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NBC Interview: Magnitsky lawyer says 50 foot fall was 'no accident'

Posted this is the Donald Trump Jr thread, but thought it deserved it's own space to breath. I imagine many people are only learning about the 2012 Magnitsky Act as it was mentioned directly by DTJ (in his second statement clarification on Sunday) as part of his discussion with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016.

NBC actually interviewed the lawyer representing Sergei Magnitsky's family on Friday (before the original NYT story released, though I doubt the timing was a coincidence), and the details are frightening. At least 8 people involved in investigating either the original Russian interior ministry embezzlement/corruption charges, or the subsequent jailing/beating death of Magnitsky, have been murdered or found dead.

The interview excerpts are here. The lawyer who represents Magnitsky's family was dropped off a building in March:

MOSCOW — A Russian lawyer who survived after falling from a fourth-floor balcony says his plunge was ”no accident" and fears he was targeted because he found key evidence in a $230 million corruption scandal involving high-ranking state officials.

"I am still afraid for my life," Nikolai Gorokhov told NBC News in his first interview since surviving the 50-foot drop on March 21. "But of course I am more afraid about the safety of my family."

The lawyer says he remembers nothing about the incident, which left him with a fractured skull and sent him to intensive care, but now fears he may have been the latest target in a chain of killings surrounding the fraud probe.

Eight people who have been involved in the same case have died in mysterious or violent circumstances, while Gorokhov and another man have survived a combined three suspected assassination attempts.

Gorokhov, 53, represents the family of the whistle-blowing attorney Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Russian prison in 2009. Magnitsky was a Russian lawyer whose death led to a bitter round of sanctions between Washington and Moscow, and led Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act in 2012. That law froze the U.S. assets of Russian investigators and prosecutors said to have been involved in illegal detention and death of the late lawyer.

The other guy mentioned in the bolded above is a Russian activist who has survived two attempts on his life:

Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza wants such deaths to be investigated. He played a key role in support of the Magnitsky Act — a move that he alleges has led to two separate attempts to kill him.

When NBC News met Kara-Murza in Washington he was still frail from the second of what his doctors say were were two poisoning attempts.


He described the moment he said he realized he had been poisoned once again.

"It was about 5 o'clock in the morning, I woke up because my heart was racing and then I started sweating really badly and then I started having trouble breathing," he said.

"Of course I knew straightaway what it was because this was the second time in two years that this happened and it began almost identically in the same way," he added. "My organs were shut down one by one."

At the time, Kara-Murza was touring Russia screening documentary on his friend and late Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. The most popular opposition leader in Russia and most prominent supporter of the Magnitsky Act was gunned down as he walked with his girlfriend in central Moscow in 2015 within sight of the Kremlin.

These sanctions might be more important to Putin than the Ukraine sanctions, based on the reaction.

We now have three sets of sanctions - Ukraine, Russian hacking, and the Magnitsky act - which have been discussed by persons representing Russian business or government interests, with the Trump campaign, before he was sworn in as president. Those directly implicated include Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr, and Jared Kushner. Jeff Sessions was forced to recuse himself from the Russian hacking investigation because of similar allegations. And of course the Donald himself has had his outbursts on Twitter on the matter.
 
and don't forget the state department had said immediately as they got into the white house they wanted to redact russian sanctions quickly.
 
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