Oct. 31, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:03:28
3877 The Truth About The Fusion GPS Dossier Collusion Scandal
The now-infamous “Golden Showers” dossier has Fusion GPS in the spotlight as serious questions are raised about who funded the largely discredited or unverified allegations against Donald Trump and his campaign associates. In April 2016, the Hillary Clinton Campaign and the Democratic National Committee used lawyer Marc Elias to retain and fund Fusion GPS for opposition research, leading to the “Golden Showers” dossier.In June 2016, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele and his company Orbis Business Intelligence are hired by Fusion GPS to specifically investigate Trump’s possible connections to Russia. What is the truth about the Fusion GPS dossier collusion scandal?Sources: http://www.fdrurl.com/fusion-gps-dossierYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Are you ready to join me on a very dark, devious, sinister, sexually deviant and dangerous journey?
A journey so deviant, so dark, so full of falsehoods and manipulations that if you were given the choice between joining me on this journey and ending up As a salami in a man which between Weinstein and Spacey, you would still weigh things in the balance.
Well, I hope you will join me.
It's essential as we talk about how an American political party applied and paid elements of a hostile foreign power for lurid and false stories about an American domestic political opponent.
How they attempted to use this collusion with sinister elements of a foreign power in order to sway an election and then accused the victor of Donald Trump of collusion with Russia in order to sway an election.
It's absolutely astonishing.
This is the truth about the Fusion GPS dossier scandal.
Spoiler! We're going to talk about this Golden Showers dossier, the dossier that said Trump hired hookers in Russia to pee on a bed formerly slept in by Michelle and Barack Obama.
And this dossier, turns out, spoiler, was manufactured by Democrats, who paid a DC law firm in order to pay another DC research firm, who in turn paid a retired British spook to pay shadowy, unknown, unidentified Russians to tell lurid tales about Mr.
Trump's imaginary proclivities and In completely reckless disregard as to whether or not these stories were in fact true.
Let's dive in, shall we?
So this now infamous Golden Showers dossier has Fusion GPS in the spotlight as serious questions are raised about who funded the largely discredited and unverified, or unverified allegations against Donald Trump and his campaign associates.
So according to its website, Fusion GPS, and I quote, provides premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence services to corporations, law firms, and investors worldwide.
In a surprising irony, Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson co-authored a 1996 book entitled Dirty Little Secrets, The Persistence of Corruption in American Politics.
Well, they see right what you know.
Where he fiercely criticized the activities his company would later adopt.
And I quote, At its worst, opposition research can be a gateway to acts that are not just offensive, but duplicitous, and sometimes illegal.
In October 2015, the Washington Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS to investigate several Republican presidential candidates, including the eventual nominee, Donald Trump.
Billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer bankrolls the Washington Free Beacon and is known for his support of Senator Marco Rubio and pro-immigration positions.
On March 15, 2016, Senator Marco Rubio dropped out of the Republican primary, signaling the end of the road for billionaire Paul Singer's preferred choice for President of the United States.
In March 2016, Fusion GPS approached the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through the law firm Perkins Coie, offering to continue their opposition research into Donald Trump in return for payment.
In April 2016, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee used lawyer Mark E. Elias to retain and fund Fusion GPS for opposition research, leading to the Golden Showers dossier.
Now, it's not wildly uncommon to use lawyers in this capacity because you get attorney-client privilege.
You know how you can keep your email server at home in order to avoid freedom of information acts, potentially.
Federal Election Commission disclosures reveal that the Clinton campaign and the DNC paid the Perkins-Cohey law firm a total of $257,000 for legal services in that month alone.
While it is unclear what funds were later transferred to Fusion GPS, the financial transfers to Perkins-Cohey continued throughout the campaign, totaling approximately $12 million for legal services.
$12 million!
Now, were these legal services?
Were they opposition research?
Doesn't seem to me to be the same category in your filings, but what do I know?
Now, interestingly, Obama for America also paid over $972,000 to Perkins Coie since April 2016.
Let's just say they're connected and well-feathered.
In May 2016, the Washington Free Beacon ended its contract with Fusion GPS. In a two-day period from May 3rd to 4th, Senator Ted Cruz and Governor John Kasich dropped out of the Republican primary, leaving Donald Trump as the Republican nominee.
So there's no particular point for the Republicans to do any more upper research on anyone.
In June 2016, former British intelligence officer aptly named action hero Christopher Steele and his company Orbis Business Intelligence are hired by Fusion GPS to specifically investigate Trump's possible connections to Russia.
Statement of truth from Christopher Steele.
Between June and early November 2016, Orbis was engaged by Fusion to prepare a series of confidential memoranda based on intelligence concerning Russian efforts to influence the U.S. presidential election process and links between Russia and Donald Trump.
On June 9, 2016, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort attended a meeting arranged by publicist Rob Goldstone with a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, supposedly for opposition research on Hillary Clinton, but Veselnitskaya instead focused on the opposition to the Magnitsky Act.
That's a sort of sanctions act regarding Russia.
President Trump's outside counsel, Mark Corralo, said, Specifically, we have learned that the person who sought to the meeting is associated with Fusion GPS, a firm which, according to public records, was retained by Democratic operatives to develop opposition research on the president and which commissioned the phony Steele dossier.
Interesting. So, of course, Donald Trump Jr.
got into a lot of trouble in the media for this meeting, and you have a group that's trying to find connections between Trump and Russia, who has connections to the woman who asked Donald Trump Jr.
to have a meeting about Russia.
Ha! Very interesting.
The Washington Post has reported that Fusion GPS says it had no involvement in the meeting, although it did work on a lawsuit that involved Veselnitskaya for more than two years.
Hmm. Maybe.
Just theoretically, it's possible to have a meeting where you demand everyone hand over their cell phone batteries.
Fusion GPS statement.
Fusion GPS learned about this meeting from news reports and had no prior knowledge of it.
Any claim that Fusion GPS arranged or facilitated this meeting in any way is false.
On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post published an article entitled, Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole opposition research on Trump, which reported DNC leaders were tipped to the hack in late April.
Chief Executive Amy Dacey got a call from her operations chief saying that their information technology team had noticed some unusual network activity.
That evening, she spoke with Michael Sussman, a DNC lawyer who is a partner with Perkins Coey in Washington.
Soon after, Sussman, a former federal prosecutor who handled computer crime cases, called CrowdStrike President Sean Henry, whom he had known for many years.
Within 24 hours, CrowdStrike had installed software on the DNC's computers so that it could analyze data that could indicate who had gotten access, when, and how.
Just a little sidebar, please, our kind listeners.
The timestamps on the information that was taken from the DNC servers indicate a massively high transfer rate, which almost certainly means that the data was copied to a local USB drive rather than over uncertain internet connections with many hops, jumps, and skips all the way out to Romania, which is one of the theories.
And here they're talking about unusual network activity that does not mean external network necessarily.
And... His name was Seth Rich.
According to Aaron Klein at Breitbart, and I quote, CrowdStrike was financed to the tune of $100 million from a funding drive by Google Capital.
Google Capital, which now goes by the name of Capital G, is an arm of Alphabet Inc.
Interestingly, by the by, it's the only alphabet that starts F-U-R-N-C. To continue, Google's parent company, Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Alphabet, has been a staunch and active supporter of Hillary Clinton and is a longtime donor to the Democratic Party.
Again, how fascinating.
We might have had a break-in.
Quick, call the most pro-Democrat group you can think of to investigate.
I'm sure that's just a coincidence.
We all know how great lefties are with computers.
Again, Aaron Klein from Breitbart.
CrowdStrike is a California-based cybersecurity technology company co-founded by experts George Kurtz and Dmitry Alpedovich.
Alpedovich is a non-resident senior fellow of the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council.
You know, I just don't have enough acronyms on my business cards.
Just a passing thought.
Aaron continues, the Council takes a hawkish approach toward Russia and has released numerous reports and briefs about Russian aggression.
The Council is funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Act, the U.S. State Department and NATO Act.
Another Council funder is the Ploughshares Fund, which in turn has received financing from billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations.
Excellent. Those sticky, whistled Nazgul fingers just seem to be pretty much everywhere.
The questionable reports from CrowdStrike are not independently verified, as the DNC refused to turn over its equipment to the FBI on multiple occasions.
The connection between CrowdStrike and Perkins Coie should raise additional questions about the validity of reports claiming the Russian government hacked CrowdStrike.
See, it's important to remember that the left loved Russia when it was atheistic, When it was globalistic, internationalistic, and communistic, when it was a bloodthirsty dictatorship hell-bent on spreading communism around the world and slaughtering tens of millions of its own citizens, the left had nothing but great stuff to say about Russia.
Now that Russia has become more Christian and more nationalistic, it is, in fact, the ultimate enemy, which tells you everything you need to know about the left if you're willing to listen.
On June 20th, Steele added the first contributions to the dossier, alleging that Donald Trump used prostitutes during a visit to Moscow in Russia in 2013 and that this information was being used to blackmail him.
Oh, sorry, there's a typo.
I think you misspelled Weinstein.
The New York Times reports that Steele made his information available to an FBI contact with the documents eventually making their way up To FBI counterintelligence chief Peter Strzok.
I gave it a good shot.
On July 26, 2016, brief tenured Trump advisor Carter Page was contacted by the Wall Street Journal related to allegations found in the Golden Showers dossier.
The document was circulating throughout both intelligence and media circles with rumors and unfounded allegations working their way into mainstream publications and news airwaves.
Now, see, if you're a reporter and you're going to publish stuff, first of all, unfounded allegations, not cool, not good, and will often lead to lawsuits.
So you kind of have to know directly your sources.
You can't be paying your sources.
I don't think so, anyway. And you have to have some idea of the motivation behind why your sources are doing what they're doing and passing along this information.
The chain of nonsense is Between this supposed dossier and it getting onto mainstream media news outlets was completely ridiculous.
If there's two words you want to understand about golden showers other than ew gross, it's also this is weaponized fiction.
In my view, it's just fiction that gets run through.
Like how you can launder money to make it appear more realistic and your fake money gets to be real money.
I'm not talking about the Fed. I'm talking about the illegal laundering.
It's the same thing. You can make up a bunch of stuff and if you get it through the right channels and get it through the right Then, somehow, it seems to gain credibility.
Although, we have a battle here, of course, in that if this information is false, to me it seems completely false, then it's not that the information has gained credibility by passing through intelligence channels and the mainstream media.
Intelligence channels and the mainstream media will have lost credibility by promoting this nonsense.
So at this point in 2016, summer of 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an official investigation into collusion between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the Russian government.
See, because of this golden showers dossier most likely.
According to New York Times reports, CIA Director John Brennan briefed Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.
On August 25th, 2016, he alleged that, quote, unnamed advisers to Mr.
Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election.
Harry Reid. Wait, wasn't that the guy who had to resign because he was getting sucked into the corruption scandals with Menendez?
He's really worried about Russia, you see.
Terrible stuff. In September 2016, a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, warrant was allegedly obtained by the FBI related to Carter Page due to the evidence contained in the Golden Showers dossier.
So again, I understand how this works.
Unverified stuff. We'll get to the chain of how it works in a second, like how it got there.
But all this unverified stuff is floating up and floating around.
Next thing you know, boom!
During the grueling closing months...
Of a deeply contentious and volatile election cycle.
Oh, looky la!
The FBI, run by a guy who's pretty close to the Clintons in a lot of ways, now gets to listen in on the opponents.
But all they care about, you see, is Russian interference in an American election.
It was reported in 2013 that over 33 years, the FISA court granted 33,942 warrants with only 12 denials, a rejection rate of only 0.03%.
I wonder if any of the denials had the word Clinton in them.
I can't imagine.
Later that month, Steele reports that following instructions from Fusion GPS, he briefed several major news outlets on allegations against Donald Trump, including the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN. So, if you are a reporter and you get information, then you try and figure out the source of that information.
Some ex-British spook?
Who cares? Even if it's the FBI who says we're looking into it, you can't just immediately say that the FBI is automatically right.
I think, as a reporter, you have a responsibility to figure out what is the source of the information.
Because the story could be, wow, this information is pretty salacious and wild and lurid, or it could be This unsourced information is being floated through the FBI and mainstream media in an attempt to influence the American election.
That seems kind of corrupt.
What a great story that that would have been.
But it wasn't Nixon who, along with Joseph McCarthy, added a bunch of communists in Hollywood and therefore was not targeted later on.
It wasn't Nixon. What can I tell you?
On September 23rd, 2016, Yahoo News published an article entitled, quote, U.S. Intel officials probe ties between Trump, Advisor, and Kremlin, focusing on this piss dossier's allegations about Carter Page.
Page steadfastly denied the allegations and is currently suing Yahoo News for defamation.
I wonder if they had told everyone at this point that all their passwords had been compromised, Yahoo.
I don't know. Later reports would allege that one time Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was wiretapped, and it was widely known that he would regularly speak with Donald Trump.
When did the surveillance begin?
Did the dossier play a role on obtaining the necessary permissions, and was campaign-related information shared with political opponents?
You see? It starts with...
A Republican-backed website investigating.
They don't look into Russian ties.
It then gets transferred to the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Then this information gets generated, floated around.
You end up with surveillance on people speaking to Trump.
All accidents, all coincidences.
Nothing ever going back to the Clinton campaign or the DNC. An article by Sarah Carter entitled, Obama's rule changes open door for NSA intercepts of Americans to reach political hands reported on the relaxation of rules related to intelligence reports.
And she wrote, As his presidency drew to a close, Barack Obama's top aides routinely reviewed intelligence reports gleaned from the National Security Agency's incidental intercepts of Americans abroad, taking advantage of rules that their boss relaxed starting in 2011 to help the government better fight terrorism espionage by foreign enemies and hacking threats.
So... Just as the presidency is drawing to a close, Barack Obama's top aides become very interested in these intelligence reports pretty much at the same time that the FBI is able to listen in on calls regarding Manafort and potentially Trump.
Just a coincidence, folks.
Please move along. Nothing to see here.
Sean Davis from The Federalist said, Shaila Murray, a former Washington Post reporter turned political operative, was serving as a top communications advisor to Obama while the Obama administration was reportedly using information from the dossier to justify secret surveillance of Trump campaign staff.
Murray is married to Neil King, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was hired by Fusion GPS in December of 2016.
You know, I thought of using this white wall of the backdrop here to draw up a chart of all these things, but I'm afraid I'm going to look like Russell Crowe wearing a tinfoil hat in Beautiful Minds.
But it seems important.
Sean Davis goes on to say, While at the Wall Street Journal, King worked alongside Fusion GPS's core team, even sharing bylines with Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS executive, who personally hired Steele to probe Trump's alleged Russia connections.
So isn't that interesting?
If the situation was not already strange enough, in October 2016, James Comey's Federal Bureau of Investigation met with Steele and offered to fund his continued investigation of Donald Trump's alleged Russia connections.
Huh. Interesting.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Doesn't the FBI have its own investigator or two hanging around, kicking around, bending paper clips into haiku poems, trimming bonsai trees and occasionally doing some work?
Why would they need to continue paying this guy?
Around this time, Steele once again acted on instructions from Fusion GPS to brief mainstream media outlets as to his allegations and even conducted an interview with the far-left Mother Jones website.
Mother Jones. Is that a...
not to Bertolt Brecht?
I don't know. After Steele's name becomes more widely reported in the news media, the FBI reportedly pulls its funding offer to Steele, and unconfirmed news reports suggest that he'd never received payment from the FBI. As Donald Trump beats Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election, the arrangement between the Clinton campaign, Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie law firm Christopher Steele, and Fusion GPS winds down.
The irony of all of this I will get to at the end.
So the dossier, the Golden Showers dossier, is brought to the attention of Senator John McCain by a Steele associate in late November 2016.
And after an associate meets with Steele, McCain obtains a copy of the DNC-Clinton campaign opposition research.
John McCain, quote, Republican, unless you want to repeal Obamacare, On December 9th, 2016, Senator McCain gives a copy of the Golden Showers dossier to FBI Director James Comey, even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation has already been investigating the spurious claims for months.
On December 13th, 2016, Steele made his final contribution to the dossier, alleging that Russian technology business executive Alexei Gubarev had used his various companies to hack into the Democratic National Committee email systems.
How did he know that? I mean, it's amazing to me.
The crime of hacking into the DNC is reported.
The FBI says, hey, give us your service.
And the DNC is like, no!
And the FBI is like, well, there's nothing we can do.
It's not like we have the power of law or compulsion or subpoena or anything like that.
Can't do anything. Nope, nope, nope.
Good luck if you're not at the top of the power pyramid having that happen.
United States President Barack Obama and President-elect Donald Trump are both briefed about the Golden Showers dossier on January 6, 2017 by FBI Director James Comey and other senior intelligence officials.
I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh.
God help me if I ever get through life and have to sit down with a meeting saying, hey, there's reports that you went to Russia and paid horrors to pee on a bed.
Oh man, that's never a great day.
But the fact that Trump ended up firing James Comey, I don't know any employee of mine who says, who lies and says, or gives false information out and says, hey, word on the street is you had whores pee on a bed.
Yep, you're pretty much fired.
James Comey said, the IC leadership thought it important for a variety of reasons to alert the incoming president to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified.
You know, if it's unverified, maybe you could say that more publicly.
Among those reasons were, one, we knew the media was about to publicly report the material, and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the president-elect, and two, to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming president, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.
On January 10, 2017, the Soy Boys at BuzzFeed abandoned any shred of journalistic integrity and published the Golden Showers dossier, prompting condemnations from many in the media and lawsuits from individuals smeared by reportedly unfounded allegations.
Despite her campaign providing millions and millions of dollars in funding for its production, Hillary Clinton later claimed to be unaware of the dossier until it was published by BuzzFeed.
Unaware of the dossier.
Didn't mean she'd read it cover to cover, completely unaware.
Millions and millions and millions of dollars spent on this pretty core piece of opposition research.
Hillary Clinton had no idea.
Now, either she did have an idea and she's lying, which would be not the first time a Clinton has denied, denied, denied, delayed, delayed, delayed until everyone's so exhausted they stop pursuing, or...
She genuinely had no idea of millions of dollars being spent on OPPO research, the most central and key part of the OPPO research in many ways, by her campaign, in which case she was thoroughly unqualified to be dog catcher, let alone president.
On January 27, 2017, FBI Director James Comey attended a dinner where President Trump reportedly pondered asking the FBI to investigate the origins of the dossier.
But Comey pushed back.
He said, During the dinner, the president returned to the salacious material I had briefed him about on January 6, and, as he had done previously, expressed his disgust for the allegations and strongly denied them.
He said he was considering ordering me to investigate the alleged incident to prove it didn't happen.
I replied that he should give that careful thought because it might create a narrative that we were investigating him personally, which we weren't, and because it was very difficult to prove a negative.
Yes, very difficult to prove a negative.
On February 13, 2017, General Michael Flynn resigned as President Donald Trump's National Security Advisor due to allegedly misleading Vice President Mike Pence related to communications with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Flynn's conversations as a private citizen with Kislyak were surveilled and he was eventually unmasked, leading to the increased focus on the conversation.
But don't worry folks, it's all about fighting terrorism.
President Donald Trump on March 4th, 2017.
Terrible! Just found out that Obama had my wires tapped in Trump Tower just before the victory.
Nothing found. This is McCarthyism.
Is it legal for a sitting president to be wiretapping a race for president prior to an election?
Turned bound by court earlier, a new low.
I bet a good lawyer could make a great case out of the fact that President Obama was tapping my phones in October just prior to election.
And, of course, the mainstream media said, he's crazy, he's paranoid.
No pedophiles in Hollywood.
Clinton supporter and former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morrell on March 15, 2017 said, unless you know the sources and unless you know how a particular source acquired a particular piece of information, you can't judge the information.
You just can't.
I mean, it's funny. This is a terrible story from back in the day.
It just sort of popped into my head regarding this, hopefully to give some context.
So back in the Vietnam War, there was a...
Program put forward by the U.S. military that basically said if you inform us who's a traitor in your community, who's actually working for the communists and so on, we'll kill them.
And of course what they got handed was a bunch of names of people who hated each other, who just wanted to use, to settle old scores and business disputes and infidelity problems and I just hate that guy kind of thing.
They got the U.S. to act as their professional hitman, nothing to do with communism.
And this of course is the problem.
You need to verify this kind of information because otherwise anyone can hand anything.
To someone, and then that starts a whole set of wheels in motion that can destroy people's lives.
It's just a great way to outsource your attacks on people, so you have to very skeptically judge the information before putting anything in motion.
Michael Morrell went on to say, I had two questions when I first read it.
This is the Golden Showers dossier.
One was, how did Chris, that's Chris Steele, talk to these sources?
I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries to And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this information?
What was their motivation?
And I subsequently learned that he paid them.
So, I mean, there's a reason why hearsay is not admissible.
It's because if I say someone said something, so Bob said something, well, Bob needs to be cross-examined.
Bob needs to be under oath.
You can't, right? So... It's not even the people that Steele dealt with who gave him the information.
They were passing along information from other people.
He didn't meet!
And he paid them for information.
You know, you can pay people to clean toilets.
You can pay people to pick up crappy garbage.
You can pay waiters to clean vomit off a rug.
You can pay people to do some pretty unpleasant things.
Right, Weinstein? And...
Can you pay them, if you give them lots of money, can you pay them to say, Trump did bad things?
if they're anonymous, if they're intermediaries, if they just get free money for making up stories.
Morel went on to say, that the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the money from Chris.
And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you're paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, They are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor.
And they're going to call you up and say, hey, let's have another meeting.
I have more information for you because they want to get paid some more.
And this is what it is all based on.
Money flowing third-hand to anonymous sources.
How do you verify any of that?
You can't. That's kind of the point.
On March 22, 2017, Politico published an article entitled, Nunes Claims Some Trump Transition Messages Were Intercepted, reporting House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump's transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November's presidential election.
Oops! Just happened to scoop up.
Donald Trump. And of course they were hoping to find things.
This tells you how fundamentally clean the guy is.
Because if they'd found something dirty, of course it would have been broadcasted.
Of course it would have leaked and spilled and been amplified by the mainstream media.
So in trying to find him dirty to anybody with half a brain, they actually proved him clean, in my opinion.
Politico said, Nunes, himself a Trump transition member, said a source had shown him evidence that members of the Trump transition team had been unmasked and that their identities had been revealed in U.S. intelligence reports.
So the unmasking is the intelligence stuff like the surveillance is supposed to be anonymous and you're only supposed to find out people's identities if there's something really important that needs to be acted on.
Representative Devin Noon said, I've seen intelligence reports that clearly show that the president-elect and his team were, I guess, at least monitored.
It looks to me like it was all legally collected, but it was essentially a lot of information on the president-elect and his transition team and what they were doing.
Mike Cernovich, April 2nd, 2017, said, Susan Rice, who served as the national security advisor under President Obama, has been identified as the official who requested unmasking of incoming Trump officials.
Cernovich Media can exclusively report.
On May 3rd, James Comey testified in front of the Senate, judiciary hearing, and refused to answer any questions related to former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele.
Given President Trump's inclination to ask the FBI to investigate the origin of the dossier claims, Comey's immediate pushback, and the FBI's questionable relationship to the author of unsubstantiated rumor, this testimony takes on a new context.
So let's dig in.
Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley asked, On March 6th, I wrote to you asking about the FBI's relationship with the author of the Trump-Russia dossier, Christopher Steele.
Most of these questions have not been answered, so I'm going to ask them now.
Prior to the Bureau launching the investigation of alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, did anyone from the FBI have interactions with Mr.
Steele regarding the issue?
So that's important. Because if they're going to start an actual investigation based upon The Russia dossier, the Golden Showers dossier, then they need to evaluate whether the dossier has validity.
So if they had talked to Mr.
Steele and had found out that he was paying informants who were paying other informants, that it was all third-hand and corrupted by money payments, that means that I would imagine, I would guess, in a rational universe there's no investigation to start because the information is bogus.
I mean, can't be verified.
And is compromised by money-changing hands.
James Comey replied, That's not a question that I can answer in this forum.
As you know, I briefed you privately on this, and if there's more that's necessary, then I'd be happy to do it privately.
See, for James Comer, privacy is very, very important, which is why nobody should ever be unmasked, and you don't go on bad information to start surveilling people.
Senator Chuck Grassley said, Have you ever represented to a judge that the FBI had interaction with Mr.
Steele, whether by name or not, regarding alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia prior to the Bureau launching its investigation of the matter?
So not, will you tell me, but have you ever represented to a judge?
James Comey. I have to give you the same answer, Mr.
Chairman. Senator Chuck Grassley then asked, this one I'm going to expect an answer on.
Do FBI policies, just the policies allowed to pay an outside investigator for work, another source is also paying him for as well?
Want me to repeat it?
Do FBI policies allow it to pay an outside investigator for work that another source is also paying that investigator for?
Right, he would ask that, I would assume, to establish if there was conflict of interest.
Because if Steele is paying for information and then the FBI is also paying for information...
James Comey...
I don't know for sure as I sit here, possibly is my answer, but I'll get you a precise answer.
See, that's...
head of the FBI. Doesn't know.
Just doesn't know. Chuck Rossley then asked...
Did the FBI provide any payments whatsoever to Mr.
Steele related to the investigation of Trump associates?
James Comey I'm back to my first.
I can't answer this forum.
Chuck Rousley Was the FBI aware?
Was the FBI aware that Mr.
Steele reportedly paid his sources who in turn paid their subsources to make the claim in the dossier?
James Comey Same answer, sir.
Senator Chuck Grassley, here's one you ought to be able to answer.
Is it vital to know whether or not sources have been paid in order to evaluate their credibility?
And if they have been paid, doesn't that information need to be disclosed if you're relying on that information in seeking approval for investigative authority?
I understand the question.
If you're going to go and say, we want to investigate this person based on this information, isn't it important to When you seek permission to inform whoever's giving that permission that the information has been paid for or that it's third-hand.
James Comey, I think in general, yes, I think it's vital to know.
See, now that's not answering the question.
He said it isn't important to disclose if you're relying on paid information.
Vital to know. To know is different from to disclose.
Senator Chuck Grassley then asked, The FBI and the Justice Department have provided me material inconsistent answers in closed setting about its reported relationship with Mr.
Steele. Will you commit to fully answering the question from my March 6th and April 28th letter and providing all requested documents so that we can resolve those inconsistencies even if in a closed session being necessary?
James Comey Because as I sit here, I don't know all the questions that are in the letters, I don't want to answer that specifically.
But I commit to you to giving you all the information you need to address just that challenge, because I don't believe there's any inconsistency.
I think there's a misunderstanding, but in a classified setting, I'll give you what you need.
I'll give you three guesses as to whether or not James Comey has provided what Chuck Grassley has asked for.
Human Rights Foundation founder Thor Halverson to the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 26, 2017.
In 2012, I began researching a Venezuelan corruption scandal that also involved U.S. banks, companies, and even U.S. courts.
This story should have received extensive exposure on the front pages of America's national newspapers, Fusion GPS, however, was hired to spike these stories.
Even though it was clearly acting as a public relations council on behalf of a foreign principal, Fusion GPS never registered under Farah and was able to engage in nefarious activities without public scrutiny.
You have to register if you're acting as a council on behalf of a foreign principal.
Thor went on to say, I urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to probe into Fusion GPS's Venezuelan activities and especially into their willingness to pay journalists in exchange for the publication of baseless smears.
Venezuelan journalist and whistleblower Alec Boyd claims that Fusion GPS has a history of smear tactics including labeling the journalist a pedophile, extortionist and drug trafficker after he criticized a Fusion client.
According to Fox News, Boyd says he was targeted after his 2012 reporting on Durwick Associates, a power company with close ties to the Venezuelan government.
The company allegedly skimmed nearly a billion dollars from rigged contracts with the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.
Venezuelan journalist Alec Boyd said, I believe that Fusion GPS's business is to do basically whatever the paymasters tell them to do.
They are particularly good at spreading misinformation, disinformation and smears.
It is my understanding that Fusion GPS were hired basically to smear Derwick opponents and to dispel any possible doubts that regular media may have had at the time.
They published this information through a number of social media and websites anonymously.
They created fake Twitter accounts with my name impersonating myself.
They started publishing photos of me walking around London with my daughters.
They produced a huge amount of information, fake information, about me, accusing me from being a pedophile to being an extortionist to a drug trafficker to a car thief.
The message I believe at the time, we know where you are and we know where your children are, so take that as a threatening message.
People that were believed to be collaborating and sending me information from Venezuela were assaulted in Venezuela by the intelligence police of Mr.
to Chavez.
Similar allegations appeared in the congressional testimony of American businessman Bill Browder, who believed that Fusion GPS used smear tactics to discredit him and his late attorney, Sergei Magnitsky.
According to the Daily Caller, Magnitsky died in a Russian jail in 2009, Browder.
Browder says he was tortured and killed because his investigation uncovered a $230 million money laundering scheme involving Kremlin-connected Russian businessmen.
The Russian side, possibly relying on information compiled by Fusion GPS, has attempted to undermine the Magnitsky Act by claiming that Browder is attempting to cover up his own money laundering scheme.
In July 2016, Browder filed a complaint with the Justice Department claiming that Fusion GPS worked on behalf of a foreign government, and the complaint caught the attention of Senator Chuck Grassley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Fusion GPS claims that President Trump's political allies, quote, So, remember, if you are acting as counsel to a foreign principal, you're supposed to register. Senator Chuck Grassley spokesperson Taylor Foy, July 26, 2017, said, Senator Grassley has been raising concerns about inadequate enforcement of FARA for years.
Fusion GPS allegedly failed to register under the law for work it was doing to advance Russian interests by repealing sanctions against human rights violators.
And it was doing this work at roughly the same time it was producing the unverified Trump dossier, which relies heavily on Russian sources.
So of course it would be relevant both to the committee's review of FARA enforcement and the dossier.
On August 22, 2017, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson met with the Senate Judiciary Committee for nearly 10 hours, but would not disclose the identity of his clients, now known to include the Washington Free Beacon, the Clinton Campaign, and the DNC. In September 2017, Senator Chuck Grassley requested the U.S. Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Division supply the Senate Judiciary Committee with any suspicious activity reports related to Fusion GPS's financial transactions.
On September 18, 2017, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and reported that he was unaware of who paid for the infamous dossier.
Acting as John Podesta's attorney for the meeting with the Senate Intelligence Committee was lawyer Mark Elias, who acted as the go-between for the Clinton campaign slash DNC and Fusion GPS. Clinton doesn't know.
Hillary Clinton doesn't know. Her campaign chairman has no idea that millions of dollars were...
Foggy, foggy, foggy.
Former CIA director Leon Panetta said, Well, it certainly makes the situation very awkward if you're testifying and saying you have no knowledge, and the attorney sitting next to you is one of those that knew what was involved here.
I think it does raise an issue that the committee is going to have to look at and determine just exactly who knew what.
Dear God alive, how powerful are these people?
When the former CIA director says, That's awkward.
I'm sorry I shouldn't laugh, but if you're making the CIA awkward, you got some juice, that's all I'm saying.
Former DNC Chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was also interviewed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and unsurprisingly also denied knowledge of who funded the dossier.
On September 19, 2017, CNN published an article entitled Exclusive, U.S. Government Wiretap Former Trump Campaign Chairman, reporting...
U.S. investigators wiretapped former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort under secret court orders before and after the election, sources tell CNN. An extraordinary step involving a high-ranking campaign official now at the center of the Russia meddling probe.
The government's snooping continued into early this year, including a period when Manafort was known to talk to President Donald Trump.
See? You pay for a dossier.
That dossier mysteriously ends up floating around the FBI. The FBI then requests surveillance.
Surveillance then gets unmarked.
Oh, look! People can peer directly into the heart of an opposing campaign and the plans of the president-elect.
But it's all a coincidence and nobody knows who paid for it.
In October 2017, House Intelligence Committee issued four subpoenas related to Fusion GPS, three to the company co-founders and another to the corporation's bank, with the goal of uncovering who funded the company and the Golden Showers dossier.
Fusion GPS attorney Joshua Levy, on October 16, 2017, Of acute importance, these subpoenas, if indeed directed to our clients, violate the I don't know.
If it's confidential, how did it get out?
Fusion GPS partners Peter Fritsch and Thomas Ketan later plead the fifth during interviews with the House Intelligence Committee and the company filed an injunction in an attempt to prevent the release of its banking records.
President Donald Trump on October 19, 2017.
Workers, a firm involved with the discredited and fake dossier, take the fifth.
Who paid for it? Russia, the FBI, or the Dems?
Or all? After non-stop efforts by Fusion GPS to prevent client identities from becoming public, Perkins Coe suddenly revealed itself as a client on October 24, 2017.
I guess they were released from an NDA of some kind.
The Washington Post published a story entitled, Clinton Campaign, DNC, pay for research that led to Russia dossier, which sparked additional doubt into the entire Russian collusion investigation.
And now they've just, what, indicted Manafort, who has to surrender to himself, but for, was it tax stuff or whatever, has nothing to do with these time on the Trump campaign.
So after all this investigation, they still can't tie Manafort and Trump to Russia.
New York Times journalist Kenneth Vogel said, When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer Mark Elias pushed back vigorously, saying, You or your sources are wrong!
New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman said, Folks involved in funding this lied about it and with sanctimony for a year.
Guys, guys, guys.
Your job is to find out if people are lying.
Well, they told me it wasn't true.
Yeah, because that always stops journalists.
The whole point of being in the newspaper is you don't want to be there.
The DNC statement is this.
Chairman Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization.
But let's be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened.
That seems pretty specific to me.
This guy and the new leadership were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS. That's not saying no one at the DNC was involved.
Or it's not saying here's who did approve millions of dollars of spending.
Very specific.
Hey, did you rob that bank? My brother's girlfriend did not rob that bank.
Former Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon and CNN correspondent, quote, The first I learned of Christopher Steele or saw any dossier was after the election.
But if I had gotten handed it last fall, I would have had no problem passing it along and urging reporters to look into it.
Opposition research happens on every campaign.
And here, you're probably the most shadowy guy ever running for president.
Guy. Yeah, I guess you'd have to be pretty gender-specific in that campaign.
Sorry. The most shadowy guy ever running for president, and the FBI certainly has seen fit to look into it.
I probably would have volunteered to go to Europe myself to try and verify it, if it would have helped get more of this out there before the election.
Even when we find out the whodunit of who approved it in April 2016, it still won't amount to much, because there's nothing illegal afoot here.
On October 25th, 2017.
The Campaign Legal Center filed a nine-page complaint with the Federal Election Commission, criticizing the Clinton campaign and the DNC for categorizing payments for opposition research as legal services in appropriate paperwork.
Quote, By failing to file accurate reports, the DNC and Hillary for America undermined the vital public information role that reporting is intended to serve.
Campaign Legal Center Senior Director Adav Noti said, By filing misleading reports, the DNC and Clinton campaign undermines the vital public information role of campaign disclosures.
Voters need campaign disclosure laws to be enforced so they can hold candidates accountable for how they raise and spend money.
The FEC must investigate this apparent violation and take appropriate action.
Ain't gonna hold my breath.
Representative Devin Nunes on October 25th, 2017.
What else is Fusion GPS hiding?
I imagine quite a bit.
So my guess is there's a lot more here once we get to the bottom of it.
We've been asking DOJ and FBI whether or not they used this dossier for months.
Actually, I believe since March 6th.
So this is going to bring back...
This should send chills down everybody's spine if in fact this dossier, which is paid opposition research, was picked up by the FBI and used for any type of investigation.
Paid opposition research being used as the basis for an investigation of surveillance of political opponents, of unmasking people.
In my mind, it's not even the semblance of law.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez on October 26, 2017.
I'm glad that this research was being conducted.
You hire a lawyer, and we hire lawyers all the time who hire third-party vendors to do their work.
And so we knew that we were paying for opposition research at the DNC, but we didn't ask questions about who they're hiring in the context of doing their research.
Wait, seems like nobody knew that you were paying for opposition research with this group.
Washington Free Beacon Statement on October 27, 2017.
Since its launch in February of 2012, the Washington Free Beacon has retained third-party firms to conduct research on many individuals and institutions of interest to us and our readers.
In that capacity, during the 2016 election cycle, we retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple candidates in the Republican presidential primary, just as we retained other firms to assist in our research into Hillary Clinton.
All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the free beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the free beacon received appears in the Steele dossier.
The free beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele.
Washington Free Beacon statement, October 27, 2017, continues.
Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign.
Representatives of the Free Beacon approached the House Intelligence Committee today and offered to answer what questions we can in their ongoing probe of Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier.
But to be clear, we stand by our reporting and we do not apologize for our methods.
We consider it our duty to report verifiable information, not falsehoods or slander, and we believe that commitment has been well demonstrated by the quality of the journalism that we produce.
The First Amendment guarantees our right to engage in newsgathering as we see fit, and we intend to continue doing just that as we have since the day we launched this project.
The Washington Free Beacon has also come under criticism for non-disclosure of their relationship with Fusion GPS while covering the company related to the infamous dossier.
So, this is what they say.
We can assume it's true for the moment.
And it means that all of the steel, golden shower stuff occurred after the work product was taken out by the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
While reporting on the Fusion GPS scandal and the fallout of the dossier, CNN justice correspondent Evan Perez provided favorable coverage about the credibility of the firm, but failed to disclose his close relationship with members of the company.
Perez worked with the three Fusion GPS co-founders at The Wall Street Journal and even co-authored multiple stories with co-founder Glenn Simpson.
Seems relevant to me.
What do you think? These guys are totally credible, I say objectively.
Turns out they're former colleagues, maybe friends.
On October 28, 2017, Fusion GPS reached an agreement to provide its bank records to U.S. House investigators, but the documents and their contents are to remain sealed and confidential.
Again, privacy, very, very important.
Thank you.
Trump said just now, Never seen such Republican anger and unity as I have concerning the lack of investigation on Clinton-made fake dossier.
Now $12 million?
The uranium-to-Russia deal, the 33,000-plus deleted emails, the Comey fix, and so much more.
Instead, they look at phony Trump-Russia collusion, which doesn't exist.
The Dems are using this terrible and bad-for-our-country witch-hunt for evil politics, but the Republicans are now fighting back like never before.
There is so much guilt by Democrats slash Clinton, and now the facts are pouring out.
Do something!
The frustration and anger, of course, is palpable and it's understandable.
So, these revelations, to me it's interesting if you look at Harry Reid's October surprise, all right, so 10 days before the election day, he wanted to lever the dossier's allegations into mainstream media publication,
and With a public letter to James Comey, when James Comey was then the director of the FBI. And Harry Reid accused Comey of withholding explosive information.
That's interesting. Now, the mainstream media can't really publish on really scurrilous, unsupported, shadowy, paid-for, third-hand allegations.
But if Harry Reid, who is a government official, who was a government official, makes public reference to such material, then you can report on it.
Of course, though, Harry Reid did not mention his own party's role in creating or concocting or getting these allegations.
And so it was a way of getting this information into the mainstream media without revealing the Clinton campaign slash DNC's role in paying for it.
And this is very powerful stuff.
Now, since this information came from Russia and is unverified or has been falsified, And of course, since the DNC and the Hillary campaign paid for this information, through many layers, of course, paid for this information, who really was colluding with Russia to alter the outcome of a US election?
There's nothing more powerful than being accused falsely of a crime by the guilty party, because they get to project all of their fear and anger and hatred into you.
It's very powerful. The reason why the Russian narrative was the one chosen.
Now, here's the irony.
So, not in public, but in these closed hearings.
There are reports that James Comey said that his intervention in the Hillary Clinton email case was first prompted by this fake or planted Russian intelligence.
So, this fake Russian intelligence...
Purported to discuss an email between Debbie Washerman-Schultz and George Soros-employed activist Leonard Bernardo.
And this was a non-existent email.
So when Comey found out about this, he had this second intervention that reopened the case, if you remember where you were.
I remember when I was when this happened.
Eleven days before Election Day.
Mr. Comey, then director of the FBI, reopened the investigation based upon fake Russian intelligence.
And it's possible that him reopening this investigation 11 days before the election might have moved enough votes to Donald Trump in order to account for his win or support his win or certainly helped his win.
So that's interesting.
You set up this Channel for fake Russian intelligence in order to win the election and potentially, of course, those channels ended up costing you the election.
So there's a lot that's going on at the moment.
There's a lot that's in play. There's the Uranium One scandal where the Clinton Foundation received $145 million from interested parties intent on gaining control of 20% of America's uranium.
And the Iranian one casts a shadow over the Clinton family, of course, over Obama, over the Justice Department, over the FBI, over Russia.
Big wide net. There, of course, is the Hollywood pedophile scandal that's going on, which has relations to cultural norms, the deep state, and a lot of money that flows towards the Democrats.
From Hollywood. The JFK records, of course, were just released, which has some implications on the Bushes.
There is, of course, this Awan Brothers, Debbie Washerman Schultz scandal in Congress, where we have dozens of congressional office computers and communication systems utterly compromised.
Terabytes of data moved off-site for more than a decade.
And this is the reason why, right?
The net is closing.
The net is closing. The plug is pulled from the bottom of the swamp.
And this is why you've got these past presidents coming out and saying, oh, Trump is unstable.
Oh, Trump is a bad guy.
You understand? There's billions of dollars in play at the moment with a variety of these scandals.
So this is where things are.
There is a confrontation between the remnants of the republic and the giant death star of the deep state.
You know, when you drain a swamp, if you've ever been around a swamp when it's being drained, There is fetid and foul stuff in the air and unholy beasts emerge from the depths.
Before the wind blows the stink away, there is horrible stuff.
Smells and stenches and beasts that emerge.
And horrible things are uncovered. Bodies sometimes.
Now is the time for you to act, for you to spread this video, spread information, talk to people about this, engage people in this attempt to break the hypnotic spell the left has over.
These supporters of the Democrats to help people to understand how essential and how important and what a civilization saving or damning moment this is in the history of the West, in the history of the world.
