When President Trump's pick for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was before a Senate committee at the beginning of the year, there was a widely reported exchange with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) where the senator tried to get the former CEO of Exxon Mobil to understand that Russian President Vladimir Putin had his opponents killed.

For years, Rex Tillerson already had a good relationship with President Putin when he was negotiating with the Russian government as CEO. In fact, it was reported that Tillerson was given one of the highest honors bestowed on a non-native of Russia, the Friendship Award.

Putin reportedly had his opponents killed

It was already learned that the Russian government had meddled with the 2016 presidential election and that the Trump campaign was under investigation by the former Obama administration. Tillerson's history with Putin was clearly the reason Rubio asked to see if his loyalty would be to the nation or to President Trump. Unfortunately, Senator Rubio was not able to get Tillerson to believe in the facts they were presenting to him or even accept decades-old reporting from various media sources as proof.

Even with the British government's determination that Putin ordered the poisoning of an opponent, or the obvious pattern of opponents being found dead or even killed in public.

A report by the New York Times over the weekend revealed a meeting Donald Trump Jr. had with a Kremlin lawyer last year, does recall another death that was likely ordered by Putin.

The story of Sergei Magnitsky

In 2009, Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was thrown in jail for exposing top Russian officials for tax fraud. In the year that he spent in jail, he became ill and was denied medical attention until he came close to death.

When he thought they were finally taking him to a hospital, he was met by pro-Putin thugs rather than doctors who beat him to death. In 2012, President Obama signed a bipartisan bill called the Magnitsky Act which punished those officials by putting them on a black list. The law reportedly enraged President Putin so much that he enforced a ban on the United States to prevent then from adopting Russian children.

The Russian lawyer that Trump Jr. reportedly met with last year was Natalia Veselnitskaya who has led the effort to attack the bill and propaganda efforts against it. One of those propaganda efforts was the creation of a film that premiered in the same month that she reportedly met with Trump Jr. called The Magnitsky Act — behind the scenes, which attempted to sway opinion against the U.S. based law. Here is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) speaking about the accountability act.
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