The House Intel Committee released something of particular interest today. This is the transcript of the Fusion GPS (authors of the Russia Dossier) co-founder Glenn Simpson's testimony/interview with Trey Gowdy regarding the Russia Dossier.
Here are a couple of HUGE excerpts I was able to find while reading through it. (click for full size
This first excerpt is important because it establishes the precedent for the rest of the interview
that Simpson knew definitively that the Perkins Coie law firm was in the employ of the DNC and by extension, the Clinton Campaign.
The second excerpt ties into the first, establishing that Simpson
had billed the invoice for the writing of the Russia Dossier to Perkins Coie.The implication here is that money flowed as such:
Hillary/DNC ->
Perkins Coie ->
Christopher Steele (author of dossier)This absolutely raises enough suspicion that a subpoena for further bank records and testimony by all parties involved should be issued. The reasonable extrapolation that the DNC was using campaign funds to pay for opposition research based on information from questionable sources and of entirely unverifiable authenticity.
Here's where it gets good:
Steele was paid to write the dossier on the supposed Russian connection, but he NEVER actually visited Russia during the investigative process. The excuse provided by Simpson is that Steele feared he would be arrested as a foreign spy if he did so.
Simpson claims that they assessed the credibility of Steele's sources thoroughly, and that his sources were hired to travel and talk to people. One can reasonably extrapolate then that these sources either were already within Russia or were hired to travel to Russia.
Simpson "hasn't found anything [stated in the dossier] to be wrong," but "... to this day, [Simpson] cannot tell," or as he amends, "doesn't have a strong opinion" on whether certain parts of the Dossier are true or false.
In other words, he says he has not found any verifiably false information in the Dossier, but he doesn't have an overwhelming faith in the accuracy of what he refers to as the more "controversial" parts.
The big TL;DR
- The DNC paid for opposition research from Russian sources using campaign funds
- Simpson and Fusion GPS knew that the firm that they invoiced for the payment of Steele for the Dossier was contracted with the DNC
- Steele never actually visited Russia during the research process for the Dossier
- While Simpson claims he has never found anything in the Dossier to be false, he cannot say that he has an inclination to believe the more "controversial" parts of the dossier (read: the parts the media has been freaking out about since the election) to be true more than false.
I'm excited to see where this will lead. I'm sure subpoenas will be issued because this could be huge.
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