At the start of Martin McDonagh‘s quirky “Hangmen,” a condemned prisoner, Hennessy (Gilles Geary) is shouting his innocence. It hardly matters to hangman Harry (Mark Addy) who has heard it all before in his 25 years on the job. It‘s 1963 in Lancashire, the north of England. Near the end, Peter Mooney (a very good Johnny Flynn), a menacing stranger who exudes fake charm, erupts in a storm when Harry‘s wife Alice (Sally Rogers) refuses to rent him a room because his references don‘t check.
Actor John Lithgo is a charmer and always a pleasure to watch how he creates characters with voice, accent and a scrunch of the face. These two short stories lend themselves to his talents, though I have to admit, they might be better read and opened by the imagination.
This is a very good/bad play. Actually, it‘s a staged TV sitcom. It hits all the political bases, as they do. I enjoyed it, as I might a sitcom if I ever saw them (I don‘t), but great drama it is not. The most is to call it a trenchant satire.
So, we enter the upper-class townhouse, with its a white couch and high sideboard, (there will be a terrace). Peter (Marton Csokas) is spying on the phone of Chloe (the always sharp Uma Thurman). She in blonde ponytail wears jeans and black heels. What does that say? Not comfort. (Jeans comfort, heels not) A certain carefully scripted cool sexiness.
Feb 10, 2018 – The Council on Foreign Relations Russia policy report “Containing Russia” by Robert Blackwill and Philip Gordon is a coldwar2.0 “let‘s fight the Russians” polemic that makes many claims but is slim on evidence. Here‘s one false assertion I know, because I spent over a year researching and writing about William Browder and his Magnitsky hoax. Important because it helped charge Russiagate.
So forget about the cover photo of Putin with a glass of champagne! So he is the rich guy against the low-income American officials who represent the working classes! (joke!)
Jan 19, 2018 – The Nation’s Bob Dreyfuss writes innuendo backed up by egregiously wrong information in a story that claims “there‘s a potentially incriminating link between the Trump Tower meeting involving Kushner and a Russian firm enmeshed in a famous money-laundering scandal.‘
Jan 18, 2018 — How I knew about William Browder’s corrupt past, which made me investigate what turned out to be his fake Magnitsky/Prevezon story. Goes back to the Avisma story. It was never reported by the mainstream media. A half hour.
Jan 15, 2018 – Who is Juleanna Glover? Glenn Simpson of the investigative agency Fusion GPS in his August appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee was asked about Paul Manafort‘s notes of the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Nataliya Veselnitskaya. Manafort wrote that “Browder hired Joanna Glover.”
Jan 13, 2018 – Just received from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists @ICIJorg an email of an article by Michael Forsythe @PekingMike, a reporter on the investigations team at The New York Times. It tells how a consortium of almost 400 reporters from all over the world wrote about the people implicated in “the Panama Papers,” exposing the shell companies set up by the offshore incorporator Mossack Fonseca.
Jan 12, 2018 – Lawyers are supposed to carefully vet the facts they assert with documented evidence. The National Law Journal is a preeminent legal publication. So why did it yesterday repeat this unproved myth? That “Hermitage‘s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, exposed the alleged fraud behind the Prevezon case before his death while in Russian custody.” Dear writer Ryan Lovelace @lawdotcom, read this:
Jan 11, 2018 – The most interesting new assertion in Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee August 22, 2017, just released by Sen. Diane Feinstein, is this: that charges promoted by William Browder and adopted by the Justice Department to target the Russian real estate company Prevezon originated with a Russian organized crime figure, Demetri Baranovsky.
Jan 9, 2018 – Another fake news story, this by NYTimes. About Glenn Simpson, former Wall Street Journal reporter, whose FusionGPS was hired in turn by the Clinton and Trump campaigns to find dirt on the other. Read the story for details, but note these lies in the NYT account.
Jan 9, 2018 – How William Browder organized an international campaign to block the Russians from going after his evaded taxes and profits from illicit share buys. Includes how Browder got Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act and the Justice Department to file a suit against a Russian real estate company to muddy the trail. A half hour.
Jan 8, 2018 – I love how Wm Browder is considered by otherwise serious media to be the go-to guy for comments on the corruption of others. Here he is quoted in an Al Jazeera story yesterday about how the former Ukrainian President Viktor “Yanukovich’s clan pumped stolen money into companies in Ukraine with bank accounts in Latvia and gradually passed it through dozens of offshore shell companies in Cyprus, Belize, British Virgin Islands and other money-laundering hotspots including the UK.”
It is built around the travails of a French political theater troupe visiting India whose director abandons them because he can‘t produce the Mahabarata, the ancient Indian epic. Never clear why.
Dec 29, 2017 – Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty is the U.S. government propaganda news service, so no surprise if it lies about William Browder and the Magnitsky case, but look here at the latest, “Hermitage Capital’s Browder Sentenced In Absentia By Moscow Court,” where it is easy to counter its claims with real facts.
Dec 21, 2017 — President Trump yesterday signed a Magnitsky Act order, banning listed individuals from entering the U.S and having connections to U.S. financial institutions if they are complicit, even indirectly, with human rights abuses as determined by the Treasury Department. Attempts to get Treasury to supply evidence against the laEdittest Magnitsky Act targets were unavailing. In the past, the Russian names have been supplied by Browder, with evidence never published.
The Fiasco Theater company has become known for iconic, clever, delightful productions of Shakespeare plays that are both complex, with live music performed by the actors, and minimal and intimate, with few characters and small settings. This production at the Classic Stage Company opens with terrific sea shantys in a country style. It will proceed to joyous drinking songs. And a charming and very accessible production of Shakespeare‘s comic play about shipwrecked twins and mismatched lovers.
Dec 21, 2017 – How William Browder started the Hermitage Fund with dicey investors and engaged in the tax evasion that led to the detention of his accountant, Sergei Magnitsky.
New York, Dec 14, 2017 — Did the Justice Department collude with William Browder to block the settlement of a case which Browder got it to file against a Russian company to build a wall against Russian attempts to go after him for $70 million in back taxes and stock fraud? And to prove that his story about the death of his accountant Sergei Magnitsky, which had led to U.S. sanctions against Russia, is a fraud?
Today at a federal court hearing in New York (Southern District of NY), a U.S. government attorney admitted that he had received information that the Dutch would block release of money that was supposed to settle a dispute between DOJ and a Russian-owned company.
Nov 25, 2017 – William Browder has blocked the Russians from investigating how he may have used shell companies in offshore Cyprus to fraudulently move assets out of Russia. He filed a request to a court in Cyprus asking an emergency injunction on transfer of any data about his activities to Russia. Then 17 of his loyal supporters in the European Parliament asked the Cyprus government not to cooperate with Russia in its investigation into how Browder might have used his offshore companies in tax evasion, illicit share purchases and fraudulent bankruptcy.
Nov 21, 2017 – My radio interview about William Browder, his tax evasion and his fake Magnitsky story, this morning on #FaultLines, new Washington DC-based talk show, weekdays 7 to 10am, 105.5 FM.
100Reporters, Oct 20, 2017 – The controversial New York meeting in June 2016 between Donald Trump’s campaign team and a group of Russians, initiated as a talk about finding dirt on Hillary Clinton, is drawing new scrutiny of US economic sanctions against targeted Russians.
At the meeting, Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump confederates, lured by a promise of compromising information on Trump‘s rival, instead stumbled upon a quagmire: a fraud that bilked the Russian treasury of $230 million; a trans-Atlantic dispute over offshore accounts and tax evasion, and a U.S.-born investor, William Browder, who once ran the largest foreign investment fund in Russia, and who plays the eminence grise in this drama.
Browder is perhaps best known as an investor in Russia turned an anti-corruption activist, and the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act, the battery of economic sanctions aimed at Russian officials.
Before the First World War, things in England seemed quite solid, unmoving, as far as classes went. The upper class was frivolous, its members assumed everything about their lives would remain pretty much the same. Nice homes, nice parties. At the opening, a family and friends in Yorkshire are doing charades, underlining lives of fantasy.
But the interwar years seemed to change everything, to auger in a seismic shift in class relations. J.B. Priestley‘s absorbing 1937 play about what happened to one family and the people whose lives they touched explains how by the time the Second World War occurred — why are we having so many world war? but that’s another story — to be followed by the victory of the Labor Party, the ascendancy of the upper class was not so assured. At least, money would matter more than class.
The Cabaret Convention put on by the Mabel Mercer Foundation has for almost three decades brought together some of the best cabaret performers in the country, each of four days presenting as many as 20 singers, some prominent, some new, some doing standards, others jazz, to keep the tradition alive. Dozens appeared over four evenings; these are just my highlights. I notice that most are women. Well, so be it! They had the most pizzazz, the most drama.
