How Trump gets his fake news

The president rarely surfs the web on his own, but his staff have made a habit of slipping news stories on to his desk—including the occasional internet hoax.

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By SHANE GOLDMACHER

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus issued a stern warning at a recent senior staff meeting: Quit trying to secretly slip stuff to President Donald Trump.

Just days earlier, K.T. McFarland, the deputy national security adviser, had given Trump a printout of two Time magazine covers. One, supposedly from the 1970s, warned of a coming ice age; the other, from 2008, about surviving global warming, according to four White House officials familiar with the matter.

Trump quickly got lathered up about the media’s hypocrisy. But there was a problem. The 1970s cover was fake, part of an internet hoax that’s circulated for years. Staff chased down the truth and intervened before Trump tweeted or talked publicly about it.

The episode illustrates the impossible mission of managing a White House led by an impetuous president who has resisted structure and strictures his entire adult life.

While the information stream to past commanders in chief has been tightly monitored, Trump prefers an open Oval Office with a free flow of ideas and inputs from both official and unofficial channels. And he often does not differentiate between the two. Aides sometimes slip him stories to press their advantage on policy; other times they do so to gain an edge in the seemingly endless Game of Thrones inside the West Wing.

The consequences can be tremendous, according to a half-dozen White House officials and others with direct interactions with the president. A news story tucked into Trump’s hands at the right moment can torpedo an appointment or redirect the president’s entire agenda. Current and former Trump officials say Trump can react volcanically to negative press clips, especially those with damaging leaks, becoming engrossed in finding out where they originated.

That is what happened in late February when someone mischievously gave the president a printed copy of an article from GotNews.com, the website of internet provocateur Charles C. Johnson, which accused deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh of being “the source behind a bunch of leaks” in the White House.

No matter that Johnson had been permanently banned from Twitter for harassment or that he offered no concrete evidence or that he had lobbed false accusations in the past and recanted them. Trump read the article and began asking staff about Walsh. Johnson told POLITICO that he tracks the IP addresses of visitors to his website and added: “I can tell you unequivocally that the story was shared all around the White House.”

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon defended Walsh, who has since left the administration to advise a pro-Trump group, in a statement to POLITICO: “Katie was a key member of the team and is a trusted friend and ally of the White House. No one in the White House took that article seriously.” Walsh declined to comment.

But the smear of one of Priebus’ closest allies — Walsh was his chief of staff at the Republican National Committee — vaulted from an obscure web posting to a topic of heated conversation in the West Wing, setting off mini internal investigations into who had backstabbed Walsh.

When Trump bellows about this or that story, his aides often scramble in a game of cat-and-mouse to figure out who alerted the president to the piece in the first place given that he rarely browses the internet on his own. Some in the White House describe getting angry calls from the president and then hustling over to Trump’s personal secretary, Madeleine Westerhout, to ferret who exactly had just paid a visit to the Oval Office and possibly set Trump off.

Priebus and White House staff secretary Rob Porter have tried to implement a system to manage and document the paperwork Trump receives. While some see the new structure as a power play by a weakened chief of staff — “He’d like to get a phone log too,” cracked one senior White House adviser — others are more concerned about the unfettered ability of Trump’s family-member advisers, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, to ply the president with whatever paperwork they want in the residence sight unseen.

“They have this system in place to get things on his desk now,” the same White House official said. “I’m not sure anyone follows it.”

Priebus has implored staff to do so in order to abide by presidential record-keeping laws, which require cataloguing what the president sees for the archives.

Lisa Brown, who served as White House staff secretary under President Barack Obama for two years, said it can be “dangerous” when people make end runs around paperwork procedures, leaving the president with incomplete or one-sided information at key junctures.

“It’s even more important with someone like this,” she said of Trump, a president notoriously influenced by the last person he has spoken to, “but the challenge is he has to buy into it.”

“You know that people are going to go around the system. But then it’s up to the principal to decide how to handle it,” Brown added. “You need the president to say, ‘Thanks, I appreciate it’ [when he receives stories] and to hand it off to get it into a process.”

McFarland, who is expected to leave the NSC for the ambassadorship to Singapore, did not respond to requests for comment about bringing the president a fake news magazine cover. But another White House official familiar with the matter tried to defend it as an honest error that was “fake but accurate.”

“While the specific cover is fake, it is true there was a period in the ’70s when people were predicting an ice age,” the official insisted. “The broader point I think was accurate.”

Trump may not be a fan of briefing books, but he does devour the news. Most mornings, current and former aides say, Trump reads through a handful of newspapers in print, including The New York Times, New York Post, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal — all while watching cable news shows in the background.

He uses the internet minimally, other than tweeting and tracking his mentions, so what other news stories he sees can be more haphazard. Trump does receive a daily binder of news clippings put together by his communications team, but White House officials disagreed about how much he reads those. White House and former campaign aides have tried to make sure Trump’s media diet includes regular doses of praise and positive stories to keep his mood up — a tactic honed by staff during the campaign to keep him from tweeting angrily.

There is universal agreement among Trump advisers on this: The best way to focus the president’s attention on any story is to tell him about it personally, even if it is in one of the papers he’s already thumbed through. But officials say it’s a high-risk, high-reward proposition because Trump’s frustrations at bad stories can easily boomerang against those delivering him the news.

Still, Trump advisers are unwilling to give up the chance to directly bend the president’s ear and hand him supporting documents because they have seen how he can be swayed.

When Secretary of State Rex Tillerson wanted to appoint Elliott Abrams, a veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush White Houses, as his No. 2, someone in the president’s orbit made sure Trump was freshly aware of Abrams' anti-Trump comments from 2016, such as a Weekly Standard op-ed in which Abrams wrote, “The party has nominated someone who cannot win and should not be president.”

Trump personally intervened to block Abrams’ appointment.

More recently, when four economists who advised Trump during the campaign — Steve Forbes, Larry Kudlow, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore — wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “now is the time to move [tax reform] forward with urgency,” someone in the White House flagged the piece for the president.

Trump summoned staff to talk about it. His message: Make this the tax plan, according to one White House official present.

The op-ed came out on a Wednesday. By Friday, Trump was telling The Associated Press, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but we’re going to be announcing, probably on Wednesday, tax reform,” startling his aides, who had not yet prepared such a plan. Sure enough, the next Wednesday, Trump’s economic team was rolling out a tax plan that echoed the op-ed.

Moore was at the White House that day. “Several of the White House folks came up to us and said, ‘It’s your op-ed that got Trump moving on this,’” Moore said. “I’ve probably written 1,000 op-eds in my life, but that might have been the most impactful.”

So who was his guardian angel in the White House?

“We still don’t know,” he said.

"This Isn't Science": We Have No Idea How Much Pain Inmates Feel During Execution

Georgia is about to execute another man, and the result could be horrific.

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By NATHALIE BAPTISTE

Just weeks after Arkansas attempted to execute eight men in 11 days, lethal injection in back in the news. On Tuesday, Georgia is scheduled to execute J.W. Ledford for a 1992 murder. Texas was slated to put Tilon Carter to death on Tuesday as well, but he received a stay last week after the state's court of criminal appeals decided to hear his claims that the jury was misled.

Georgia will use a controversial one-drug protocol—a heavy dose of pentobarbital, an anesthetic that critics say can fail to render inmates fully unconscious. On Monday, Ledford requested that Georgia execute him by firing squad, instead. He argues that a pain medication he takes has altered his brain chemistry so much that the pentobarbital may not work properly, leading to excruciating pain. (Texas was planning to use pentobarbital to kill Carter, as well.)

"What we have here is masquerade—something that pretends to be science and pretends to be medicine but isn't."

Americans generally accept the claim that lethal injection is a humane and painless way to kill convicted murderers. A 2014 Gallup poll found that 65 percent of Americans believe that lethal injection is the "most humane" form of capital punishment. According to a 2015 YouGov poll, just 18 percent of respondents described lethal injection as "cruel and unusual punishment," which is prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. But, despite its widespread use, there is virtually no scientific data to suggest that lethal injection is humane. There's been very little research done on the effects of lethal injections on humans at all—but the science that is available suggest that inmates may actually experience immense pain before dying.

On a recent episode of our Inquiring Minds podcast, Kishore Hari interviews Teresa Zimmers, an associate professor of surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine. Zimmers, who has spent years researching lethal injection, is sharply critical to the ways in which states kill the condemned.

"What we have here is masquerade," says Zimmers. "Something that pretends to be science and pretends to be medicine but isn't."

Prior to 1972, when the Supreme Court halted executions nationwide, states used a variety methods to put inmates to death, including gas chambers and the electric chair. After the court ruled in 1976 that the death penalty did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, an Oklahoma state legislator called the state's medical examiner, Jay Chapman, and asked him if he could come up with a new and humane way to execute prisoners. Chapman has said that he initially thought he wasn't qualified for the task, but he nonetheless proposed using fatal doses of pharmaceuticals that are typically used to put patients.

Chapman came up with a three-drug protocol: Sodium thiopental, an anesthetic to put the inmate to sleep; pancuronium bromide, which causes paralysis; and potassium chloride to stop the heart. Other states soon adopted this protocol, but there was never much scientific evidence showing it was truly humane.

"It's not at all clear that the protocol works as advertised," explains Zimmers.

In 2007, Zimmers was part of a team that analyzed execution records from California and North Carolina and found that lethal injection might actually lead to painful chemical asphyxiation. Zimmers' team suggested that the thiopental dosages being uses might not be high enough to induce sleep and that potassium chloride might not reliably stop the heart. The potential result: a paralyzed inmate who remains aware while dying from the inability to breathe. Zimmers' paper concluded:

[O]ur findings suggest that current lethal injection protocols may not reliably effect death through the mechanisms intended, indicating a failure of design and implementation. If thiopental and potassium chloride fail to cause anesthesia and cardiac arrest, potentially aware inmates could die through pancuronium-induced asphyxiation. Thus the conventional view of lethal injection leading to an invariably peaceful and painless death is questionable.

Beginning around 2009, European pharmaceutical companies began refusing to sell their drugs to American states that intended to use them to put inmates to death. The shortages led to a rush to find different lethal injection methods, such as replacing the sodium thiopental with a drug called midazolam or using a single fatal dose of an anesthetic.

And just like with the original cocktail, these new lethal injection techniques have been developed with little scientific rigor. "There's been a very active substitution of drugs into this protocol with, of course, no corresponding investigation," says Zimmers.

When Oklahoma used the one-drug protocol of pentobarbital in the execution of Michael Wilson in January 2014, the inmate's last words were, "I feel my whole body burning." A few months later, the state tried to put Clayton Lockett to death using a three-drug protocol that included the anesthetic midazolam. Lockett mumbled and writhed on the gurney, before dying of a massive heart attack about 40 minutes after the procedure began. Oklahoma's executions are now on hold.

Despite the controversy surrounding midazolam, last month Arkansas rushed to execute eight men in 11 days when its supply of the drug was set to expire. After a series of legal setbacks for the state, only four were put to death. The last man to die, Kenneth Williams, reportedly convulsed, jerked, lurched, and coughed for 10 to 20 seconds after prison officials administered midazolam.

Often, the debate over capital punishment centers around the morality of government-sponsored killing or the potential for an innocent person to be executed. But Zimmers suspects that for many people, support for the death penalty relies on the notion that states are using compassionate, scientifically validated method to kill inmates. That notion, Zimmers argues, is simply wrong.

"They should understand that this isn't science," she says. "This is a pretense of science."

Researchers see possible North Korea link to global cyber attack

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By Dustin Volz 

Cyber security researchers have found technical clues they said could link North Korea with the global WannaCry "ransomware" cyber attack that has infected more than 300,000 machines in 150 countries since Friday.

Symantec and Kaspersky Lab said on Monday some code in an earlier version of the WannaCry software had also appeared in programs used by the Lazarus Group, which researchers from many companies have identified as a North Korea-run hacking operation.

"This is the best clue we have seen to date as to the origins of WannaCry," Kaspersky Lab researcher Kurt Baumgartner told Reuters.

Both firms said it was too early to tell whether North Korea was involved in the attacks, which slowed to a crawl on Monday but have already become one of the fastest-spreading extortion campaigns on record.

The cyber companies' research will be closely followed by law enforcement agencies around the world, including Washington, where U.S. President Donald Trump's homeland security adviser said on Monday that both foreign nations and cyber criminals were possible culprits.

The two companies said they needed to study the code more and asked for others to help with the analysis. Hackers do reuse code from other operations, so even copied lines fall well short of proof.

U.S. and European security officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity that it was still too early to say who might be behind the attacks, but they did not rule out North Korea as a suspect.

The Lazarus hackers, acting for impoverished North Korea, have been more brazen in pursuit of financial gain than others, and have been blamed for the theft of $81 million from a Bangladesh bank. The North Korean mission to the United Nations was not immediately available for comment.

Regardless of the source of the attack, investors piled into cyber security stocks on Monday, betting that governments and corporations will spend more to upgrade their defenses.

SMALL PAYOUT

The perpetrators had raised less than $70,000 from users looking to regain access to their computers, according to Trump homeland security adviser Tom Bossert.

"We are not aware if payments have led to any data recovery," Bossert said, adding that no federal government systems had been affected.

Some private sector cyber security experts said they were not sure if the motive of the attack was primarily to make money, noting that most large ransomware and other types of cyber extortion campaigns pull in millions of dollars of revenue.

“I believe that this was spread for the purpose of causing as much damage as possible,” said Matthew Hickey, co-founder of British cyber consulting firm Hacker House.

The countries most affected by WannaCry to date are Russia, Taiwan, Ukraine and India, according to Czech security firm Avast.

The number of infections has fallen dramatically since Friday’s peak when more than 9,000 computers were being hit per hour. Earlier on Monday, Chinese traffic police and schools reported they had been targeted as the attack rolled into Asia for the new work week, but no there were no major disruptions.

Authorities in Europe and the United States turned their attention to preventing hackers from spreading new versions of the virus.

Shares in firms that provide cyber security services rose sharply, led by Israel's Cyren Ltd (CYRN.O) and U.S. firm FireEye Inc (FEYE.O).

Cisco Systems (CSCO.O) closed up 2.3 percent, making it the second-biggest gainer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, as investors focused more on opportunities the attack presented rather than the risk it posed to corporations.

Morgan Stanley, in upgrading the stock, said Cisco should benefit from network spending driven by security needs.

POLITICAL TOPIC

Beyond the immediate need to shore up computer defenses, the attack has turned cyber security into a political topic in Europe and the United States, including discussion of the role national governments play.

In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) President Brad Smith confirmed what researchers already widely concluded: the attack made use of a hacking tool built by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that had leaked online in April.

He poured fuel on a long-running debate over how government intelligence services should balance their desire to keep software flaws secret - in order to conduct espionage and cyber warfare - against sharing those flaws with technology companies to better secure the internet.

On Monday, Bossert sought to distance the NSA from any blame.

"This was not a tool developed by the NSA to hold ransom data. This was a tool developed by culpable parties, potentially criminals or foreign nation-states, that were put together in such a way as to deliver phishing emails, put it into embedded documents, and cause infection, encryption and locking," Bossert said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, noting the technology's link to the U.S. spy service, said it should be "discussed immediately on a serious political level."

"Once they're let out of the lamp, genies of this kind, especially those created by intelligence services, can later do damage to their authors and creators," he said.

In Britain, where the virus first raised alarm when it caused hospitals to divert patients on Friday, it gained traction as a political issue just weeks before a general election. The opposition Labour Party accused the Conservative government of leaving the National Health Service (NHS) vulnerable.

RANSOM VIA BITCOIN

Some victims were ignoring official advice and paying the $300 ransom demanded by the cyber criminals to unlock their computers, which was due to double to $600 on Monday for computers hit by Friday's first wave.

So far only a few victims of the attack appeared to have paid, based on publicly available bitcoin accounts on the web, where victims have been instructed to pay.

The initial ransom demand was $300 per machine. Three days after becoming infected the demand doubles. Starting on Monday, the first victims began facing demands of $600 to unlock their machines.

This coming Friday, victims face being locked out of their computers permanently if they fail to pay the $600 ransom, said Tom Robinson, co-founder of Elliptic, a London-based private security company that investigates ransomware attacks.

As of 1400 GMT, the total value of funds paid into anonymous bitcoin wallets the hackers are using stood at just $55,169, from 209 payments, according to calculations made by Reuters using publicly available data.

Brian Lord, managing director of cyber and technology at cyber security firm PGI, said victims had told him "the customer service provided by the criminals is second-to-none," with helpful advice on how to pay: "One customer said they actually forgot they were being robbed."

Companies and governments spent the weekend upgrading software to limit the spread of the virus. Monday was the first big test for Asia, where offices had already mostly been closed for the weekend before the attack first arrived.

Renault-Nissan (RENA.PA) (7201.T) said output had returned to normal at nearly all its plants. PSA Group (PEUP.PA), Fiat Chrysler (FCHA.MI), Volkswagen (VOWG_p.DE), Daimler (DAIGn.DE), Toyota (7203.T) and Honda (7267.T) said their plants were unaffected.

British media were hailing as a hero a 22-year-old computer security whiz who appeared to have helped stop the attack from spreading by discovering a "kill switch" - an internet address which halted the virus when activated.

Individual European countries and the United States saw infections at a rate of only 10 percent to 20 percent of the most affected countries, according to the researcher who stumbled on the “kill switch.”

The virus hit computers running older versions of Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) software that had not been recently updated. Microsoft released patches last month and on Friday to fix a vulnerability that allowed the worm to spread across networks. The company's shares were down about 1 percent on Monday, in a slightly higher broad market.

Infected computers appear to be largely out-of-date devices. Some were machines involved in manufacturing or hospital functions, difficult to patch without disrupting operations.

For a graphic on how the cyber attack spread, see: tmsnrt.rs/2qIUckv

Trump's EPA Greenlights a Nasty Chemical. A Month Later, It Poisons a Bunch of Farmworkers.

"Anybody that was exposed, we encourage them to seek medical attention immediately," a California public health official stated.

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By TOM PHILPOTT

On May 5, more than 50 farmworkers outside of Bakersfield, California, were exposed to a highly toxic pesticide that apparently drifted from a nearby field—at a high enough level that "twelve people reported symptoms of vomiting [and] nausea and one person fainted," reports the television news station Kern Golden Empire. "An additional twelve workers did not show signs of any symptoms," the station reported. "However more than half of the farm workers left before medical aide arrived."

"Anybody that was exposed, that was here today, we encourage them to seek medical attention immediately," Kern County Public Health warned.

Public health authorities took the poisoning quite seriously. "Anybody that was exposed, that was here today, we encourage them to seek medical attention immediately. Don't wait. Particularly if you're suffering from any symptoms. Whether it's nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, seek medical attention immediately," Michelle Corson, public relations officer at Kern County Public Health, said in an announcement to the TV station.

According to the news report, the poisoning was caused by a chemical called chlorpyrifos. A spokeswoman for the Kern County Department of Public Health said the department assumes chlorpyrifos was the active ingredient in the pesticide in question, but the matter is still under investigation by the Kern County Department of Agriculture and Measurement Standards. A spokesman for that office said test results pinpointing the chemical are pending but would not be done for at least a week. Dow AgroSciences, one of the main makers of the chemical, did not respond to phone calls and emails.

Many public health experts, scientists, and environmentalists have for years been pushing for a ban on chlorpyrifos, and last year it was looking like the Environmental Protection Agency intended to instate one. According to the National Pesticide Information Center, exposure to the chemical through inhalation can cause initial symptoms like "tearing of the eyes, runny nose, increased saliva and sweat production, nausea, dizziness and headache," followed by possible "muscle twitching, weakness or tremors, lack of coordination, vomiting, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, and pupil constriction with blurred or darkened vision." Chlorpyrifos is an endocrine disrupter, and major studies (here, here, and here) have found strong evidence to suggest that even at very low doses, the chemical triggers effects among children ranging from lower IQ to higher rates of autism. More here.

But in March, the EPA abruptly changed its stance on chlorpyrifos, greenlighting it instead of banning it. The decision, among the first major ones made by Scott Pruitt in his tenure as EPA chief, caused outrage in public health circles. Dow AgroSciences applauded the decision. "Dow AgroSciences remains confident that authorized uses of chlorpyrifos products offer wide margins of protection for human health and safety," the company declared in a press release.

The parent company, Dow Chemical, has cultivated a cozy relationship with the Trump administration. The company delivered $1 million to the president's inaugural committee, the Center for Public Integrity notes. Dow Chemical Chairman and CEO Andrew Liveris attended a postelection Trump rally. Trump named Liveris chair of the American Manufacturing Council, vowing the chemical exec would "find ways to bring industry back to America."

Russian money-laundering details remain in the dark as US settles fraud case

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By Jose Pagliery

A major US investigation into Russian money laundering has come to an abrupt end.

The case aimed to expose how Russian mobsters allegedly stole $230 million and hid some of the cash in New York City real estate. Also sure to come up was the suspicious death of the Russian lawyer who exposed the alleged fraud, though US prosecutors weren't alleging that the defendants were behind it.

The trial was set to start on Monday, but late Friday night, federal prosecutors in New York announced they settled the case with Prevezon, the company accused of buying up "high-end commercial space and luxury apartments" with laundered money.

The abrupt conclusion has some involved in the trial wondering why this Russian investigation had been cut short.

"What most concerns me is: Has there been any political pressure applied in this?" asked Louise Shelley, an illicit finance expert who was set to testify in support of the US government on Tuesday.

Shelley — who founded George Mason University's Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center — said the alleged money launderers got off easy.

"I think they won something. There's no recognition of wrongdoing," she said.

The US Attorney's office did not respond to CNN's request for comment.

In the settlement, Prevezon and its business associates did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, and the government agreed to "release" them all from any future lawsuits in connection with this case.

The case against Prevezon was a civil matter, so the federal government's inherent goal was to recover money. That it did.

The $5.9 million settlement is three times the value of the $1.9 million in supposedly laundered money tied to funds stolen from the Russian state coffers. But it's far less than the value of Prevezon's real estate in Manhattan -- which Shelley estimates at $17 million -- that had been partially acquired with those allegedly laundered funds.

Russia's largest ever tax fraud

The alleged fraud behind the Prevezon case goes back a decade. According to US investigators, corrupt Russian government officials allegedly teamed up with a powerful Russian organized crime organization to pull off that country's largest ever tax fraud.

Russian crime rings often use identity theft to file fake tax refunds. In this case, the government says that the defendants essentially did that on a grand scale: allegedly stealing the corporate identity of Hermitage Capital Management, an investment firm in Russia. According to the complaints, the defendants then allegedly created fake losses, claimed fake tax refunds -- and made off with the stolen rubles.

Hermitage's lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, exposed the alleged fraud — and was later jailed by the very investigators he fingered in the plot. He was tortured and killed in prison, according to Russia's own Presidential Human Rights Commission. The Russian government insists that Magnitsky, age 37, died of a heart failure with no signs of violence.

The conspirators allegedly laundered the illicit cash through shell companies, luxury cars, real estate around the world, and international bank accounts.

But without a trial, the illicit money trail remains unproven to the public.

The settlement allowed both sides to still claim a victory.

Prevezon said this is proof it did nothing wrong. In a statement, the firm said: "From the outset, Prevezon and its owner Denis Katsyv have maintained their innocence and have repeatedly stated that they had no involvement in or knowledge of any fraudulent activities and never received any funds from any criminal activity."

Prevezon claimed prosecutors "brought this case without conducting any independent investigation, relying exclusively on the claims of William Browder," the head of Hermitage.

Meanwhile, American prosecutors claimed this served as a deterrent for future money launderers.

"We will not allow the U.S. financial system to be used to launder the proceeds of crimes committed anywhere -- here in the U.S., in Russia, or anywhere else," acting Manhattan US Attorney Joon H. Kim said in a statement.

The case had initially been brought by US Attorney Preet Bharara, but he was fired by President Donald Trump in March.

Bharara congratulated the prosecutors on Twitter late Friday night: "Congrats to Joon & team in Russian money laundering case (underlying fraud uncovered by Sergei Magnitsky, died suspiciously in Moscow jail)."

There was one witness set to testify at the trial who had a very personal connection to the case: Jamison Firestone, whose law firm partner was Magnitsky.

On Saturday, Firestone lamented that details about the Russian government, mobsters and investors who allegedly received these funds won't be aired at trial.

"I wanted this all to come out," he told CNN on Saturday. "The embarrassing stuff exposes the Russian government's entire money laundering machine."

But Firestone said this settlement is one step closer to justice. Estonia, the UK, and the US have already adopted "Magnitsky laws" to sanction Russians connected to the fraud. This settlement is the first time a court in the West has forced someone allegedly involved in the money laundering to pay up.

"We're just going to keep doing this until we expose them all," he told CNN. "These people may escape prosecution as long as the Putin government stands, but it won't stand forever. Putin is going to die before they do, and hopefully they will die in tiny prison cells like Sergei Magnitsky did."