Today was the fifth day of Navalny’s trial. Although the prosecution said yesterday that it was about to finish presenting its case, today it resumed questioning witnesses.
There were two of them, both court bailiffs from the trial over allegedly slandering a veteran (a World War II veteran featured in a separate case against Navalny). They were the quickest examinations of all: both witnesses said they remembered absolutely nothing. The first essentially refused to testify, citing memory loss. He could barely even recall which trial he had seen Navalny at, or what the veteran had to do with it.
The Investigative Committee and the prosecutor’s office’s ability to drag in witnesses like these is starting to inspire a kind of admiration. It almost seems as if the prosecution is deliberately calling people who cannot support its case in any way. Maybe it’s a devious plan to sabotage the criminal case from within, but more likely it is just further proof that this case was fabricated from beginning to end, and there is nothing that could substantiate the charges.
Then the prosecutor began reading out the case materials again. Today’s portion was devoted to the designation of ACF as an extremist organization. At first glance, what does extremism have to do with any of this, when this is a criminal fraud case? I’ll explain. The prosecution cannot prove that Navalny, while urging people to donate money to ACF for anti-corruption work, spent that money on himself. Even though they are reading bank statements aloud in court, there is no link between Alexei’s spending and donations to ACF, and they know it. But the prosecutor’s office still needs some way to establish the fact of embezzlement. It needs to say that Navalny called on people to donate money to fight corruption, then deceived everyone and spent it on something else. So they came up with extremism. Supposedly, people supported Alexei so that he could engage in lawful activity, but instead he was doing something illegal. Calling for the overthrow of the government. Organizing unauthorized rallies. Undermining elections.
That is exactly what the prosecutor said in court today: ACF posed a threat to the state.
The architect of this entire extremism case is Moscow prosecutor Denis Popov. We published an investigation about him. He is a typical corrupt official: despite his tiny official salary, he owns a hotel in Montenegro and a villa in Spain, and of course does not declare them. And today in court, Alexei said it plainly: the Moscow prosecutor is a crook and a thief.
Prosecutor Natalia Tikhonova nearly had a heart attack. According to media reports, she started shrieking that Navalny had no right to call people crooks without a corresponding court ruling. Alexei smiled and said he would keep calling things by their proper names. The judge panicked too and began threatening to have Alexei removed from the courtroom, to which he suggested she go ahead—just not forget that they were all in prison at the moment, so there was nowhere much to go.
For the rest of the day, the prosecutor kept reading out case materials—inspection reports on videos and screenshots from social media. For example, they examined Navalny’s Instagram, which, in the prosecution’s view, contains airtight evidence of fraud: vacation photos. It is worth noting that someone at the Investigative Committee is being paid to study Navalny’s public, open Instagram account and look for evidence there.
The hearings will resume next week. We will continue covering them. Subscribe to our channel and help us share these videos.