Tuesday 6/23/26 Bill Meyer Show Guests and Information
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6:40 JAMISON FIRESTONE, author of RULE OF LIES: My Wild Ride Through
RULE OF LIES: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia by Jamison Firestone (Harper; June 23, 2026) is a true story that reads like a spy thriller-darkly comic, violent, and unnervingly real. Rather than explaining Russia’s destruction of rule of law and democracy through politicians or oligarchs, the book tells it from the inside out: how an American lawyer walked straight into chaos and managed to live long enough to expose it.
Raised by a multimillionaire conman and crack addict who hung out with mobsters and owned Manhattan’s most expensive brothel, Firestone learned early on how to deal with criminals. At twenty-four, fresh out of law school and desperate to escape that world, he struck out for the Wild East, the disintegrating Soviet Union. In 1991, as Russia slid into lawlessness, he founded the country’s first independent foreign-owned law firm-an act his law school equated with insanity.
What followed was out of the frying pan and into the fire. For nearly two decades, Firestone lived in the maelstrom of post-Soviet Russia, defending himself and his clients against mafia attacks, corrupt police, and armed commandos who raided his office. He was threatened, surveilled, extorted-and at one point forced to raid his own offices with a SWAT team and bug the offices of the Russian police just to stay alive. In a system where the law was a weapon, survival meant learning how to fight back.
Firestone soon found himself at the center of Russia’s most explosive scandals. He employed Sergei Magnitsky, whose exposure of the largest tax theft in Russian history led to his imprisonment, torture, and murder. Refusing silence, Firestone joined Bill Browder and teamed up with Alexei Navalny to expose Magnitsky’s killers and take their blood money.
Along the way, he inadvertently inspired Navalny to develop the corruption-exposing videos that would later threaten the Kremlin-and helped trigger an open war with the Russian state over the Magnitsky Acts, legislation threatening sanctions against Russia’s most powerful figures.
RULE OF LIES is both an adventure and an indictment: how a fragile democracy was hijacked by criminals and KGB spooks and transformed into a true mafia state. And how a small group of people decided to hit back. Darkly funny, often horrifying, and deeply personal, it is a warning about what happens when corruption hardens into governance-and what it costs to resist.
7:35 Herman Baertschiger Income Tax – Merk says people are telling him to make the “rich pay”. Yeah, the income tax started that way, too, and Herman and I discuss a history of the dreaded income tax.
8:10 I talk about a new op ed from Ken Davis, a former finance executive for a Fortune 500 company and former Deputy Attorney General for Virginia, and it’s abouts how Republicans can ease the cost of living by providing interest payments to taxpayers on their wages withheld and advanced to the government as part of their third budget reconciliation package.
Current pay roll deductions do not earn interest or allow the American people to invest, draining from the private economy. This solution would be practical way to ease economic burdens and give Republicans a huge win heading into the November election.
Friday 6/19/26 Bill Meyer Show Guests and Information
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