Let’s play a game I like to call Cold War: Redux, where terms like “dead from a heart attack” actually mean “dead by a fatal beating for someone who was very, very unhappy with you…XOXO Gossip Putin.”
The November 5 death of Mikhail Lesin made waves last year after the former spokesperson for Putin’s government was found in the Dupont Circle Hotel in Washington, D.C. Now, recent reports from the capital have turned the affair into the beginning of the international-themed sequel to Clue.
While the former media chief’s death was first publicly declared the result of cardiac arrest (thank you, “unnamed family member”), the Washington Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Metropolitan Police Department are now saying that the 57 year-old incurred “blunt force injuries of the neck, torso, upper extremities and lower extremities” which contributed to his demise. The medical examiner has officially ruled Lesin’s cause of death “undetermined.”
So, yeah: one fucker of a heart attack. Right.
Back in January, The Daily Beast reported that Lesin was in the United States with the intention of giving information to the U.S. government regarding “corruption and human-rights abuses in Russia” in exchange for his own security and/or immunity for his own illegal activities.
The former propaganda chief was suspected by the Department of Justice and the FBI for money laundering and stashing away roughly $30 million in real estate in California obtained by seemingly shady means. So a pardon from the U.S. government would be a good guess as to what he was doing in the States at the time of his death—that is, if this theory is correct.
Nicknamed “the Bulldozer” for being able to keep Russia’s media outlets in line with the wishes of the Kremlin, Lesin is also credited as one of the co-founders of Russia today (more commonly known as RT), a de facto mouthpiece for the Putin administration.
The D.C. police department has stated that the investigation remains active. Cue the conspiracy theorists now.
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Image via Getty.
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