William Browder Revisits the Magnitsky Affair

William F. Browder

Global Governance, Russia

Stop "recklessly disseminating the lies that the Kremlin is trying to spread around Washington."

On June 16th, 2016, Rachel Bauman wrote an article in the National Interest entitled, “What Really Killed Sergei Magnitsky,” in which she makes a number of unchecked allegations against me and the late Sergei Magnitsky.  She wrote this article without making a single attempt to contact me or any member of my team.  Had she done so, we would have provided her with factual evidence that destroyed every point she made in her story.

The crux of her article is that the Magnitsky Act, a 2012 law which sanctions Russian human rights violators, was passed on the basis of a story about Sergei Magnitsky that is not true.  She suggests that I lied to the US government, and that a Russian filmmaker named Andrei Nekrasov was able to singlehandedly uncover these lies and expose them in his recent film.  Since Ms. Bauman didn’t bother to check any of the facts herself when she wrote this story, I’d like to provide some of these facts now.

Her first point is that Sergei Magnitsky, the person to whom the US sanctions legislation refers, was not tortured as is stated in the law.  She confidently refers to the Russian Presidential Human Rights Council report, claiming it states that Sergei Magnitsky died of acute heart failure, rather than injuries.  Had she actually read the report, she would have found that on page 2 it states, “Magnitsky was completely deprived of medical care before his death.  In addition, there is reasonable suspicion to believe that the death was triggered by beating Magnitsky: later his relatives recorded smashed knuckles and bruises on his body.”  This document can easily be found at the following link: http://russian-untouchables.com/eng/civil-right-council/.  It is surprising that she would have made such an erroneous statement without checking the facts.

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