Unfortunately. They've adopted the anti-Israel attitude of Willis Carto's old "Liberty Lobby."
WASHINGTON — Mikhail Y. Lesin once occupied the upper stratosphere of Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia, an advertising executive turned cabinet minister who helped carry out the state takeover of the country’s independent media and later created the Kremlin’s global English-language television network.
Until late 2014 he ran the media wing of the state’s energy giant, Gazprom, before stepping down or, more likely, being forced out. He ended up in the United States, where he and his family owned properties in Los Angeles said to be worth far more than the salary of the former government minister. And then, in November, he was found in a hotel here in Washington, the victim, the Russian state media he had helped build said, of a heart attack.
On Thursday, more than four months later, one of the questions surrounding Mr. Lesin’s death was answered: The office of the chief medical examiner in Washington announced that he had not died of a heart attack, but rather of blunt force injuries to his head. But the mystery surrounding his rise and fall only deepened.
Although the examiner and the police did not declare his death a criminal act, the authorities clearly no longer consider it to be the result of natural causes. Mr. Lesin’s body also showed signs of blunt trauma to his neck, torso, arms and legs, the result, according to one official, of some sort of altercation that happened before he returned to his room at the Dupont Circle Hotel on the night in November when he died at the age of 59.
The medical examiner’s office did not explain the timing of its announcement, nor why the findings took so long. Officials there had said as recently as Wednesday that it would not imminently release its findings, only to reverse course the next day. His death remains the subject of a police investigation, though spokesmen for the Metropolitan Police Department and the F.B.I. in Washington declined to comment.
For months, Mr. Lesin’s fate has been the subject of much speculation. In the Russian news media, he was said to have had a falling out with a major shareholder of Gazprom Media, Yuri V. Kovalchuk, an even closer business ally and friend of Mr. Putin’s. Some speculated that he had fled to the United States in a kind of self-exile, one that is not unknown among ministers and businessmen who once were in favor inside Mr. Putin’s Kremlin. ...”