Ever since it was publicly released, there has been widespread derision aimed at the FBI conclusion that RT founder Mikhail Lesin got drunk and beat himself to death.
Now Buzzfeed has a significant scoop that Christopher Steele, author of the infamous “dossier”, has given the FBI a report based on information from high-level contacts in Moscow that Lesin was beaten to death by Russian state security agents moonlighting for an oligarch closely connected to Vladimir Putin.
The FBI possesses a secret report asserting that Vladimir Putin’s former media czar was beaten to death by hired thugs in Washington, DC — directly contradicting the US government’s official finding that Mikhail Lesin died by accident.
The report, according to four sources who have read all or parts of it, was written by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, who also wrote the famous dossier alleging that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Donald Trump. The bureau received his report while it was helping the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department investigate the Russian media baron’s death, the sources said.
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The BuzzFeed News series also revealed new details about Lesin — including that he died on the eve of a scheduled meeting with US Justice Department officials. They had planned to interview Lesin about the inner workings of RT, the Kremlin-funded network that he founded.
Now BuzzFeed News has established:
Steele’s report says that Lesin was bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for an oligarch close to Putin, the four sources said.
The thugs had been instructed to beat Lesin, not kill him, but they went too far, the sources said Steele wrote.
Three of the sources said that the report described the killers as Russian state security agents moonlighting for the oligarch.
The Steele report is not the FBI's only source for this account of Lesin's death: Three other people, acting independently from Steele, said they also told the FBI that Lesin had been bludgeoned to death by enforcers working for the same oligarch named by Steele.
While my reaction to this originally was “Breaking: Water is wet!” on reflection it’s a significant story in that it reinforces the web of evidence of this relatively new aggressive approach to dissident elements that Putin and his cohort are engaging in. The brazen nature of their behavior will only get worse the longer we fail to push back. Any story like this one that makes it harder to keep sweeping this stuff under the rug is valuable.