Co-Founder of Murky Firm Behind Dirty Dossier Refuses to Appear Before Senate Committee
The brouhaha over the Donald Trump Jr. email and Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya has drawn more attention to the murky firm Fusion GPS which is behind the 35-page PeeGate dirty dossier.
The dossier has served as the foundation for the coup plotters seeking to have President Donald Trump removed from office and has been used by chief inquisitor Adam Schiff to lay out his case for Russian meddling based on the circumstantial evidence contained within it.
Fusion GPS hired former British spook Christopher Steele to compile the information and there are ties between the parties involved in what appears to have been a setup of Trump Jr. to justify the surveillance of Trump Tower.
Now in a story that shows that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, the co-founder of Fusion GPS is refusing to appear before the Senate Intelligence Committee, frustrating efforts to get answers on exactly who commissioned and paid for the dossier.
This is likely out of a fear that questions would be asked about Ms. Veselnitskaya and the honey pot meeting that sucked in Trump’s son, son in law Jared Kushner and campaign aid Paul Manafort.
The Hill is reporting that “Co-founder of firm behind Trump-Russia dossier won’t testify before Senate”:
Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson won’t testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, despite a request for voluntary testimony from the committee.
Simpson co-founded the political intelligence firm Fusion GPS in 2009. During the 2016 campaign, the firm hired former British spy Christopher Steele, who produced a now-infamous dossier alleging Russian intelligence’s influence over President Trump.
The Senate Judiciary Committee said yesterday that Simpson would testify next week. The chair of the committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent a letter asking for information about the dossier to Fusion GPS in March, and in June threatened to subpoena Simpson if he did not comply with the request for voluntary testimony.
Grassley rejected claims from Simpson’s lawyer in June that responding to the committee’s request would violate Simpson’s First Amendment rights.
“Your attorney has failed to sufficiently explain your claims that responding to the Committee’s requests would infringe upon or violate your and/or Fusion’s First Amendment rights, attorney-client and attorney work product privileges, and confidentiality agreements,” Grassley wrote in a letter released in June.
“Based on the minimal and vague explanations your attorney has provided, the Committee cannot adequately assess your claims. Thus, we must presume that they are unfounded.”
Grassley’s main questions for Simpson involve who hired Fusion GPS to produce opposition research against Trump, and whether the firm shared the document with the FBI.
“When political opposition research becomes the basis for law enforcement or intelligence efforts, it raises substantial questions about the independence of law enforcement and intelligence from politics,” Grassley wrote in March.
Donald Trump Jr.’s email further reinforces the suspicion of some that the entire Russian meddling story is a complete setup and a trap which an overly eager Junior Trump blundered into.
That is understandable as businessmen aren’t accustomed to dealing with black operations and the world of spooks, dirty politicians like Senator John McCain (a key figure in PeeGate) and an interlocking media and intelligence complex that is used to disseminate propaganda.
Nearly every piece of the ginned-up case against Trump can be traced to that dossier and it smells like a huge rat when the company’s co-founder refuses to agree to testify before Congress.
