie about that attracts people at, you know, six, 16, 26 and 60, whatever. I don't remember the name of the movie, but if you watch that movie, you know, you can tell what a person's like when they're when they're seven years old and nobody ever changes. And Putin didn't change. His circumstances changed. You know, there's this expression that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. Absolutely. And that is, you know, Putin's instincts were always secret policeman, KGB, all that kind of stuff. But he didn't have the absolute power to do it.

25:47Bill Browder:And when he first came in, he had to be, he was in a democracy. He needed people to keep him in, vote him in. He had to be elected. He had to be reelected. There was a democracy going on. Now, he chiseled away at all the institutions, the regional governors, the media, the courts, all that kind of stuff. But when he first came in, he was subject to these constraints. And so if the constraints had stayed in place, none of this stuff would have ever happened. If the institutions of Russia had been robust enough, none of this would have ever happened.

26:17Rory Stewart:Eczema is unpredictable, but you can flare less with EPCLIS, a once-monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four in ten people taking EBCLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing. EBCLIS, LibriKizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per two milliliter injection, is a prescription

26:41Bill Browder:medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88

26:45Rory Stewart:pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBCLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to EBCLIS. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EBCLIS. Before starting EBCLIS, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask your doctor about EBCLIS and visit ebglis.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX or 1-800-545-5979.

27:17Rory Stewart:LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot make your email response time faster. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you find space for your three desk drinks. Why do you have three? And while we can't help you find the perfect volume for your presentation video, LinkedIn can help you find the perfect audience for your business. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com slash small business.

27:46Bill Browder:I'm R.J. Decker, a private investigator. uncovering the sunshine state's darkest secrets. Tuesdays, it's the premiere of ABC's hottest new crime show. R.J. freaking Decker as I live and breathe. He's a private eye. It's not a standard murder. It's someone bigger. And a public mess.

28:05Alastair Campbell:Trying to get someone back to prison today? You go to prison one time and suddenly it's all the jokes.

28:10Bill Browder:R.J. Decker, series premiere, Tuesdays on ABC and stream on Hulu.

28:21Rory Stewart:Let's now loop it back to your own story. We have Bill in Russia making a lot of money. We have Putin getting control. Khodorkovsky sent off to jail. And then?

28:29Bill Browder:Well, so Khodorkovsky sent off to jail. I'm sitting there and I haven't stopped my attack on the oligarchs. I continue to attack the oligarchs. And I'm exposing corruption at Gazprom, the national gas company that most people have heard of by now, Sparebank, all sorts of other big oil companies. More football involvement. And so they're all scratching their heads. What do we do with this guy? Because now I'm no longer going after Putin's enemies. They're now his business partners. He gets a 50 percent of everything. They have three options. They could kill me. They could arrest me or they could deport me.

29:04Bill Browder:When you say they, you mean the government forces or the oligarchs? Putin. Because now Putin is in on it. If the decision was taken today, they would have made the decision to kill me. But he was still timid back then. To arrest me, I'm sure they thought about it seriously. But then they thought, OK, this guy would be sitting in jail and every foreign leader, they would be just as much hostage to my arrest as I was. And so the easy answer was to deport me. And so I was flying back to Moscow. I've been living there for 10 years. I landed at Sheremetyevo Airport. I went to the VIP lounge. I'd been through that lounge like 250 times.

29:40Bill Browder:Normally it's a 30-second thing. I'm sitting there for an hour, and then eventually four heavily armed border guards come in and grab me and frog march me down to the detention center of the airport. Kept me there overnight. I didn't know whether I'm being sent to Siberia or being deported, and thank God they deported me the next morning. they declared me a threat to national security not to be allowed back into Russia. And that was the beginning of the most terrible story. And so after that, I realized that I've got to get my people out because they're going to go after my people next. I evacuate my staff.

30:13Bill Browder:We successfully sell all of our securities. And everyone said, why did they allow you to do that? And the answer is that they're evil, but they're absolutely incompetent at exercising their evil. They have C students from D universities with no motivation. So they wanted to get all my money. They wanted to get all my people. They wanted to get everything. But we got the people out, we got our money out safe. And I dusted off my hands. I thought, okay, that's the end of the story. It turns out to be the beginning of the worst nightmare you could ever imagine. 18 months after I was expelled, my offices were raided in Moscow.

30:49Bill Browder:You'd still kept offices in Moscow. Well, I kept my office in Moscow on the assumption that one day this storm is going to blow over. I didn't have any people there. I had one secretary manning the office, no professional staff.

31:00Rory Stewart:And which year are we? Where are we in time now?

31:02Bill Browder:We're now in 2007. June 2007, the office gets raided, 25 police officers. The American law firm that I use to help me with all my paperwork also gets raided. They seize all of our corporate documents connected to our investment portfolio. And the documents are then used in a highly complex fraud in which they steal our companies. The police seize our documents, steal our companies, and then working together with a bunch of organized criminals, steal$230 million of taxes that my firm had paid to the Russian government in the previous year. I have a young lawyer. His name was Sergei Magnitsky. He was 35 years old at the time I hired him to look at this story.

31:46Bill Browder:He discovers the tax fraud. He exposes it. He testifies against the officials involved. And then five weeks after he testifies, the same officials he testified against arrest him, put him in pretrial detention, and then torture him to withdraw his testimony. They put him in cells with 14 inmates and eight beds and left the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heating, no window panes in December in Moscow, so he nearly freezes to death. They put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up. They move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night.

32:21Bill Browder:They want him to get him to withdraw his testimony. They also want to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the$230 million, and he did so on my instruction. He absolutely would not give in. He was a man of incredible principle and integrity. The torture got worse and worse and worse. He started to get sick. He lost 20 kilos, developed terrible pains in his stomach, was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones, needed an operation, which was scheduled for the 1st of August. They refused to give him an operation. They moved him to a prison without any medical facilities. Torture got worse and worse.

32:56Bill Browder:And on the night of November 16th, 2009, he went into critical condition. instead of putting him in the emergency room, they put him in an isolation cell, let eight riot guards into the cell, chained him to a bed, and then beat him to death. He was 37 years old, November 16, 2009. He left a wife and two children. It's the most tragic, horrifying, unbelievable thing ever I could have ever imagined.

33:28Alastair Campbell:I mean, always you had your initial reactions. You tell us what that was. But then how did you sort of turn that into then fighting for the change that became known as an act in his name? For me, it was the turning point of my life.

33:39Bill Browder:It had all been sort of, everything was sort of virtual, making money, losing money. It was all not material, but all of a sudden, a person who worked for me, a young man who worked for me, was tortured to death. And I just couldn't live with myself if I didn't do something about that. And so I made a vow to his memory, to his family, to myself, that I was going to put aside everything I was doing in my life as a businessman. And I was going to devote all of my time, energy and resources going after the people who killed him to make sure they face justice. And that's what I for the last 16 years, that's what I've been doing.

34:15Bill Browder:And at first we tried to get justice in Russia and it was absolutely impossible. They circled the wagons. They started attacking him and attacking me as some type of criminals. instead of going after the people who killed him. They didn't care about the money that was stolen. And so it became clear that we were not going to get any justice in Russia. And if we needed to get justice, we're going to have to get justice outside of Russia. And that's where I came up with this idea, which is the people who killed him did it for money, and they don't keep that money in Russia. They keep that money in the West.

34:49Bill Browder:And so the idea was that we would freeze their assets in the West and ban their travel to the West. And that became known as the Magnitsky Act. And I first took this idea to Washington. And I got two senators interested, a Democratic senator from Maryland named Benjamin Cardin, liberal Democrat, and a Republican senator from Arizona, the late John McCain. And they took on this case. They called it the Magnitsky Act. And this was back in a time in Washington when there was no pro-Russia torture and murder lobby in that city. And when it went for a vote in the Senate, it passed 92 to 4. It passed the House of Representatives with 89%.

35:31Bill Browder:It became a federal law on December 14th, 2012, signed by President Obama. Vladimir Putin went out of his mind with this law because he's a guy who does a lot of human rights abuse. He's a guy who loves money. And he's a guy who keeps his money in the West. And so he made repealing the Magnitsky Act his single largest foreign policy priority. He went after me in the most horrific way, put me and Sergei Magnitsky, who had already killed on trial. It was the first ever trial against a dead man in the history of Russia, found us both guilty. I got nine years in absentia. They've been chasing me around the world with Interpol red notices, a dozen attempts to have me extradited from the UK, kidnapping threats, death threats, lawsuits, you name it, everything.

36:20Bill Browder:And it became clear that this was something that really got under Putin's skin.

36:24Alastair Campbell:There was a moment in, was it 2018, when you were arrested in Spain, by sort of quotes, Interpol, close quotes, and Putin was basically at that time talking to Trump about getting you properly dealt with?

36:37Bill Browder:So I was arrested in Spain on a Russian Interpol notice. I was coming out of my hotel room in Spain. I was in Spain, actually, to give evidence to the Spanish national prosecutor, anti-corruption prosecutor, about dirty money from Russia connected to the murder of Sergei Magnitsky in Spain, invited by the prosecutor to formally open the criminal case. As I'm coming out of my hotel room, two heavily armed police officers from the Policía Nacional of Spain were standing outside my room, arrested me. I said, when am I being arrested? Interpol, Russia. The manager of the hotel, who had given me a fabulous upgrade the night before, was standing there with him, begging them to let me pack my bags because he didn't want his fancy room occupied for some indefinite period by my belongings while they were waiting to see if I was going to be released or not.

37:26Bill Browder:They allowed me to pack my bags. I go into one of the, and it was a suite, and so I went out of sight, and I try to call my wife. She's still sleeping. It's early morning. I try to call the Spanish lawyer who'd set up the meeting with the prosecutor. The Spanish lawyers don't get to work till like 11. Nobody was taking my call. And so I tweet out, urgent, being arrested in Madrid, Spain right now on a Russian Interpol warrant. Not sure where they're taking me. Press send. They go out to the police car. They shove me into the back of the car. They didn't take my phone away, which was interesting.

38:01Bill Browder:And I'm sitting in the back of the police car. The windows don't go down and the doors don't open from the inside. And there's thick plexiglass between me and them. And I'm thinking, wait a second, what if these guys are not actually police officers? Maybe these are like Russian kidnappers. I mean, how hard would it be to get a police uniform? And we're driving along and I'm thinking to myself, what if people don't believe my tweet? And I took my phone out and I take a picture of the back of their head. So it's obvious that I'm in the police car with all the paraphernalia. And I tweeted out in the back of the police car on the way to the station.

38:34Bill Browder:And at this point, my phone blows up and it's all on silent. New York Times, Financial Times, News Alert, Bill Browder being arrested in Spain. And then all of a sudden I see calls coming in from everybody. And then I see my lawyer and he's the only one whose call I want to take. And so I leaned down to pick up the call. And then the police see that I have my phone. I'm on the phone in the back of their police car. They screech over the side of the road. They grab my phone away from me, no phone. I said, lawyer, no lawyer. And then we arrive at some nondescript building in some old square in Madrid.

39:08Bill Browder:And I said, where are we? And they say, medical exam. And I said, medical exam? And I could just picture going into some rooms getting injected in the arm and then waking up in a slow boat to Moscow. And as one of me, two of them, no handcuffs, and they could see that the situation was going to get out of control. And one of them starts calling somebody. And then he puts in a Google Translate, medical exam is standard arrest protocol. And no medical exam, lawyer, no lawyer. Anyways, they decide to forego the medical exam. We jump into the police car again. And then we finally arrive at the police station.

39:45Bill Browder:And I'm just so relieved to see the flag of Spain and the European Union flag at the police station that I'm just being arrested and not kidnapped. What did you feel? Did you think you're on your way to Moscow? Well, I mean, everyone has different ways of dealing with crisis. And I'm actually, crisis is, I'm good at crisis. I'm really, I'm not good at a lot of other stuff, but I'm good at crisis. I just like buckle down. I'm just looking, where's my, you know, what do I have to do? What, you know, my mind is going at a thousand miles. I'm not panicking. I'm just like thinking what, what's, what to do.

40:16Bill Browder:And it was really good that I tweeted because by the, so I get to the police station and I'm, and I'm sitting in the police station. This is just like a little police station in this, in some place in Madrid. And, and they, they think they've got like Carlos the Jackal. I mean, international fugitive wanted by Interpol. They found him, they got him and everyone's sort of popping their head in to see that, you know, like, Like, you know, it doesn't look that scary, but, you know, you never. And this police station was like buzzing and everyone was so interested. And like, you know, and so I'm sitting there and I'm sitting there for about an hour and a half.

40:51Bill Browder:And then I could feel like the mood deflate and I know what it was. And then like maybe 20 minutes later, the chief of police, along with the translator, comes into my cell and they said, you know, Mr. Browder, we're very sorry. We've been on the phone to Interpol. The warrant is not valid. you're free to go. So the police officers, the one who arrested me, come up to me and through the translator and say, is there any way you can delete that tweet? And I say, is it illegal? And they said, no, I'm keeping it up there. So anyone who ever wants to go on my Twitter account, go back to that. This is like May 2018.

41:24Bill Browder:You can find the picture in the back of the police car still on Twitter. And so, you know, there's been a lot of criticism of Twitter and most of it's justified, but Twitter did save my life at that moment. And when did the Trump-Putin? A couple months later, Trump is meeting with Putin in Helsinki at the first summit between the two presidents. And it was right after Robert Mueller had indicted 12 military intelligence officers. And so the first question to Putin is, are you going to hand over the military intelligence officers? And he says, it's possible we would. If we did, we would expect some goodwill and reciprocity from our American friends.

41:58Bill Browder:And particularly, we would expect them to hand over Bill Browder, me. And then the next question goes to President Trump. What do you think of this deal? And Trump says, I think it's an incredible offer. And it took four days and a vote in the Senate, 98 to zero, not to hand me over before the whole thing stopped. I'm not sure

42:20Rory Stewart:it would be the same vote today. As we move forward, let's kind of bring this now to Russia today. Tell us what we're missing about Putin, what Trump is missing about Putin, what Russia means in the world and what we can learn about geopolitics from your story?

42:35Bill Browder:Well, the most important thing I can tell you from this story is what I've seen with Putin, with the Magnitsky money and with a thousand other scams like it. And we, by the way, have proven that Putin got some of the money from the Magnitsky crime. He gets money from every crime. Over the course of his 26 years in power, he has stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian state. When I say he, he and a thousand other people have stolen a trillion dollars from the Russian state. That money, the trillion dollars, should have been spent on health care, schools, roads, public services. Instead, it was spent on yachts, private jets, villas in the south of France, villas and townhouses on Belgrave Square, etc.

43:21Bill Browder:They've stolen too much money over too long a period of time. And what Putin is afraid of, what he's been afraid of for a while, is that the Russian people one day are going to snap. It happens everywhere sooner or later that if a dictator impoverishes his people too much, they come for him. And so if you're a dictator like Putin who's stolen too much money and you're sitting in the Kremlin afraid that one day a million people are going to march on Red Square, what do you do to stop that from happening? You come straight out of Machiavelli 101, you create a foreign enemy, and you start a war. The war with Ukraine is a totally manufactured war.

44:03Bill Browder:They're not enemies of Russia. There's all this business about denazification of Ukraine. There's no Nazification that's taking place. It's a complete fabrication. He needed a foreign enemy to start a war. He needed a war to distract the people so they're not marching on the Kremlin. They're fighting with a foreign enemy. That's what this war is about. And this is what everybody misunderstands about this situation. And this is very important. This is very important for Keir Starmer. It's very important for Macron. all, it's very important for everybody, which is there is no way he is going to stop this war.

44:39Bill Browder:There is nothing we can give him. This is not about NATO. This is not about an empire. It's not about patriotism of Russia. This is about a little man who's stolen too much money, who's scared of his own people. He needs a war. And therefore, this war will carry on. And this 20 point peace plan or this 28 point peace plan or whatever points peace plan, Putin is not going to agree to.

45:03Alastair Campbell:So you mentioned Starmer there and Macron, but the truth is, my very strong sense is that he's playing Trump along and Trump is falling for it. Well, I think that that's a

45:14Bill Browder:generous way to ascribe Trump's motivations. So give me the ungenerous version. For reasons that we don't understand. And, you know, there's been books written and a thousand pages of ink spilled on this, Trump is more aligned with Putin than he is with Zelensky.

45:35Alastair Campbell:Well, I've been hearing through the entirety of this interview, every time you've talked about Russia then, I keep feeling parallels with America now. I find that incredibly scary.

45:44Rory Stewart:I mean, if you replace the word Ukraine with Greenland, you begin to think there's not much negotiation you can do with Trump if fundamentally the reason he wants to acquire Greenland is political spectacle, distraction of the voters, and it's not actually a concrete national security request.

45:58Alastair Campbell:And he wants to become even richer than Putin.

45:59Bill Browder:Well, I think that there's something there. I mean, look, the Qataris gave him a$400 million jet, and he's building an airbase for the Qataris in Idaho. Middle East potentates with an airbase in Idaho? How is that in America's national interest? And so I don't know what Putin and Trump have agreed to. I don't know what they've discussed in secret meetings where there's been no note takers. But what I do know is that at every opportunity where Trump could have been tough on Putin, he has not been tough on Putin. At every stage of the game, he could, I mean, he is tough on everybody. He's like humiliating the Europeans with 10 % tariffs and then 25 % tariffs.

46:44Bill Browder:You know what the tariffs are on Russia? 0%. Zero. And so I don't know what's going on with with these two guys. But what I can say is that Trump is not acting as any other American Democrat or Republican leader has acted in the past.

46:59Alastair Campbell:And yet the Republican politicians, a lot of them in Congress, are just going along with it. I don't think if this had happened to you in this era, I'm not sure you'd have survived.

47:09Bill Browder:And I think you're absolutely right. Do I even feel safe going to America right now? The answer is not when they're rounding up people left, right and center and Putin wants to, you know, Trump wants to be friends with Putin.

47:21Alastair Campbell:Am I being alarmist to worry that the reason that Trump has got this sort of fondness, whatever it is for Putin, is actually because he is jealous and he wants to be him. He wants to be the richest man in the world. He wants to be the most powerful person in the world. He wants to control his own country like a business.

47:38Bill Browder:Well, I don't think you're being alarmist. He's laid his cards on the table. I mean, the one thing that we can say about Trump is that he's totally transparent. He's not hiding anything. He doesn't want to be limited by judges, the activist judges. He doesn't want the fake media to talk about what he's doing. He doesn't like these international institutions and laws and treaties that constrain him. He said it. There's no mystery to the whole thing. The question is, what does the rest of the world do to survive and to keep their sovereignty, keep their values, etc. And that's the big challenge.

48:17Bill Browder:And Mark Carney gave a beautiful speech yesterday talking about that. And that is the challenge of the rule of law, you know, the Europe, the world that's outside of Trump's direct control.

48:29Rory Stewart:Without being too self-interested and British about this, but you've leveled some pretty terrible criticisms, justified criticisms against Britain and the way it's behaved. Is there anything good that you can say about the way the British government has behaved and treated you in this case since 2012.

48:44Bill Browder:So when the war started, all of a sudden, so I couldn't get, I literally could not get a meeting with the most junior bureaucrat in the foreign office during the oligarch heyday London grad times. But as soon as the war started, my phone started ringing. Not only could I get meetings, I was being asked to brief ministers. I was being asked to come in and talk about how do we counter this evil Russian aggression. All of a sudden, the British

49:12Rory Stewart:woke up. And they gave you a knighthood.

49:14Bill Browder:They gave me a knighthood.

49:15Alastair Campbell:And you took it. I'll never take it, Bill.

49:17Bill Browder:From not being able to get a meeting in the foreign office to be a knight commander of the distinguished order of St. Michael and St. George, it's complete. And you

49:27Rory Stewart:feel safe, I hope, in Britain.

49:28Bill Browder:I feel institutionally safe. I mean, you know, the Russians can do terrible things and the British government's not going to hand me over to the Russian government on a Russian arrest warrant, on a bogus Russian arrest warrant. And so, I mean, I do feel I've been warmly embraced by the British establishment because of my views on Russia and because of the work that I've done to hold them to account.

49:49Alastair Campbell:But you weren't listened to when you were first articulating them.

49:52Bill Browder:If they had listened to me when I was first talking about it, and I don't want to overstate my importance, but if they had listened to me about sanctions, which is what I've been arguing for, the Magnitsky Act, freezing the assets, which by the way is now a British law, and it had been used against Putin and against Russia earlier, I think it might have changed the course of history because Putin thought that if he were to invade Ukraine, it would be just like when he went into Georgia, nothing happened. Just like when he took Crimea, nothing happened. Just like when he carpet bombed Syria, nothing happened.

50:27Bill Browder:Just like Litvinenko and Salisbury, nothing happened. And so Putin was of the impression that the UK and Europe would do nothing when he did a full-scale invasion. We'd scream bloody murder, sanction a few low, low, low people, and that would be that. If he had known that we had the capacity and the willingness to do this stuff earlier, he might have done something differently. And I wish, it breaks my heart that we were all so self-interested during all those boom times with the oligarchs that this is where we ended up.

50:56Rory Stewart:Bill, it's been a great, great privilege. I mean, we could talk to you for many, many hours, but thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for your courage. Thank you for your compassion and your loyalty. And we're very proud to have you as one of our knights. Thank you.

51:10Alastair Campbell:Rory's a great believer of the honor system, Bill. I'm kind of less convinced. Bill, thanks so much. Thank you.