Feinstein Posts Entire Testimony Of Fusion GPS Founder On Trump Dossier

Just four days after two GOP Senators asked the DOJ to launch a criminal probe  of Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 British spy who was the author of the Trump dossier, and which according to many served as the basis for the Russian collusion probe, on Tuesday afternoon Senator Dianne Feinstein released the full 312-page transcript of the Judiciary Committee’s closed-door interview with Glenn Simpson, a former journalist and co-founder of Fusion GPS, which commissioned the controversial Donald Trump’s dossier about alleged connections with Russians.

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Glenn Simpson on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 14, 2017

The unexpected release follows Fusion GPS’ demand last week that the full transcript be released, sparking a fight with Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) over who was standing in the way of the document being released. The Senate Judiciary Committee interviewed Simpson in August as part of its investigation into Russia’s election interference.

Needless to say, Grassley was furious, stating that it is “totally confounding that Senator Feinstein would unilaterally release a transcript of a witness interview in the middle of an ongoing investigation” and that “Her action undermines the integrity of the committee’s oversight work and jeopardizes its ability to secure candid voluntary testimony relating to the independent recollections of future witnesses.”

There are some snarkier takes on the Fusion GPS demand to have the transcript released: as Sean Davis of the Federalist notes, “At the demand of Fusion GPS, @SenFeinstein put Fusion GPS’s testimony on her website. In the interest of transparency. While redacting the names of Fusion’s partners. Amazing.”

As Davis also adds, “It’s almost like Fusion GPS was more interested in aligning future DOJ witness testimony with its own claims than it was with actual transparency.”

As for Simpson, he has emerged as the central figure in the probes into Russian election interference after his firm helped assemble a controversial dossier tying President Trump to Russia. Former British spy Christopher Steele compiled the document, which includes unverified allegations against Trump and his links to Moscow.

As Bloomberg adds, Republicans and Democrats tangled in recent weeks over the origins of the dossier, which was funded in part by Trump’s political opponents, and how the FBI and other agencies may have used the dossier in their investigations.

“The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice,” Feinstein said in a statement. “The only way to set the record straight is to make the transcript public.”

The full transcript details Glenn Simpson’s August 22 interview. It shows that Simpson told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the author of the dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele, decided to approach the FBI in July 2016 to brief the bureau on his findings about Trump.

“He thought from his perspective there was an issue — a security issue about whether a presidential candidate was being blackmailed,” Simpson said. He added that when Steele met with an FBI official in September, the official told Steele the bureau “had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source.”

As reported previously, Fusion was initially hired by conservative website, Washington Free Beacon, during the Republican primaries to dig up dirt on Trump. Later in the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee paid Fusion GPS through a law firm for some of the research that resulted in the dossier.

The 35-page report drew on information from Russian contacts and concluded that Russia had been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” Trump for at least five years and fed his campaign “valuable intelligence” about Clinton.

Trump has derided the findings, as recently as Dec. 26 when he wrote on Twitter: “‘Dossier is bogus. Clinton Campaign, DNC funded Dossier. FBI CANNOT (after all of this time) VERIFY CLAIMS IN DOSSIER OF RUSSIA/TRUMP COLLUSION. FBI TAINTED.’ And they used this Crooked Hillary pile of garbage as the basis for going after the Trump Campaign!”

Finally, and speaking of transparency, see if you can spot it in the examples below:

Full transcript below (link)

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