PUTIN’S RESET

By then marginalized and certainly aware of the grim fates of others with
guilty knowledge, Lesin visited Washington in November, 2015. He was believed to
be talking to the FBI to make a deal. He disappeared for a couple days before being
found in his Dupont Circle Hotel room, dead from blunt-force trauma to the head
and neck.
The violent death, just blocks from the White House, of a once-trusted Putin
insider now in trouble with the FBI, ordinarily would have any Kremlin information
warrior, to say nothing of any good investigative journalist. The strangest part of
Lesin’s unsolved murder is not Moscow’s suspected role. The strangest part was that
the violent death of the creator of RT never became a Russian propaganda theme.
Somehow, RT and other state-controlled outlets “knew” within hours of the
discovery of the body that Lesin had died of natural causes due to a long illness
brought on by excessive drinking and smoking. Anyone who knew Lesin would find
that to be a logical cause of death.
For nearly a century, “died after a long illness” has been a staple of Kremlin
propaganda to explain away inconvenient deaths. Shortly after news of Lesin’s
demise, a Kremlin spokesman issued a statement saying that Putin “highly appreciates
the enormous contribution Mikhail Lesin made to the formation of the modern
Russian media.”
In perhaps the first public report of the Bulldozer’s demise, RIA Novosti cited
an un-named “family member” saying that Lesin “died from heart stroke.” TASS
sourced an anonymous Russian Embassy official in Washington who supposedly said
that “police found no signs of foul play.” RT simply quoted from those multiple and
apparently mutually-confirming reports.
The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed to know nothing. But District of
Columbia medical examiners, apparently wary of the deaths of other particularly
knowledgeable Putin foes, seemed to be looking for high-tech assassin’s chemicals in
Lesin’s body tissues, or the extremely rare polonium-210 isotope used to assassinate
Litvinenko in London. Four months later, after a long silence during exhaustive tests,
D.C. authorities released the forensic information that revealed something different.
The Bulldozer had died from massive blunt-force trauma to the head and neck.
Officials did not state how the trauma occurred, but noted that the torso and
extremities showed signs of similar trauma. With the news of the violence of Lesin’s
death now public, the Russian Embassy in Washington blamed U.S. authorities for
providing no information.
106