Members of the Democratic Party and the Leftist Mainstream
Media (MSM) are doing and saying whatever lie that pops into their minds, have
been exposed as liars by one of their own.
The New York Post has been rated (these days – things change
among Conservative MSM) as Center-Right: AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check. The NY Post has fingered
a Leftist organization Fusion GPS which
Congressional sources has pegged as “…
actually an opposition-research group for Democrats, and the founders, who are
more political activists than journalists, have a pro-Hillary, anti-Trump
agenda.” (Quote from NY Post article)
JRH 6/25/17
**************
Sketchy firm behind
Trump dossier is stalling investigators
By Paul Sperry
June 24, 2017 2:24pm
A secretive Washington firm
that commissioned the dubious intelligence dossier on Donald
Trump is stonewalling congressional investigators trying to learn
more about its connections to the Democratic Party.
The Senate Judiciary
Committee earlier this month threatened to subpoena the firm, Fusion GPS, after
it refused to answer questions and provide records to the panel identifying who
financed the error-ridden dossier, which was circulated during the election and
has sparked much of the Russia scandal now engulfing the White House.
What is the company hiding?
Fusion GPS describes itself as a “research and strategic intelligence firm”
founded by “three former Wall Street Journal investigative reporters.” But
congressional sources say it’s actually an opposition-research group for
Democrats, and the founders, who are more political activists than journalists,
have a pro-Hillary, anti-Trump agenda.
“These weren’t mercenaries or
hired guns,” a congressional source familiar with the dossier probe said.
“These guys had a vested personal and ideological interest in smearing Trump
and boosting Hillary’s chances of winning the White House.”
Fusion GPS was on the payroll
of an unidentified Democratic ally of Clinton when it hired a long-retired
British spy to dig up dirt on Trump. In 2012, Democrats hired Fusion GPS to
uncover dirt on GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. And in 2015, Democrat
ally Planned Parenthood retained Fusion GPS to investigate pro-life activists
protesting the abortion group.
More, federal records show a
key co-founder and partner in the firm was a Hillary Clinton donor and
supporter of her presidential campaign.
In September 2016, while
Fusion GPS was quietly shopping the dirty dossier on Trump around Washington,
its co-founder and partner Peter R. Fritsch contributed at least $1,000 to the
Hillary Victory Fund and the Hillary For America campaign, Federal Election
Commission data show. His wife also donated money to Hillary’s campaign.
Property records show that in
June 2016, as Clinton allies bankrolled Fusion GPS, Fritsch bought a
six-bedroom, five-bathroom home in Bethesda, Md., for $2.3 million.
Fritsch did not respond to
requests for comment. A lawyer for Fusion GPS said the firm’s work is
confidential.
Sources say Fusion GPS had
its own interest, beyond those of its clients, in promulgating negative gossip
about Trump.
Fritsch, who served as the
Journal’s bureau chief in Mexico City and has lectured at the liberal Wilson
Center’s Mexico Institute, married into a family with Mexican business
interests. His wife, Beatriz Garcia, formerly worked as an executive at Grupo
Dina, a manufacturer of trucks and buses in Mexico City that benefits from
NAFTA, which Trump opposes.
Fritsch’s Fusion GPS partner
Thomas Catan, who grew up in Britain, once edited a business magazine in
Mexico, moreover. A third founding partner, Glenn Simpson, is reported to have
shared dark views of both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump. Before
joining Fusion GPS, Simpson did opposition research for a former Clinton White
House operative.
The Senate Judiciary
Committee is also investigating whether the FBI has wrongly relied on the
anti-Trump dossier and its author, Christopher Steele — the old spy who was
hired by Fusion GPS to build a Russia file on Trump — to aid its ongoing
espionage investigation into the Trump campaign and its possible ties to
Moscow.
The FBI received a copy of
the Democrat-funded dossier in August, during the heat of the campaign, and is
said to have contracted in October to pay Steele $50,000 to help corroborate
the dirt on Trump — a relationship that “raises substantial questions about the
independence” of the bureau in investigating Trump, warned Senate Judiciary
Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
Senate investigators are
demanding to see records of communications between Fusion GPS and the FBI and
the Justice Department, including any contacts with former Attorney General
Loretta Lynch, now under congressional investigation for possibly obstructing
the Hillary Clinton email probe, and deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, who is
under investigation by the Senate and the Justice inspector general for failing
to recuse himself despite financial and political connections to the Clinton campaign
through his Democrat activist wife. Senate investigators have singled out
McCabe as the FBI official who negotiated with Steele.
Like Fusion GPS, the FBI has
failed to cooperate with congressional investigators seeking documents.
Steele contracted with Fusion
GPS to investigate Trump’s ties to Russia starting in June 2016, whereupon he
outlandishly claimed that Hillary campaign hackers were “paid by both Trump’s
team and the Kremlin” and that the operation was run out of Putin’s office. He
also fed Fusion GPS and its Hillary-allied clients incredulous gossip about
Trump hating the Obamas so much that he hired hookers to urinate on a bed they
slept in at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton, and that Russian intelligence recorded the
pee party in case they needed to blackmail Trump.
Never mind that none of the
rumors were backed by evidence or even credible sourcing (don’t bother trying
to confirm his bed-wetting yarn, Steele advised, as “all direct witnesses have
been silenced”). Steele reinforced his paying customers’ worst fears about
Trump, and they rewarded him for it with a whopping $250,000 in payments.
But it’s now clear his
“intelligence reports,” which together run more than 35-pages long, were for
the most part worthless. And the clients who paid Fusion GPS (which claims to
go “beyond standard due diligence”) for them got taken to the cleaners.
Steele’s most sensational
allegations remain unconfirmed. For instance, his claim that Trump lawyer
Michael Cohen held a “clandestine meeting” on the alleged hacking scheme in
Prague with “Kremlin officials” in August 2016 unraveled when Cohen denied ever
visiting Prague, his passport showed no stamps showing he left or entered the
US at the time, witnesses accounted for his presence here, and Czech
authorities found no evidence Cohen went to Prague.
Steele hadn’t worked in
Moscow since the 1990s and didn’t actually travel there to gather intelligence
on Trump firsthand. He relied on third-hand “friend of friend” sourcing. In
fact, most of his claimed Russian sources spoke not directly to him but “in
confidence to a trusted compatriot” who, in turn, spoke to Steele — and always
anonymously.
But his main source may have
been Google. Most of the information branded as “intelligence” was merely
rehashed from news headlines or cut and pasted — replete with errors — from
Wikipedia.
In fact, much of the
seemingly cloak-and-dagger information connecting Trump and his campaign
advisers to Russia had already been reported in the media at the time Steele
wrote his monthly reports.
In the same August report,
for example, Steele connected a Moscow trip taken by then-Trump campaign
adviser Michael Flynn to “the Russian operation” to hack the election. But
there was nothing secret about the trip, which had taken place months earlier
and had been widely reported.
And there was nothing untoward
about it. It was a dinner celebrating the 10th birthday of Russian TV network
RT, and Flynn sat at the same table with Putin as US Green Party presidential
candidate Jill Stein.
The real question is why
anyone would take anything in the sketchy report seriously.
But even the CIA gave it
credence. The dossier ended up attached to a Top Secret intelligence briefing
on Russia for President Obama, even though his intelligence czar last month
testified “We couldn’t corroborate the sourcing.” The FBI, moreover, has been
using it for investigative leads on Trump associates like Carter Page, even
though former FBI Director James Comey this month described the dossier as
“salacious and unverified.”
And of course, Democratic
leaders in Congress keep referring to it to cook up more charges against Trump,
while liberal media continue to use it as a road map to find “scoops” on Trump
in the “Russiagate” conspiracy they’re peddling — still hoping against hope
that the central thrust of the report — that Trump entered into an unholy
alliance with the Russian government during the election — will one day prove
true and bring about the downfall of his presidency.
___________________
Sperry is a former Hoover Institution media fellow and author of “Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and
Subversives Have Penetrated Washington.”
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