Fusion GPS: What We Told Congress

News  |  Jan 3, 2018

UPDATE: Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, responded to Fusion GPS on Wednesday, saying founders Simpson and Fritsch should testify publicly if they want transparency, and that Simpson himself asked the committee to keep previous transcripts private. 

Simpson and Fritsch, via their lawyer, say Grassley is welcome to release the testimony they already have provided under two conditions.

“We have consistently supported release of the transcript, so long as we would have the opportunity to review it for accuracy, and so long as the identities of Fusion’s bank and employees could be protected...Fusion GPS wants it released.”

Fusion's statement also points out that Grassley is not pursuing the president's associates with the same vigor he continues to go after their firm and encourages the chairman to shift his focus back onto the key issues of Russian election interference and possible Trump campaign collusion. 

Grassley pressures Fusion GPS to testify publicly about Trump dossier (The Hill)


In a telling op-ed for The New York Times, Fusion GPS' founders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch set the record straight on much of the disinformation President Trump and his allies are spreading about their firm and the Steele dossier. 

They share many of the same details they did in their 21 hours of congressional testimony before three different committees, which Republican leadership has refused to make public. 

In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

The two men say they do not believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the FBI investigation, a detail the NYT itself recently confirmed.

As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

Simpson and Fritsch also advised Congress to follow the money, something they say lawmakers are not pursuing.

We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses....

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering...

We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

Fusion GPS hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele specifically because of his Russia expertise, the founders say, and Steele's connections yielded valuable information.

[W]e did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?

What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of working with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and haven’t since.

After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary. We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power.

Simpson and Fritsch conclude: 

The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.

Read the full piece: The Republicans’ Fake Investigations (NYT)