The investigation into the salacious Trump-Russia dossier that claimed then-Republican nominee Donald Trump colluded with the Russians during the 2016 presidential election appears to have come across something interesting.
According to The Washington Times, congressional investigators are looking into the possibility that reporters were paid to spread the anti-Trump dossier throughout the media despite many of the claims being unverified.
California Republican Rep. Devin Nunes, who serves as the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, recently signed a subpoena to force a bank to turn over financial records for Fusion GPS, the firm that compiled the now largely debunked “Trump dossier.”
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Nunes is trying to figure out who — besides the Hillary Clinton campaign — paid Fusion GPS to compile the dossier and whether Fusion GPS, in turn, paid journalists in the media to spread the misinformation. However, The Washington Times reported that Fusion GPS is battling to block the subpoena.
It raises the question: What is Fusion GPS trying to hide?
Fusion GPS hired and paid former British spy Christopher Steele to gather the collection of unverified stories into a single document.
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The dossier, which was partly funded by former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, was full of sensational claims — such as alleging Trump consorted with Russian prostitutes during trips to Moscow.
Clinton’s campaign and the DNC paid nearly $9 million for the discredited dossier.
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website, initially paid Fusion GPS for research on Trump between the fall of 2015 and the spring of 2016, according to Fox News.
After the Free Beacon dropped the firm, Fusion GPS was hired by attorney Marc Elias, who represented the Clinton campaign and DNC.
The dossier was leaked to BuzzFeed and published on its website on Jan. 10, 2017. The published dossier from BuzzFeed News contains a total of 17 memos and 35 pages of documents dated from June 20, 2016, to Dec. 13, 2016.
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Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian technology entrepreneur, is suing BuzzFeed in a libel case, alleging the website falsely published the claim that his firm flooded Democrats’ computers with “porn, viruses and spyware,” according to The Washington Times.
In papers filed in a London court in connection with that libel case, Steele said he spoke with journalists in September of 2016, in Washington, at the request of Fusion. He admitted he briefed journalists about the contents of the “Trump dossier” at that time.
Anti-Trump Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain also has an unusual link to the dossier.
Lawyers representing Gubarev — the tech giant suing BuzzFeed — claim that a long-time McCain aide isn’t complying with subpoenas for additional information.
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Gubarev filed a brief last week in federal court claiming that the aide, David Kramer, “has been seemingly avoiding service” of a deposition subpoena for several weeks.
According to The Daily Caller, the only people or entities known to have possessed the dossier aside from BuzzFeed are Fusion GPS, Steele, McCain and Kramer.
The congressional investigation is trying to identify who leaked the dossier to BuzzFeed; whether journalists were paid to spread the discredited document to fuel Russia collusion conspiracy theories; and all the parties who paid Fusion GPS to compile the dossier.
The whole “Trump dossier” story, entangling the Washington establishment, the Clinton campaign, and potentially the paid involvement of American journalists is an illustration of how murky the Washington swamp really is.
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And this is what President Trump is really trying to drain.
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