Runs the Sports Program spoke in washington about ideas for dealing with corruption. The commission of security and cooperation in europe, an hour and 10 minutes. Hello welcome to this briefing of the us helsinki commission. The commission is a unique entity of Congress Mandated to monitor compliance with International Rules and standards across europe ranging from military affairs to economic and environmental issues, to human rights. My name is paul up to 12. Im the International Economic policy advisor responsible for anticorruption and sanctions related issues which i am joined by jim walden, the attorney for russian doping whistleblower Grigory Rodchenkov. For this book into the dark underworld of fraud in sports and what we can do with it. As an administrative aside i would like to mention the camera crew recording the briefing and its entirety. Our topic today is the russian doping scandal. A story of corruption and fraud on an unprecedented scale. It has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the russian state was behind a systematic effort to dope their athletes and defraud. No one can say how deep this rabbit hole goes and how long these corrupt practices have gone on. What we can say is it is a microcosm of the conflicts playing out across the world. As clean athletes compete against cheaters, so do legitimate business men face off against oligarchs and government based on rule of law do battle with authoritarian kleptocratics. Much like at the olympics without the benefit of transparency and the bravery of those few who stand up and say enough is enough. It becomes immeasurably more difficult for democracy, human rights and free markets to succeed. Dr. Grigory rodchenkov is one of these brave people, the director of russias antidoping laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov was the lead architect of the state run doping program. Working with the fsb, the successor to the soviet kgb, to cheat the international checks put in place to prevent doping by olympic athletes. That all changed in 2016 when Grigory Rodchenkov blew the whistle on the program he had once helped facilitate resulting in suspension of russia from the 2018 winter olympics. His revelations also generated a revitalized debate on the need to combat corruption and International Competition more generally. Grigory rodchenkov lives a precarious life in the United States, relying on whistleblower protection and fearful that russian agents may one day coming knocking. He seldom gives interviews or makes statements due to this very real threat on his life but we are lucky enough today to have jim with us who will read an original statement from Grigory Rodchenkov as well as speak to the man app story, his hopes and fears and the centrality of whistleblowers in the fight against globalized corruption. To conclude, i would like to remark the word corruption is mentioned 14 times in the National Security strategy, which i have with me today and would like to show off. Many across the Us Government and the dc policy community are coming to terms with the tremendous threat that globalized corruption and club talk or see posed to us National Policy and the need to build not only a 21stcentury financial and legal architecture but also an Ethical Society capable of resisting expediency and opportunism at the expense of the values we now hold dear. This sort of society is exemplified by whistleblowers. And i am humbled to speak today with jim, who represents one of the most courageous whistleblowers in recent years. Before i hand the floor over to jim, we would like to show the trailer for the oscar documentary icarus, to bring you up to speed for those unfamiliar with the case. Icarus tells the story of Grigory Rodchenkovs decision to reveal russias state run doping operation and the implications of this decision for him and the world, thank you. The idea that i had was to improve the system in place to test athletes was bullshit. When i started on this i didnt know what it was going to lead to. Would like to be missed. Gregory did the testing. Test my samples through his water lab in moscow. I will facilitate. It is explosive. Lets back up one second. Were you the mastermind that she did the olympics . That set off this whole chain of events. Today the World Antidoping Agency suspended russias sports drug testing lab. 99 of russian athletes are guilty of doping. An unimaginable level of criminality i will get the flight for you right now. The department of justice criminal investigation against you. We can talk to these guys about this. The slander. Recording. I want to thank them for 12 paul. It was originally for Grigory Rodchenkov but he cant be here but i will read a statement from him. It is a great honor to coming to the Congressional Commission to talk about the importance of Grigory Rodchenkovs work and specifically to talk about the critical juncture we are in when it comes to clean sports. As you now know from paul and icarus and the newspapers, Grigory Rodchenkov served for ten years as director of the Moscow Antidoping Center, it was supposed to enforce strict water codes to help catch cheaters. The World Antidoping Agency is the critical vanguard in the fight for clean sports. The ones that are supposed to be the gatekeepers. He will not be surprised to learn the budget is made of money from the ioc and many individual nations. Will not be surprised to know the United States is one of the largest contributors to its budget. It is 2. 3 million annual contribution, the secondlargest only behind the ioc. As the world knows, while Grigory Rodchenkov was working, he harbored a dark secret. His bosses in the kremlin who were supposed to be completely independent of the Moscow Antidoping Center ordered him to contrive an elaborate doping system to allow russian athletes to cheat, clean athletes from around the world, at world competitions including but not limited to the olympics. It would take me about three days, eight hours a day to explain how sophisticated and how many people were involved in the system but given the time constraints, boiled down fuzz to six main components. I will separate them into two categories come out of competition testing, when there is not a competition going on, i am really talking about the two events in 2014, World Championships and olympics associated. With respect to out of competition testing, Grigory Rodchenkov disclosed russia had long had a system that was referred to as the disappearing positive. For protected athletes meaning those people on National Teams would take performance enhancing drugs but from time to time be required to give urine tests, the primary method to detect cheating. Those athletes when they came into the moscow lab for out of competition testing would be pretested meaning before the official tests began and if there urine sample tested positive meaning it was a dirty test, that test was never downloaded to the atom system is a system that links fuzz to water. Once a dirty sample is downloaded into adams, they become aware of it and actions to suspend the athletes occur. According to Grigory Rodchenkov, disappearing positive methodology was in place for russia for virtually the entire time he was the director of the russian Antidoping Center and was ordered not by him but by his bosses in the kremlin, the orchestration was assisted by the center for sports preparation and the fsb which as paul says was a Successor Agency to the kgb. That covers out of competition testing. In the competition testing meaning testing that occurs while the games are going on, the system was dizzying in its checks and balances to ensure that russians didnt get caught. Before the games, athletes were given a sophisticated cocktail of performanceenhancing drugs. The main problem as many of you know with performanceenhancing drugs, the time during which it stays in your system but Grigory Rodchenkov devised a way to mix performanceenhancing drugs with alcohol and have the athletes swish it in their mouths for a while and spit it out so it would be absorbed under your tongue subliminally and it would keep the performanceenhancing drugs out of your digestive system and make it harder to detect. That was the first innovation. But because athletes were going to be taking these performanceenhancing drugs leading up to and sometimes during competitions, the athletes were instructed to give clean urine, meaning urine they provided when they werent taking performanceenhancing drugs so that there would be a way to switch their dirty urine with clean urine that had been collected before. There was one major obstacle to this problem. For those of you who dont know, during competition testing, when an athlete gives urine, the athlete gives two samples. And a bottle and a beer bottle. The a bottle is used to protect them during the games. Will be bottle is used in case there is a positive test to check the be bottle to make sure there wasnt a part false positive. The problem is these bottles are tamperproof, made by a Swiss Company that developed an Incredible Technology so that if you remove the cap, the brakes but you cant use a different because the serial number is the same as on the bottle. The greatest innovation was when the fsb found in 2013 they could open the b bottles which everyone including Grigory Rodchenkov believed was impossible. If you can open the b bottles, you can put clean urine in it and put the tap back on. They opened the bottles without breaking the. That was the next innovation. Then, during the game, as testing began, the fsb could open the bottles, replaced dirty urine with clean urine, restore them to the lab, and test them. The idea was they would then test clean but there was another problem. The fsb could not control surprise inspections on athletes who in competition and out of competition and from time to time they would send doping officers to take random samples for athletes. In those instances the fsb had a team of people intercepting samples and confiscating them. That, in five minutes, is a system that had so many components it is too complicated to go through. Dr. Grigory rodchenkov, let me be clear about this, dr. Grigory rodchenkov had no choice but to participate in this system if he wanted to stay alive. Despite his service to the russian federation, when german media started to leech details of the russian doping system from other whistleblowers and it became a major problem and an investigation started in 2015, Grigory Rodchenkov learned the kremlin was hatching a new secret plan, a plan to paint him as the lone wolf. They planned to execute this by executing him and staging his suicide. When he learned this from a friend of his at the kremlin he did not take long to decide what to do. Within two days, as you saw in the trailer, he was on an airplane to los angeles, determined to tell the truth about the russian statesponsored doping system. He didnt know. Alone. He brought with him powerful evidence to corroborate the truth of his claims. He brought a hard drive. He brought a flash drive. He brought the telephone that he used at the moscow lab. What he did with that evidence was to turn it over to antidoping authorities. What they found was a gold mine. Details that have only coming, you have seen the tip of the iceberg in the media reports. Emails between himself and other coconspirators about among other things the disappearing positive methodology. Memos he wrote to his bosses at the kremlin and fsb detailing the problems and issues with the doping system in russia. And copious, handwritten, daily diaries he has been keeping since he was a boy, of every detail of every day at the olympics including information about what he was doing for the doping system and what his supervisors were doing for the doping system. Since he came to the United States, Grigory Rodchenkov has told the truth, first in the documentary icarus, then at the New York Times and then to an independent commission established by w ata headed by a renowned investigator named prof. Richard mclaren. Prof. Mclaren didnt work alone. He assembled a team of experienced investigators, Hard Scrabble people who were skeptical of Grigory Rodchenkovs claims. Because he knew he couldnt just rely on Grigory Rodchenkovs word, he hired people to review all the evidence and also to look at samples of russian athletes, the bottles that had been taken from the lab and moved to a lab in lausanne. What did prof. Mclaren and his team of investigators find . They found that Grigory Rodchenkov was completely credible, and moreover, that his evidence was fully corroborated by the documents they determined to be authentic and a rigorous and expansive testing protocol for the samples which showed clear evidence of tampering both of the bottles themselves because of scratches and marks and because adjustments made to the urine to make salt levels match the salt levels the athlete game at the time of the competition testing. Telltale signs that Grigory Rodchenkov was telling the truth. And most importantly, Grigory Rodchenkov produced the actual list of protected athletes and the metadata for that list showed it was not created by him. It was created by the center for sports preparation. One of the main organizers of International Sports and a key conspirator and it just so happened that the scratches and marks and salt found in samples of russian athletes because they tested many samples beyond the people on that list, the only people that had scratches, marks and sells manipulation were the very people on this list. That they delayed significantly interviewing him and ultimately getting evidence from him. They themselves set up a completely different forensic testing system of the same bottles that mclaren had tested and largely confirmed his reports. And dr. Rodchenkov committed himself to submitting over 200 0 pages worth of affidavits with meticulous detail about not only the Russian Doping Program in general but that there is officials within russia which were pulling the strings of the puppet. And the involvement not all of officials but of coaches and athletes. Lets just stop here for a second. None of dr. Rodchenkovs revelations should have been news to anyone because the evidence of a russian statesponsored doping system has been mounting for use. It would take me a day to go through all that evidence, but let me give you a couple of snippets. In 2008 there were olympics in beijing, and before the beijing games, seven russian athletes were suspended for doping violations. After come in the Previous Year a whole flock of of the russians had been suspended. The New York Times ran an article because of a mounting suspicion and they said, and im paraphrasing, because of the number of suspensions and the various sports of the suspended athletes, troubling questions are starting to mount about statesponsored doping system and russia. But then in 2013 they became concerned doping was on the rise and starting in 2013 they published a yearly report of the countries that had the most whats called an analytical adverse finding, i doping violation. And guess what the report showed. Russia had a staggering 225 adverse analytical findings in 2013, 20 more than the second ranked rate country on the list. So in 2014, wada did it again. What did they find . Russia had 148 148 adverse analytical findings, 20 above the next highest ranked country. They didnt begin in 2015. What did did they find . Russia had 176 adverse analytical findings. 36 more than the next highest country. And so think about that for a second, ladies and gentlemen. In three years worth of time russia had almost 550 adverse analytical findings, and that in and of itself is not compelling evidence of a statesponsored doping system . I dont know what is. But i know what the ioc determined. The ioc determined that dr. Rodchenkov was credible, and based on his evidence they banned 43 of the athletes from the list for lifetime bans against any further olympic competitions. And so its obviously important to talk about dr. Rodchenkovs, the corroboration and verification hes telling the truth. But you know what a truthful person does . A truthful person tells the truth no matter whether the truth is guilt or innocence. And the ioc also did something important based on dr. Rodchenkovs information. Because he exonerated some athletes. There were two wrongly accuse russian athletes, and rather than simply trying to blame everyone, dr. Rodchenkov call it out and said ioc, youve gotten this wrong. I have no reason to believe that these two people were involved. They were not on the list. They didnt have scratches and marx. They didnt have salt content and i dont have any recollection of being told that they were protected athletes. Based on dr. Rodchenkovs evidence, the two athletes are now competing again. But the