Joshua Yaffe's piece about Bill Browder, “Russia's Most Wanted: How a hedge-fund manager became Putin's greatest obsession,” from the August 20th New Yorker, is much recommended. It also gives us a lot of dots to connect. 

In Dec. 2012, Pres. Obama signed into law The Magnitsky Act, named after Browder's former attorney, who was arrested in Moscow, transferred from one shitty prison to the next, and died/was murdered in prison in Nov. 2009. Not a pretty story. The Act authorizes the U.S. government to sanction human rights offenders, freeze their assets, and ban violators from entering the country. Why does it bother Putin so? Yaffe writes:

The Magnitsky Act threatened the unspoken pact that governs Putin's relations with those who enforce his power, whether they are interior-ministry officials or bureaucrats in the tax agency. “It means his krysha doesn't work,” Celeste Wallander explained. Krysha is Russian for “roof,” and in criminal jargon means the protection that a powerful figure can offer others. “It screws up his social contract with those inside the system,” she said.

Indeed, in September 2013, the U.S. Attorney's office in New York brought a case against a Russian company called Prevezon and its sole shareholder, Denis Katsyv, under the Act. How did Prevezon come to the fed's attention? Browder brought them the intel.

Anyway, here's a dot. See if you can connect it:

The Prevezon case provided the platform for an ever-expanding Russian campaign against the Magnitsky Act, largely overseen by Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had been the lawyer for the Katsyv family for a decade.

If Veselnitskaya sounds familiar, it's because she's the Russian attorney who was at the infamous June 9th Trump Tower meeting with Donald, Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort.

Read the piece.