Fusion GPS gets medieval on Hill GOP obstructionists, leaks their side of the Steele Dossier story to NY Times
Just three days after The NY Times revealed that a drunk George Papadopoulos told Australia’s ambassador to the UK in May of last year that Russia had “dirt on Hillary” in the form of e-mails — dynamiting the GOP claim that the Fusion GPS-commissions “Steele Dossier” set off the FBI probe into Russia’s ties to celebrity real estate developer Donald Trump and possible meddling in the 2016 presidential election — Fusion GPS founders Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch have unleashed a 55,000 gallon container of whupp-ass on congressional Republicans in the form of a bombshell-packed New York Times op-ed titled “The Republicans’ Fake Investigations“.
Five huge takeaways stood our:
- Congressional Republicans are engaging in a coordinated cover-up by refusing to release transcripts of testimony by Simpson and Fritsch on Capitol Hill, including a day-long meeting with Senate Judiciary Committee officials: “Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place. … Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.
- Someone tied to Team Trump was talking to the FBI before the words “Steele Dossier” had joined the political lexicon: “As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.” This could be a reference to Papadopoulos — or not.
- The GOP-controlled Congress is in effect protecting the most corrupt president in American history: “We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed. We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.“
- “[W]e debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it.”
- Steele acted independently of Fusion GPS: “[W]e hired [Christopher] Steele, a highly respected Russia expert… without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun? What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.
Read it all here.
D.B. Hirsch is a political activist, news junkie, and retired ad copy writer and spin doctor. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.