Fusion GPS and the Trump Dossier are at the epicenter of ever-increasing revelations surrounding DNC and Obama Administration involvement with what appears to be a strategically directed political campaign against President Trump.
Back in July, I wrote about Fusion GPS and that firm’s ties to Russia in an article titled, Fusion GPS, the Trump Dossier, Russian Money & the Magnitsky Act. From the article:
Fusion GPS is the firm that commissioned the infamous – and discredited – Steele dossier on President Trump.
The FBI used this dossier as part of their reasoning for generating FISA surveillance warrants on the Trump campaign in June 2016.
It turns out that Fusion GPS was employed by the Russian government – at the exact same time that Fusion commissioned the Trump dossier.
Veselnitskaya [the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016] hired the law firm BakerHostetler to represent Prevezon, a Russian holding company based in Cyprus accused by the US government of laundering stolen cash into New York City real estate. Browder told prosecutors that the laundered money was stolen from Russia as part of the tax-fraud scheme that Magnitsky uncovered.
To rebut that claim, BakerHostetler hired Fusion to dig up dirt on Browder. [Browder] characterized Fusion’s work for BakerHostetler as a “smear campaign” against him and Magnitsky carried out “in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act.”
Browder’s Senate Testimony provided further evidence of Fusion’s financial ties to Russia:
SEN. GRAHAM: So, I just want to absorb that for a moment. The group that did the dossier on President Trump hired this British spy, wound up getting it to the FBI. You believe they were working for the Russians?
BROWDER: And in the Spring and Summer of 2016 they were receiving money indirectly from a senior Russian government official.
It became apparent from the Senate Testimony that Fusion GPS actually set up the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Natalia Veselnitskaya. This is corroborated by events detailed below.
It turns out Veselnitskaya was not even supposed to be allowed into the country. Her Visa had been denied.
The Moscow lawyer had been turned down for a visa to enter the U.S. lawfully but then was granted special immigration parole by then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch for the limited purpose of helping a company owned by Russian businessman Denis Katsyv, her client, defend itself.
This revelation means it was the Obama Justice Department that enabled the newest and most intriguing figure in the Russia-Trump investigation to enter the country without a visa.
Two weeks ago it was discovered that the DNC and the Clinton Campaign were the ones who had hired Fusion GPS. From the Clinton Dossier Disclosures:
The Washington Post reported yesterday that Hillary Clinton, her campaign and the DNC were officially behind the funding of the Trump Dossier.
“Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Some of Steele’s allegations began circulating in Washington in the summer of 2016 as the FBI launched its counterintelligence investigation into possible connections between Trump associates and the Kremlin. Around that time, Steele shared some of his findings with the FBI.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.”
Several days ago it was discovered that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS met with Natalia Veselnitskaya (the Russian lawyer at the Trump Jr. meeting) before and after the Trump Jr. meeting took place.
The co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind the unverified Trump dossier, met with a Russian lawyer before and after a key meeting she had last year with Trump’s son, Fox News has learned. The contacts shed new light on how closely tied the firm was to Russian interests, at a time when it was financing research to discredit then-candidate Donald Trump.
Yesterday the AP reported that Glenn Simpson was the author of the memo used by Veselnitskaya to pitch her meeting with Trump Jr.
In December, 2014, the sources said, Veselnitskaya, who then was involved in litigation pitting her Russian client against British-American financier William Browder, received a legal research memo reporting that the Ziff Brothers, two New York financiers allied with Browder, had made a large contribution to a Clinton charity.
The memo had been prepared by Fusion, which had been hired to conduct legal research on Browder by Baker and Hostetler law firm. The firm represented Russian businessman Denis Katsyv, who was engaged in disputes with Browder and U.S. prosecutors.
Glenn Simpson, one of Fusion GPS’ founders, met with Veselnitskaya about that litigation before and after her meeting with Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort.
Glenn Simpson gave Veselnitskaya a memo that he (Simpson) had written as part of a paid smear campaign (against Browder by Fusion GPS on behalf of the Russian government) in order to secure a meeting with the Trump Campaign.
For background on Fusion’s Russia-funded campaign against Browder see – Fusion GPS, the Trump Dossier, Russian Money & the Magnitsky Act.
Kim Strassel at the WSJ expounded on some of these issues yesterday in an editorial, Lifting the Steel Curtain:
It was in the summer of 2016 that Jim Comey’s FBI obtained a wiretap warrant on Mr. Page from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. If it was the dossier that provoked that warrant, then the wrongs here are grave. Mr. Page is suing Yahoo News over that Isikoff story, but he may have a better case against the Clinton campaign and the federal government if they jointly spun a smear document into an abusive investigation.
To that point, it is fair to ask if the entire Trump-Russia narrative—which has played a central role in our political discourse for a year, and is now resulting in a special counsel issuing unrelated indictments—is based on nothing more than a political smear document. Is there any reason to believe the FBI was probing a Trump-Russia angle before the dossier? Is there any collusion allegation that doesn’t come in some form from the dossier?
The idea that the federal government and a special counsel were mobilized—that American citizens were monitored and continue to be investigated—based on a campaign-funded hit document is extraordinary. Especially given that to this day no one has publicly produced a single piece of evidence to support any of the dossier’s substantive allegations about Trump team members.
It has long been suspected that the meeting between Trump Jr. and Veselnitskaya was a setup aimed at compromising the Trump Campaign.
It is now becoming apparent that this meeting was just one piece in a far larger campaign. A campaign conducted by the DNC, Hillary Clinton and her camp, the Obama Administration and the FBI.
A political campaign against President Trump.
Congressman Mark Meadows, (R-NC), a member of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, spoke during a special order on the House floor Wednesday night. He concluded his remarks with four questions:
- Why did President Obama’s campaign begin paying almost a million dollars to the very same firm the Clinton campaign used to fund the dossier, in the very same month the Clinton campaign began paying for the dossier?
- Why did President Obama’s FBI attempt to pay Christopher Steele for the Russian Dossier? Why was President Obama’s FBI involved in paying for a project that the Clinton campaign was orchestrating?
- Why brief the President at all on the dossier if much of the dossier could not be verified? Or, if President Obama’s intelligence officials had reason to treat the dossier seriously, why did they wait two months after the election until January 6 to brief the President?
- Why was the President’s meeting with President-elect Trump leaked to CNN four days after the briefing if, again, the dossier could not be verified?
“The point is to recognize that there are legitimate, unanswered questions about whether the Obama Justice Department involved themselves in a political project targeting then-candidate Donald Trump—a suggestion that has far more evidence behind it than the directionless investigation into the Trump-Russian collusion,”
These are good questions. They should be answered.
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