And then we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys...It turns out that in Putin’s Russia, there are no good guys. perjuring himself and bearing false witness was more of a torture than the physical torture they were subjecting him to, and so he just refused. And in retaliation they just kept on upping and upping the torture and the pressure until the point when he started to get sick. He ended up getting terrible pains in his stomach, he lost 40 pounds, and he was diagnosed as having pancreatitis and gallstones and needing an operation, an urgent operation which was scheduled for August 1, 2009. And about a week before the operation, they came to him again and they said, “Please sign this false confession,” and again he said no. And so in response to that, they abruptly moved him from the prison that had a medical wing to a maximum-security prison called Butyrka, which is considered to be one of the most horrific prisons in Russia. And most significantly for Sergei, they had no proper medical wing there. They put him in Butyrka. His health goes into a terrible downward spiral. He goes into constant, agonizing, ear-piercing pain, untreated. He and his lawyers write 20 different desperate requests for medical attention to every different branch of the criminal justice system. Every branch either ignores their requests or denies them in writing. And on the night of November 16, 2009, Sergei Magnitsky goes into critical condition.
sworn testimony against the crooked police officers and various others. And then we waited for the good guys to get the bad guys. It turns out that in Putin’s Russia, there are no good guys. And about five weeks after Sergei testified, instead of arresting the people who stole the money, the people who he testified against – the police officers he testified against – came to his home on November 24, 2008, and arrested Sergei Magnitsky and put him in pretrial detention, where he was then tortured to get him to withdraw his testimony. They put him in cells with 14 inmates and 8 beds and left the lights on 24 hours a day to impose sleep deprivation. They put him in cells with no heat and no windowpanes in December in Moscow, so he nearly froze to death. And they put him in cells with no toilet, just a hole in the floor where the sewage would bubble up. They’d move him from cell to cell to cell in the middle of the night. And the purpose of all this was to get him to withdraw his testimony against the corrupt police officers and then to get him to sign a false confession to say that he stole the $230 million and he did so on my instruction. They figured: Here’s a guy who wears a blue suit and a red tie and a white shirt, buys coffee at Starbucks in the morning, goes to a fancy Western law firm. They throw him in one of these horrible hell-hole prisons, and within a week, he’ll sign whatever they want him to sign. But it turned out that they had totally misjudged Sergei Magnitsky. Sergei Magnitsky might not have looked like a tough character, but he was a man of absolute integrity. For him, the idea of
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American Consequences
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