Photo by Jeremy Noble | CC BY 2.0
Flipping through the cable news stations last Saturday morning, I came across an amusing sight at Russia- frenzied MSNBC. There was the stern host Joy Reid (“#AM Joy”) giving a concerned and sympathetic interview to William Browder, a worried multimillionaire financier who said that Vladimir Putin wants to murder him.
“Are you afraid, Bill?” Joy Reid asked, “are you taking precautions for your safety?”
“Am I at risk of being killed by Vladimir Putin’s regime? …Yes,” Browder said, adding that there’s not much he can do “if they’re going to use chemical weapons to put poison on my door knob.”
The grandson (hilariously enough) of former US Communist Party General Secretary Earl Browder (a dutiful servant of the Soviet Union during the Great Depression and World War II), Browder is one of at least two “Americans” (including former US Russian ambassador Michael McFaul) Putin told Donald Trump he wants sent to Moscow for questioning by Russian investigators. Trump nodded approvingly as Putin discussed Browder’s theft of Russian assets during the Russian president’s joint press conference with Trump in Helsinki last Monday. Trump initially said he was willing to consider Putin’s request.
Two days before his appearance on “AMJoy,” Browder wasgiven time on CNN.”To hand me over to Putin,” Browder told CNN host Kate Boldua, “is basically to hand me over to my death…. The Russians…they’d like…