The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir

by John Bolton

Unfortunately, Putin had a curveball ready, offering to try in Russia the just-indicted GRU agents (how thoughtful), under an unspecified treaty, saying further he would let Mueller’s investigators come in to do their work, so long as there was reciprocity with respect to Bill Browder, a businessman whose lawyer in Russia, Sergei Magnitsky, had been arrested and killed by the Putin regime. Browder’s grandfather Earl Browder had been General Secretary of the US Communist Party for many years in the 1930s and ’40s, marrying a Soviet citizen. The capitalist grandson, now a British citizen, had done well financially in Russia, but Magnitsky’s murder and the actions taken against his investments moved him to launch an international campaign against Moscow. He persuaded Congress to pass a law that enabled the US to sanction Russian human-rights violators; several other countries followed suit. The way Putin saw it, Browder had given Hillary Clinton’s campaign, foundation, and other parts of the Clinton galactic empire some $400 million that he had basically stolen from Russia, which got Trump’s attention.