Michael Weiss reports: The former attorney general of Great Britain has been representing the lawyer for an alleged Russian crime family, The Daily Beast has learned, based on a tranche of email correspondence leaked online.

Lord Peter Goldsmith, who served for six years under Tony Blair’s premiership and is now a senior partner at the London office of U.S. law firm Debevoise & Plimpton, was retained in March 2014 by Andrey Pavlov to act as “legal advisor.” Pavlov for years acted as legal counsel for Russian crime boss Dmitry Klyuev; he was also directly implicated by whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky as being an accomplice in the theft of public Russian money. Pavlov has denied all these accusations.

Goldsmith — who provided the Blair government with the legal justification for Britain’s participation in the 2003 Iraq War — was tasked with helping Pavlov evade possible sanction by the European Parliament for being complicit in Magnitsky’s death in prison, and for “the subsequent judicial cover-up and for the ongoing and continuing harassment of his mother and widow,” as the text for the European parliamentary resolution stated. [Continue reading…]