Many of us have become numb to the nonsensical right wing “Deep State” conspiracy theories being used by Trump and his most rabid supporters to discredit and prematurely end the Mueller investigation: Robert Mueller is a criminal; it was actually Hillary Clinton who colluded with Russia; James Comey was a “Clinton fixer.” So when legitimately questionable information surfaces, many on the left shrug and write it off as more of the same. There are two issues, however, which, if we are being intellectually honest, we need to acknowledge, discuss and come to terms with.
In late 2015, the conservative publication Washington Free Beacon, whose owner was believed to be a supporter of Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, hired research firm Fusion GPS to look into the background of then Presidential candidate Donald Trump. After Trump won the primary in mid 2016, the Beacon understandably stopped paying Fusion to research Trump. However, Perkins Coie, a law firm representing the Clinton Campaign, soon began paying Fusion GPS to continue the research.
By that point, according to Fusion founder Glenn Simpson’s testimonies to the House and Senate, Fusion had compiled enough information to see that the most curious aspects of Trump’s background were related to his potential organized crime connections and his activities in Russia.
To help perform further research into these matters, in mid 2016, Fusion contracted former-British-spy-turned-consultant Christopher Steele, with whom Simpson had worked on previous research projects, who was a top expert on Russia with a reputation for producing accurate information, and who had a number of longtime trusted sources within Russia for gathering his information. Over the next several months, Steele talked with his sources and produced 17 memos for Fusion GPS about Trump-Russia that came to be known as “the Steele dossier.”
According to Simpson, Steele quickly became so alarmed by what he was uncovering – an active plot by Russia to put a Kremlin-compromised President in the Oval Office – that he told Simpson that he considered it his professional duty to contact U.S. law enforcement immediately. Simpson told Steele that he did not know anyone that he could contact. Steele said that he had connected in the past with law enforcement in the U.S. on other cases and would take care of the notification. Steele followed through on this in early July of 2016.
The part of the narrative that becomes questionable is that one person to whom Steele reached out – either in July or later on – appears to have been a longtime acquaintance, Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr. Allegedly without Steele’s awareness, Bruce Ohr’s wife Nellie coincidentally happened to be one of a tiny group of people (countable on one’s fingers) who was also being employed by Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump. And Bruce Ohr was allegedly unaware that his wife was doing this work. And Glenn Simpson was apparently unaware of who Nellie Ohr’s husband was. The coincidences and lack of awareness of others’ activities within this small group of people seems remarkable.
Another issue that is grossly under-reported in the mainstream media is the connection between Fusion GPS and the Trump Tower meeting.
Around 2013, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya retained U.S. law firm Baker Hostetler to assist her with a money laundering case that the U.S. government had brought against her client, Prevezon Holdings, a company based on the island of Cyprus. (Cyprus is notorious as a place where wealthy Russians launder illegally-obtained money). In Spring of 2014, Baker hired Fusion GPS to do research for the Prevezon case. Fusion’s Prevezon research led to questions about financial dealings of a hedge fund manager named William Browder.
William Browder has a long adversarial history with Vladimir Putin. In the mid 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, an atmosphere of lawlessness pervaded Russia. Wealthy oligarchs took advantage of the situation to dramatically increase their wealth by grabbing up former state-owned assets, and ethically unrestrained entrepreneurs found ways to get rich quickly as well. Browder allegedly made his own fortune by creating a hedge fund, Hermitage Capital, that assured investors that the Russian companies it invested in were uniquely law abiding and therefore less likely to be prone to unpredictable plunges in value.
To offer this assurance, Browder would investigate the companies. If he found wrongdoing, he reported it to the Russian government. This was looked upon favorably by a rising Vladimir Putin, who saw Browder’s investigations as a way to ensure that Russian businesses and oligarchs were not cheating the Russian government out of the tax money that it deserved.
As Putin’s power grew, Putin’s view of Browder’s activities changed sharply. According to Browder, Putin had begun directly taking a percentage of all illicit money “earned” by the Russian mafia and oligarchs, and Browder’s exposure of corruption was getting in the way.
In 2005, Browder was arrested and deported from Russia as a “threat to national security.” Eighteen months later, the Russian Interior Ministry raided the Moscow office of Browder’s company, Hermitage Capital Management, and seized “all the corporate documents connected to the investment holding companies of the funds that [Browder] advised.”
Browder hired attorney Sergei Magnitsky to investigate. Magnitsky determined that the documents were being used to re-register Browder’s holding companies to a convicted murderer named Viktor Markelov, and $230 million in taxes allegedly paid to the Russian government by Browder’s companies had been diverted elsewhere.
When Magnitsky notified the Russian authorities of this crime, he was jailed, where he remained for over a year under increasingly terrible conditions. He was regularly pressured, unsuccessfully, by the Russian government to sign a statement that he had stolen the $230 million from Browder. On November 16, 2009, Magnitsky was chained in an isolated prison cell and beaten to death by eight guards.
To avenge the man who had died on his behalf, Browder pushed the U.S. legislature to enact what eventually became known as the Magnitsky Act, which passed the House and Senate and was signed into law by then President Obama in November of 2012. The Act froze the U.S.-based assets of all Russian oligarchs (and Putin) who were believed to have been responsible for Magnitsky’s death. Russian oligarchs tend to invest their illicit wealth in law-governed countries like the U.S. where the wealth is safer than it would be in Russia.
As part of his retaliation against the U.S. for passing the Magnitsky Act, Putin banned the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans. That is what is being referred to when a Trump claims to have been merely talking with a Russian about “adoption.” Putin wants the Magnitsky Act repealed or weakened so that he can regain access to a large chunk of his wealth.
Natalia Veselnitskaya’s client, Prevezon Holdings was accused by the U.S. Department of Justice of laundering millions of dollars in New York real estate, using money from a $230 million Russian tax fraud scheme. If that number sounds familiar, it is because it is the amount that Browder alleges that he had paid in taxes to the Russian government but which had instead been misappropriated by the Kremlin. Browder was the one who had tipped off the U.S. Department of Justice that Prevezon had laundered the money.
The situation appears to be that Browder’s $230 million in taxes was received by the Russian government, who then denied that he had paid them. The Kremlin proceeded to launder the money to legitimize it/make it usable, and one of the parties through whom the money was laundered was Prevezon Holdings. Another interpretation is that Browder had never actually paid the taxes, but had instead used one of his many overseas tax shelters to hide the money.
In the New York case, Prevezon settled out of court for $5.9 million without admitting guilt, leading one to believe that the first interpretation above is closer to the truth.
During Fusion’s research for the Prevezon case, information about Browder’s financial dealings raised questions in the mind of Fusion founder Glenn Simpson, and Browder was notably difficult to obtain testimony from: he ran when attempts were made to serve him with a subpoena to testify. This bizarre response would seem to indicate guilt on the part of the man who had tipped off the DOJ about Prevezon, until one realizes that Browder had very good reason to believe that Putin had put a price on his head: under such circumstances, running in response to two strange men approaching him in a parking lot seems entirely appropriate and reasonable. Assassination attempts had been made on prominent Magnitsky Act advocates as well as on Browder’s own mother.
Russian lawyer Veselnitskaya apparently believed that some of Fusion’s information about Browder and his associates could be useful as a stepping stone to improving her own standing in Russia. The information on Browder could be used in the U.S. to raise questions about the legitimacy of the Magnitsky Act’s founder, and possibly result in the repeal of the Act, which would bring Veselnitskaya into high esteem with the Kremlin.
Seeing this opportunity, Veselnitskaya reported the information to Russia’s Prosecutor General, Yuri Chaika, in October of 2015. On February 18, 2016, Veselnitskaya registered what appears to be a fake NGO, the Human Rights Accountability Global Initiative Foundation (HRAGI), for the purpose of lobbying the U.S. Congress “on behalf of Russian orphans.”
On June 9, 2016, the now infamous “Trump Tower meeting” took place. Veselnitskaya and an interpreter, along with a couple of other Russians, met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton and to discuss “Russian adoptions.” The “dirt” on Hillary Clinton that Veselnitskaya appears to have offered was that the New York billionaire Ziff brothers – who were major Democratic donors – had invested with Browder. If the Ziff brothers had donated to the Clinton Campaign, Veselnitskaya reasoned, their donations would be tainted and possibly illegal because Browder had cheated the Russian government out of $230 million in taxes.
The part of this whole narrative that again seems highly coincidental is the relationship between Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS. Veselnitskaya appears to have had only a handful of direct interactions with Fusion’s Glenn Simpson: most of the communication seems to have been indirectly through Baker Hostetler. But on the morning of June 9, 2016 – right before the Trump Tower meeting – Veselnitskaya and Simpson were in court together for a hearing related to the Prevezon case.
Simpson testified that Veselnitskaya’s English is very limited, as is his Russian, so they did little more than exchange pleasantries.
Simpson also testified that on June 10, 2016 – the day after the Trump Tower meeting – he had attended a Washington DC dinner held by Baker Hostetler attorney Mark Cymrot for people working on the Prevezon case. Again, Veselnitskaya was in attendance, but according to Simpson, she was sitting at the other end of the table from him and his wife.
In his testimonies before the House Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judicial Committee, Glenn Simpson comes across as straightforward, extremely forthcoming, and highly credible. Yet the fact that he – the man who was paid by the Clinton Campaign’s law firm to investigate Donald Trump – also happened to know Natalia Veselnitskaya , and was even physically in the same room with her hours before the Trump Tower meeting (where she presented information gathered by Fusion GPS for the Prevezon case) and was again in the same room with her the evening afterward seems staggeringly coincidental.
We on the left can be blindly partisan and simply accept all that we are being told about Trump-Russia. After all, a wealth of evidence points to the possibility that Trump knowingly or unknowingly helped Russian oligarchs and mafia figures launder money via his real estate empire for decades – a felony – and that Vladimir Putin is holding knowledge of this activity over Trump’s head. A U.S. President being blackmailed in such a manner by a hostile foreign power is a profound danger to the security of our nation.
However, when we come across inconsistencies and bizarre coincidences like the Bruce and Nellie Ohr issue or the Veselnitskaya/Fusion GPS issue, we also owe it to ourselves, if we have any genuine loyalty to the truth, to stop and take a serious look. What could explain these connections? Are we really just seeing shocking coincidences, or something more?
The most reasonable explanations that I can find are as follows:
Bruce and Nellie Ohr:
Nellie Ohr was hired by Fusion to comb through Russian newspapers and other public record Russian documents for information about Trump because she was fluent in Russian.
Nellie Ohr did not know of Christopher Steele’s involvement with Fusion, nor did Steele know of hers, because it was Simpson’s practice not to let his employees know who Fusion’s contractors were (and vice versa) unless absolutely necessary. This was done to avoid tainting information gathered from different sources. If two sources found differing information on a particular point, that could be helpful to narrow in on that point as a place where more questions needed to be asked to get an accurate picture.
Nellie Ohr did not tell her husband Bruce what she was working on for Fusion because she was under a confidentiality agreement, and as a professional, she took that agreement seriously.
The information that Steele was uncovering was not shared with any Fusion employees other than Simpson. Nellie Ohr was unaware of the content (or possibly even the existence) of Steele’s memos. Therefore there was no reason for Nellie Ohr to feel the need to tell her husband about her work: the information that she was uncovering was far less dramatic.
Nellie Ohr never told Glenn Simpson that her husband was a Department of Justice official because it was not relevant to her job at Fusion, and because DOJ and other high level law enforcement officials generally do not like their identities to be widely known, for security reasons.
Still inexplicable:
The coincidence that Nellie Ohr’s husband happened to be Steele’s contact in the U.S. Department of Justice.
The coincidence that Bruce Ohr didn’t put two and two together to then ask his wife more about the research work that she was doing at Fusion.
Veselnitskaya/Fusion GPS:
Veselnitskaya probably had no idea that she would discover something about Putin’s public enemy #1, Wililiam Browder, when she was first hired by Prevezon Holdings: Prevezon was simply another legal case to her.
She engaged Baker Hostetler to help with the case because of her poor English, likely unfamiliarity with the intricacies of U.S. law, and the need for her client to have quality representation in a U.S. court.
Baker Hostetler hired Fusion to do investigative research for the Prevezon case, because money laundering cases are complicated and require a level of quality research that needed to be outsourced.
When Browder’s name turned up in Fusion’s research, Veselnitskaya recognized the name (Browder is famously vilified in Russia – there are even movies about him) and saw an opportunity for herself. From then on, for her the Prevezon case became partially a case for her client, but also a means to collect information that she could use to curry favor with the Kremlin.
Simpson was unaware of how Veselnitskaya was using his research.
Simpson was handling the case for Baker Hostetler in the same way that he would for any other client: doing research, analyzing it and passing it to his client, Baker Hostetler.
Veselnitskaya’s visa to enter the U.S. had been previously revoked, but she was able to get into the U.S. because she was the primary attorney for a case that was being tried in a U.S. court. That is why the Trump Tower meeting had to be scheduled for the same day that she was in court for the Prevezon case.
Simpson was in the same courtroom as her that day because, as a researcher for the Prevezon case, he had the greatest wealth of detailed knowledge to reinforce Prevezon’s position.
Veselnitskaya and Simpson were at the same Washington DC party the next evening because they had both been important parts of the Prevezon case.
While Fusion GPS has a central role in both the Trump Tower meeting and the Steele dossier, and there was even a brief overlap in the timeframes of the Prevezon project and the Trump project, there was no bleed-over between the two projects within Fusion GPS itself: Simpson kept all of Fusion’s projects separate to avoid information from one project contaminating another.
Still inexplicable:
The coincidence that the Trump Tower meeting involved people and information connected to the same tiny research firm that had later been hired by the Clinton Campaign’s law firm to investigate Donald Trump.
While it is sane and reasonable to dismiss the wild conspiracy theories coming out of the extreme right in their efforts to defend an indefensible President, it is also important to look at factual inconsistencies in the narrative that many Americans believe to be true. While the issue of Bruce and Nellie Ohr and the connection of Fusion GPS to Natalia Veselnitskaya can be explained, they require acceptance of an uncomfortable amount of coincidence.
Disclaimer: This is an in-depth look at the Fusion GPS Trump-research-related parts of Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 17, 2017 and before the House Intelligence Committee on November 14, 2017. The information below was presented by Glenn Simpson in his testimony, and is not being represented here as either fact or as the opinion of the webmaster unless specifically stated. All statements and assertions should be read as if prefaced by “Glenn Simpson states that …” Any content that I add will be surrounded by [brackets] and will likely include a link or reference to the source.
Glenn Simpson’s research firm, Fusion GPS, was hired by a Republican client to investigate Donald Trump as part of an opposition research campaign. After Trump won the primary, Fusion continued doing the research for a Democratic client. Simpson declined to disclose whether either client paid him directly for the work or if he was paid through an intermediary. [The Committee and Simpson’s attorneys had apparently agreed in advance that certain topics – names of his clients, communications with his clients, and naming sources of information – would not be pursued in any questions.]
Fusion’s research into Trump began in September or October of 2015 with a general exploration of public records regarding Trump’s businesses, associates, finances, bankruptcies, and “offshore or third world suppliers of products that he was selling.” The research “evolved somewhat quickly into issues of his relationships with organized crime figures,” including connections to Italian organized crime and a relationship with Russian organized crime figure Felix Sater.
Some of Trump’s money seemed to be coming from Kazakhstan and other unusual places, and the money couldn’t be accounted for. Trump also seemed to take a lot of business trips to Russia, but little if anything seemed to come from them, which Simpson found odd.
After the Prevezon case ended, Fusion hired Edward Baumgartner – who had worked on the Prevezon case and spoke Russian – as a subcontractor to do work such as researching Russian language newspapers for information about Paul Manafort and his work in Ukraine for now-exiled pro-Russian Ukrainian President Yanukovych. There were no other subcontractors who worked on both the Trump and Prevezon projects.
In May or June of 2016, once Trump was clearly the Republican nominee, Fusion’s Trump research ended for the Republican client and then resumed for a Democratic client. By that time, the research that could be done via public records had largely been exhausted, and a handful of areas of interest had also emerged, one of which was Trump’s business dealings in Russia.
Fusion hired former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele as a subcontractor to do “human intelligence” (interviewing people), a skill that is generally outside of Fusion’s data-and-document-driven strengths. Steele was hired specifically to obtain more in-depth information than could be determined from public records regarding Trump’s activities in Russia and other former Soviet countries, where Trump appeared to have relationships with Russian organized crime figures and other “colorful characters.”
Steele was the former “lead Russianist” with MI6 (Britain’s equivalent of the CIA), was a highly regarded investigator and an expert at identifying Russian disinformation. Simpson and Steele had worked together on other projects since 2009. Steele was known as “a person who delivered quality work in very appropriate ways … he’s basically a Boy Scout.” He “has a sterling reputation as a person who doesn’t exaggerate, doesn’t make things up, doesn’t sell baloney …. Everyone I know who’s ever dealt with him thinks he’s quite good. That would include people from the U.S. government.” Asked if credibility with the FBI was one reason for Fusion hiring Steele, Simpson said no. Consistent with Fusion practices to ensure integrity of gathered information, Christopher Steele and Ed Baumgartner were unaware that each other was working on the case.
Between June-October 2016, Steele created 16 memos that he sent to Simpson, as well as a 17th memo in December 2016, after the election. Steele told Simpson that he did not believe that what he had reported in the memos was disinformation.
The 17th memo was created after Steele’s engagement with Fusion GPS had ended, because Steele’s sources were still continuing to provide him with information. It is unclear whether that 17th memo was sent to Simpson or to someone else. Steele’s attorneys had apparently stated in the past that this 17th memo had been given to a “senior United Kingdom government national security official” although Simpson expressed ignorance of this.
Whenever Steele sent in a memo, Simpson would generally verify it against information that Fusion had already gathered through other sources such as public documents, and Steele’s information matched up. Neither Simpson nor Fusion edited or altered Steele’s memos in any way. Steele did not name the human sources of his information for the memos, and Simpson does not believe that he paid them for information.
Simpson had expected that Steele’s memos might reveal evidence of corruption in Trump’s overseas dealings. Instead, Steele’s first memo raised alarms that the Russian government had been “cultivating and supporting” Trump for at least 5 years, that Trump and his inner circle had been accepting a “regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his democratic and other political rivals,” and that Trump was also sufficiently compromised by the FSB (under direction of Putin) that he could be blackmailed, particularly with regards to a potentially videotaped sexual act in the Presidential Suite of the Moscow Ritz Carlton Hotel.
Russian intelligence is known to have recording devices in many Russian luxury hotel rooms to gather “kompromat” – compromising material – on political and business leaders. [This practice dates back to the Soviet Union and KGB, and is believed to have been used by Putin for political advancement early in his career] [New York Times]. Such a situation poses a profound danger to the national security of the United States if a U.S. President or other major U.S. political figure can be blackmailed by a hostile foreign power.
Steele’s first memo also noted that the Kremlin had compiled a dossier of years of recorded phone conversations and other records of Hillary Clinton, mainly revealing her expressing opinions that differed from her public positions.
Simpson was aware of the Kremlin’s hostility toward Hillary Clinton and of Russia’s interference in recent European elections, and was also aware of the possibility of meddling in a U.S. election by a foreign government. While an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal, Simpson had exposed a Chinese effort to swing the 1996 Presidential election to Bill Clinton.
Additionally, Simpson recalled a story that he had written as a WSJ journalist about Oleg Daripaska (Russian oligarch suspected to have ties to organized crime) meeting with John McCain (R-AZ) before the 2008 election. And as a journalist, Simpson had written stories about Paul Manafort’s connections to the (pro-Putin) Party of Regions in Ukraine, to pro-Putin ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and to Russian oligarchs suspected of corruption. The Manafort stories had sprung from earlier stories that Simpson had written about the Kremlin collaborating with the Russian mafia to skim money from the gas trade between Ukraine and Russia. All of these things came to mind for Simpson as he pondered Steele’s first memo.
Steele believed the information in this memo to be potentially evidence of a crime in progress and a matter of national security concern to the United States. He considered it his professional obligation to report it to U.S. authorities, and expressed this to Simpson. Simpson was hesitant at first, but eventually said that Steele should report it if he felt that it was his obligation. Steele reached out to a contact that he had at the FBI. Simpson’s perspective was “to me this was like, you know, you’re driving to work and you see something happen and you call 911.” Simpson did not seek anyone else’s approval [one would assume that “anyone else” would include Fusion’s Democratic client] to authorize Steele to go to the FBI.
Simpson did not know if Steele gave the FBI the actual written memo, and did not know if Steele had actually requested that the FBI open an investigation. Simpson only later learned from news reports that Steele first contacted the FBI in the first week of July [a few days after Simpson had agreed that he should do so]. Simpson wondered for months if the FBI had actually done anything with the information: he knew that the Department of Justice has rules against law enforcement getting involved in the middle of a campaign, but he also increasingly believed that a serious crime was in progress regarding the hacking of the DNC and others.
In mid to late September, the FBI contacted Steele and said that they wanted all of the information that he had, so Steele met with them in Rome (at FBI expense) and debriefed them. Simpson testified that the FBI told Steele that they “had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump Campaign source” independent of Steele’s sources, and that they believed that Steele’s information was credible. Later in the testimony, Simpson said that it was unclear if the FBI was the one who told Steele about this, and that he was also unclear if the FBI’s other source was someone in the Trump Campaign or the Trump Organization.
Simpson was nonetheless uncertain and deeply concerned about how seriously the FBI was in investigating Steele’s findings. This concern came to a head when the New York Times ran a story on October 31, 2016 stating that the FBI had been investigating Trump-Russia connections and had found nothing. [New York Times] Shortly after that, Steele cut off his relationship with the FBI, believing that the FBI was possibly somehow being influenced by the Trump Campaign for political purposes. After the election, the FBI contacted Steele about possibly being paid by them to continue his investigative work, but he declined.
Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee had a back and forth with Simpson and his attorneys regarding whether the non-disclosure agreement between Fusion and Orbis (the company that Steele worked for) forbade Simpson and/or Steele from giving the memos and/or the information in them to the press or to law enforcement. Republicans also pointed out that in a lawsuit against Steele, Steele’s attorneys had stated that Steele and Fusion, at Fusion’s instruction, had given “off-the-record briefings” in September and October 2016 to journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Yahoo News, the New Yorker, ABC, and others.
Simpson was asked if he or Fusion has provided Steele’s actual memos to their Democratic client or to Buzzfeed, the news outlet that first publicly released them. Simpson’s attorney told Simpson not to answer that question verbally, but the attorney had apparently provided a written statement to the Judiciary Committee stating that they had not provided the actual memos to those entities.
Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans asked a number of questions implying that Fusion’s Trump investigation was unethical, and Simpson responded:
No, the amount of Fusion’s pay or Orbis’s pay was not contingent on whether or not the FBI started an investigation.
No, to Simpson’s knowledge, Christopher Steele and Rinat Akhmetshin (HRAGI lobbyist employed by Natalia Veselnitskaya and who was at the Trump Tower meeting) did not know each other, and Akhmetshin did not work for Orbis.
No, Simpson does not believe that he discussed the existence of Fusion’s Trump investigation with Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rinat Akhmetshin, or anyone involved in the Prevezon case including anyone at Baker Hostetler, and does not believe that Steele did so either. Doing so would have been a violation of their non-disclosure agreements.
No, Simpson was not influenced in his actions on the Trump project by Veselnitskaya or Akhmetshin, and does not believe Steele to have been either.
After the election, Sir Andrew Wood, Britain’s former ambassador to Russia, had a chance encounter with U.S. Senator John McCain and his adviser, David Kramer, at a security conference in Nova Scotia, and informed them of the dossier. Rinat Akhmetshin was listed in conference records as being in attendance at that conference, a fact of which Simpson was unaware until the Senate hearing.
It is unclear how Wood had learned of the dossier: nobody at Fusion had provided any information about it to any foreign governments. After the conference, Kramer reached out to Steele to get more information for McCain to bring to the FBI’s attention. At this point, Simpson and Steele were still unclear how seriously the FBI was taking the information or if the information had been conveyed to anyone of high rank in the FBI, so the idea of having a U.S. Senator take the information to the FBI was appealing.
Some miscellaneous information from Simpson’s testimony included:
Simpson researched Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page, as well as Russian government officials Sergei Ivanov and Igor Sechin. Simpson believed Carter Page to be potentially compromised by the Kremlin.
Simpson observed that most Russians work to some degree for the Russian government and receive pensions. Simpson speculated that if those Russians were to move to the U.S., the Russian government disbursing their pensions would be an ideal way for the Russian government to launder money and get money out of Russia – a concept suggested in Steele memos #4 (2016/095) and #10 (2016/111). Simpson encouraged the House Judiciary Committee to look further into this, because there is a large amount of Russian money coming into the U.S. through what Simpson believes are fake or inflated pensions. However, such payments might not be easily traceable and would fall under diplomatic privileges.
Simpson explained that “Russian organized crime is …. involved in politics and banking and there’s even a lot of connections between the mafia and the KGB or FSB and cyber crime …. Stock fraud in particular was the big thing in the U.S.”
Simpson learned of a New York court case in which the government of Kazakhstan was trying to recover billions of dollars that had allegedly been stolen during the failure of a major bank called BTA Bank. The money was allegedly laundered in Europe and the United States. Felix Sater, a real estate developer who at one time had an office in Trump Tower, appeared to be involved in some way, and there were media reports that some of the money went into Sater’s company in the building of Trump Soho.
Simpson’s review of estate taxes on Trump’s properties indicated that Trump publicly estimated his individual properties to be worth far more than he says that they are worth on his taxes, and a number of his golf courses don’t make any money.
Toward the end of testimony, Simpson was asked about Alfa Bank and its founders, Pyotr Aven, Mikhail Fridman and German Khan. Simpson had little information about them.
Prompted by his attorney, who cited the terms agreed upon by the Senate Committee prior to the testimony, Simpson did not answer a small handful of questions, mainly pertaining to names of his clients, communications with his clients, and naming sources of information. In general, he appeared to be extremely forthcoming in his 10-hour testimony.
What did Glenn Simpson tell the House Intelligence Committee about Fusion’s Trump research that he did not already say in his Senate testimony?
The Republican client who initially engaged Fusion to research Presidential candidate Donald Trump was a conservative web publication called the Washington Free Beacon. [The Beacon’s benefactor, Paul Singer, was a supporter of (then-Presidential hopeful) U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)]. [New York Times] Simpson did not believe that the Beacon was acting as a proxy for any specific candidate, but believed that they were generally from the wing of the Republican Party that was concerned about a takeover of the GOP by Trump and his supporters. Simpson also researched (then-Presidential hopeful) U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) for the Beacon during the 2016 Republican Primary.
The Beacon would sometimes ask Fusion to pass researched information on to reporters. Other times, reporters would reach out to Fusion for information, and Fusion would make sure that the Beacon authorized sharing the information with that reporter. The Beacon also provided some of Fusion’s research to reporters without necessarily notifying Fusion.
During the period when the (conservative) Beacon was Fusion’s client, the issues that surfaced about Trump with regard to Russia that raised enough questions in Simpson’s mind to warrant further exploration included:
Trump’s relationship with Felix Sater and Sater’s real estate development company Bayrock – a company that Simpson believed had ties to Russian organized crime and received “opaque” funding from Russia and other former Soviet countries. Alexander Mashkevich, a financial backer of Bayrock, is a Central Asian organized crime figure who has been involved in money laundering, the mining industry, and Kazakhstan.
The Trump campaign’s hiring of Paul Manafort, who Simpson knew had worked for Ukraine’s pro-Russia political party, and who had also successfully worked to get pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych (now exiled in Russia) elected President of Ukraine.
The “amazing number of people from the former Soviet Union who had purchased properties from Mr. Trump.” [One of them was Dmitry Rybolovlev. Rybolovlev was a wealthy Russian oligarch who purchased a Palm Beach mansion from Trump for a staggering $95 million in 2008. Trump had paid around $41 million for it just two years earlier and had made very few improvements to it, raising questions about why Ryoboloviev had paid so much for it. The current U.S. Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross (former Vice Chair of the Bank of Cyprus) connected Rybolovlev and Trump to do the transaction.] [MSNBC]
The number of Trump properties where it was not easy to determine who the buyer was.
Various criminals buying Trump properties, including one who was running a high stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower.
The number of Trump properties that were sold at a loss shortly after they were bought.
“Patterns of buying and selling that we thought were suggestive of money laundering”
The number of trips that Trump had taken to Russia.
All of these activities started surfacing in a period in Trump’s career beginning in about 2005. Recent Trump projects that also raised questions for Simpson included a Trump development in Panama, one in Toronto, and Trump’s golf courses in Scotland and Ireland, which seemed to have a lot of opaque money coming into them and were not making any money.
The numerous Russia connections got Simpson wondering about possible connections between Trump and the Russian mafia. Simpson had learned as an investigative reporter at the Wall Street Journal that the Russian mafia is more sophisticated and more global in their activities than the Italian mafia – “[the Russian mafia] understand finance a lot better” – and they often create very elaborate money laundering schemes, including fake court arbitrations, commodities deals, and “securities straits” [this was probably incorrectly transcribed during testimony and was supposed to be “securities trades”] in order to make the source of the money harder to trace: “if you can think of a way to launder money, the Russians are pretty good at it.”
The Russian mafia is also involved in legitimate American businesses and the American government. Simpson had actually left the Wall Street Journal in 2009 in part because he wanted to investigate Russian involvement in Washington DC, but the Journal had lost interest in the topic. In talking to his sources at the time, Simpson found that “everyone said the Russians are back, and they are buying influence in Washington left and right, and they are trying to bribe all these Congressmen.”
The Russian mafia is “essentially under the dominion of the Russian Government and Russian Intelligence Services. And many of the oligarchs are also mafia figures.”
Putin’s rise to power basically included gaining control over the oligarchs and the Russia mafia [this account by Simpson is consistent with William Browder’s description of Putin’s rise to power, and corroborates why Putin might have initially been supportive of Browder’s efforts to expose how oligarchs were ripping off shareholders]. Everyone in Russia essentially works for Putin, and U.S. law enforcement believes this to be true of Russian mafia figures in the United States as well.
Because of this connection between organized crime and the Kremlin, if Trump’s businesses were taking in large amounts of illicit money from Russian mafia figures, the Kremlin would certainly know about it. “If people who seem to be associated with the Russian mafia are buying Trump properties or arranging for other people to buy Trump properties, it does raise a question about whether they’re doing it on behalf of the Russian government.” Knowledge by the Kremlin of such dealings by Trump or his businesses could also be used as “kompromat,” potentially giving the Kremlin leverage over Trump, particularly once Trump began running for President, and even more so once he became President.
After the Republican Primary ended and Trump was the Republican candidate, Fusion was hired by Seattle-based international law firm Perkins Cole – whose clients include the DNC – to continue researching Donald Trump. Peter Fritsch, Simpson’s business partner at Fusion, originally spoke with Perkins Cole about doing Trump research for them. Simpson was unaware if Fritsch approached Perkins about the project or vice-versa. Simpson understood his client to be Perkins Cole, and also understood that the DNC was Perkins Cole’s client in the opposition research that Fusion was doing into Trump.
By the time Perkins Cole hired Fusion, Fusion had already explored a wealth of documents and public records on Trump, and was now at a point to “develop more specific lines of inquiry.” Because Fusion was already familiar with the information gathered thus far, Fusion decided which areas were worthy of deeper investigation: “we were the architects of the research.” Simpson asserts that having Fusion determine what to research generally ensures that a client’s preconceived ideas don’t get in the way of producing an accurate picture.
Fusion’s lines of inquiry included Trump’s overseas business dealings, labor practices in his overseas factories, his tax disputes, his bankruptcies, and who some of his business partners were. Simpson stated that “We never set out to investigate whether Donald Trump or anyone else was engaged in sexual activity for the sort of practical reason that I just didn’t think it was a useful subject to investigate. I investigate business stuff and financial crime and corruption and those kind of things. That’s my gig. So people came to us with stories that we never pursued.”
Regarding Simpson’s relationship with Christopher Steele, Simpson originally met Steele while living in Brussels, Belgium – a location that facilitated Simpson’s reporting on one of his biggest areas of interest, organized crime and corruption in the former Soviet Union. This interest had continued after Simpson left the Wall Street Journal in 2009. By then, Simpson’s Russia/ex-Soviet focus had become a rather obscure topic in an age where most U.S. media attention abroad focused on al-Qaeida and the Middle East. A mutual friend, who knew that Steele shared this interest in Russia, introduced Simpson to Steele.
Steele was paid by Fusion for his work on the Trump project. Fusion billed Perkins Cole for Steele’s time as one of the expenses of Fusion’s work (in other words, as an outside consultant, not as a full-time Fusion employee).
Christopher Steele can speak Russian, and told Simpson that when he gathers information, he is aware that he is being given some misinformation, and does his best to filter that out before passing it on to his client (in this case, Fusion).
Simpson believes that Steele did not personally go to Russia to do his research for the Trump project. Steele had not billed Fusion for any trips to Russia, and it would also be dangerous for Steele to go there, because he had been previously exposed as a former member of British intelligence who had worked in Moscow. So instead, Simpson believes that Steele hired paid subcontractors in or from Russia who could travel around and ask questions without raising suspicion. The people that those subcontractors spoke to (in bars, etc.) were not paid for information, and were likely not told that they were being asked questions as part of a paid project.
Simpson did not know who Steele’s subcontractors were, and Simpson did not thoroughly verify their information. He trusted Steele’s expertise in filtering out disinformation and Steele’s reputation for obtaining quality information. Verification by Simpson consisted of checking Steele’s information against Simpson’s knowledge of events from public documents that Fusion had researched for the case. Simpson found nothing in Steele’s reports that was contradicted by publicly available information.
While Simpson normally edits and provides analysis of field memos from a subcontractor and incorporate it into an overall report, the information provided by Steele was so shocking and concerning that Simpson just left it raw: all of the memos are exactly what Steele sent him. The 17th Steele memo came in after the election, and Fusion was not paid for it.
Fusion’s client did not direct or authorize Simpson or Steele to go to the FBI: that was Steele’s decision, which Simpson had assented to.
Going to the FBI
Because Steele’s information, by its nature, could not be conclusively and definitively proven with official documents, Simpson was not certain at first whether Steele’s information rose to the level of certainty to take it to law enforcement, but after consideration, on July 1 or 2 Simpson consented to Steele taking his info to the FBI. Describing the situation in which he and Steele found themselves, Simpson said “We threw a line in the water and Moby Dick came back, and we didn’t know what to do with it at first.”
On July 4, Steele went to the FBI, and informed Simpson of this shortly thereafter. Steele told Simpson that the FBI thanked him and said that they would be in touch if they needed to follow up. Simpson believes that Steele likely mentioned to the FBI that he had uncovered the information in the course of work for Fusion GPS on behalf of a Democratic client, but does not know for certain if that disclosure was made.
The FBI contacted Steele before the election, but did not contact Fusion before the election.
After FBI Director Janes Comey’s October 29, 2016 announcement that the FBI was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton, and the October 31, 2016 New York Times story that the FBI had found no ties between Trump and Russia, Steele and Simpson “were, frankly, you know, very scared for the country and for ourselves and felt that if we could give it to someone else, we should, higher up.”
After the election, Steele told a friend – a U.S. Prosecutor named Bruce Ohr – about what he had uncovered during his work for Fusion, and suggested that Ohr contact Simpson. Around Thanksgiving, Ohr did contact Fusion to get information for the Department of Justice. [According to Fox News, Ohr’s wife Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion on Trump-related issues during the summer of 2016.] [Fox News]
Concerned that the FBI was possibly being unduly influenced behind the scenes and that Russia, a hostile foreign power, was in the process of swaying the election, Steele and Simpson also decided to go to the major media again with their Trump-Russia info.
The Meeting With Journalists
The journalists that Simpson and Steele had met with in September 2016 were generally national security reporters, not political reporters, because Simpson and Steele were concerned that they had stumbled on a national security issue. At the time, Simpson assumed that Clinton was going to win the election, so there was “no urgency to it” – he just wanted reporters to start looking into it because it was concerning. He was aware that the reporters would likely not be doing a story on it before the election, because “when you get past Labor Day, people stop publishing stories that could be perceived as a late hit or an October surprise.”
And in fact there was little coverage of it.
Simpson believes that Perkins Cole would generally have known that his conversations with reporters in the summer of 2016 were informed by the Steele dossier, but he would not have needed to clear every such conversation with Perkins Cole.
Regarding Buzzfeed getting the Steele dossier, Simpson said (under oath) “Well, to just put it on the record, we were not the ones that gave this document to Buzzfeed, and I was not happy when this was published. I was very upset. I thought it was a very dangerous thing and that someone had violated my confidences.” Simpson said that he had his suspicions about who might have passed the dossier to Buzzfeed, but would not share that speculation in his testimony.
Republicans asked Simpson if he believed that, based on the evidence that he and Steele had gathered, Simpson “could conclusively say as fact that the Russian Government and the Trump Campaign were colluding with each other to beat Hillary Clinton.” Simpson said no, and that even with information publicly known now, such an assertion cannot be made, but since the election, there has been a clear pattern of secretive contacts and other odd behavior that “supports the broad allegation of some sort of an undisclosed political or financial relationship between the Trump Organization and people in Russia.”
Trump’s Russian Connections
In Simpson’s deeper research of Trump associates, he found more key Russian connections, including:
A Trump-linked Russian linguist named Sergei Millian (aka Siarhei Kukuts – his name before moving to Atlanta). Millian ran the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce (Russians have used such groups as intelligence operations), and claimed to have worked for the Russian Foreign Ministry in the past. He boasted of being an exclusive agent for Trump in Russia, and claimed to have sold hundreds of million of dollars in Trump properties to Russians. He was also connected with Russotrudnichestvo, believed by the FBI to be a front for the Russia’s foreign intelligence agency SVR. Millian was also linked to Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, who appeared to have a lot of connections in the former Soviet Union and to Russian organized crime figures in New York and Florida.
Around 2003/2004, Trump was having trouble getting bank loans for buying or developing property, but was able to get credit if he could show that he had already pre-sold a certain percentage of units. Russians were willing to vouch for those pre-sales. For a project in Panama, a number of Russian gangsters agreed in advance to purchase condos there, which enabled Trump to get a bond from Bear Stearns. In addition to getting funding, the goal of such “pre-sales” was to hook in additional legitimate condo buyers who would believe that the project already had a lot of committed interest from other buyers. In Panama, the alleged Russian buyers signed paperwork, but never paid. Simpson believes that the project was built, but went “belly up.” A similar arrangement with pre-sales to Russians took place with Trump’s Toronto project.
The Agalarovs (who organized the Trump Tower meeting) appeared to be associated with people involved in major money laundering activity in New York in the 1990s. The Agalarovs had come to the United States from Russia around the fall of the Soviet Union, during which period, many powerful Russians came to the United States to launder money.
Based on what Simpson knows about the Agalarovs and Russian intelligence, he now believes that it is reasonable to assume that the Trump Tower meeting, organized by Aras Agalarov, was part of a Russian intelligence operation.
The Kushners are ethnic Russian and have a number of connections with Russians who immigrated to New York in the 1970s during the Refusenik era.
Howard Lorber, a real estate investor who did a lot of deals in Russia when things were fairly “wild” after the fall of the Soviet Union, is someone who Trump considers a good friend. Lorber and Bennett LeBow “introduced Trump to Russia.”
Trump had been to Russia a minimum of 4-5 times since the late Soviet years. Simpson found it odd that Trump made a number of “opaque” trips to Russia without coming back with a deal. Simpson initially thought that perhaps Trump’s lawyers were preventing him from going through with any deals out of concern that he would be violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which makes it unlawful for U.S. citizens to bribe foreign government officials to get business. Simpson later concluded that money was actually coming out of Russia and being invested in Trump’s properties in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Simpson believed that Felix Sater, a friend of Trump, had connections to Russian organized crime. Simpson also believed that Sater’s company, Bayrock – which developed the Trump Soho Hotel – was involved in “illicit financial business activity and had organized crime connections.” Simpson had also noticed a general shift from Trump being associated with Italian mafia figures early in his career to Russian mafia figures starting in the 1990s. Notably, despite Sater’s involvement with developing Trump Soho and having an office in Trump Tower, Donald Trump has said that he is not sure that he would recognize Sater if he saw him.
Trump Jr. had gone to Russia a number of times, and had also gone to Kazakhstan for reasons that could not be determined. He had also gone to Latvia.
Regarding Dmitry Rybolovlev, the Russian oligarch who had inexplicably bought a run-down Palm Beach mansion from Trump for over twice what Trump had paid for it just two years earlier, Simpson had initially believed that that transaction was part of an overall pattern of excessive spending by Rybolovlev in order to prevent his ex-wife from accessing his money. However, Simpson later learned that Rybolovlev was closely connected to Igor Sechin, described by Simpson as “Putin’s No. 1 compadre in the kleptocracy.” Sechin apparently helped Rybolovlev leave Russia with billions of dollars.
Simpson’s conclusions about Trump possibly being involved in organized crime resulted from a large amount of factual evidence that was suggestive of an organized crime connection. However, due to Simpson’s lack of legal authority to subpoena people, etc., his conclusions not completely provable through documents and data.
Simpson’s Suggestions for Further Investigation
Simpson was asked for his thoughts on areas that the House Intelligence Committee should explore further. His response included:
Records (potentially subpoenaed if necessary) from banks, real estate agents, and title companies. Simpson had not gone after bank records because doing so would be illegal due to financial privacy laws, and because he did not have governmental subpoena power. Such records could help determine if Trump properties had been used for money laundering, which Russia could be using to blackmail the President.
Of particular interest would be Deutsche Bank’s records related to the characters involved. [Deutsche Bank had been one of the only financial institutions willing to loan money to Trump after he filed for bankruptcy.] [Business Insider]
The possibility of an “unacknowledged relationship between the Trump people and the UKIP people and that the path to WikiLeaks ran through that.”
Russian intelligence defectors living in the United States: ask what they think is going on.
The travel records of people in Trump’s circle.
The “Manafort-Stone-Trump relationship.” Roger Stone and Manafort worked in Ukraine for some “bad guys” with Arthur Finkelstein around 2005-2006. Finkelstein went on to work for pro-Putin Prime Minister of Hungary, Victor Orban.
Irakle Kaveladze, a Russian who was at the Trump Tower meeting. Simpson believes that Kaveladze and the Agalarovs have been involved in money laundering since the 1990s, and have laundered KGB money.
A couple weeks in August 2016 when Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Donald Trump were in the Hamptons. Dmitry Rybolovlev’s plane was close by, and Ivanka and Jared disappeared for a few days. Rybolovlev’s plane landed in Dubrovnik (Croatia), on August 12, and Jared and Ivanka reappeared in Dubrovnik. “There had been rumors of meetings between Trump people and Russians on yachts off Dubrovnik.”
The relationship between Jared/Ivanka and Roman Abramovich, a Russian billionaire.
A female attorney in Florida [whose name Simpson could not recall during testimony] who used to work for Gazprom, had ties to Michael Cohen, and played some role in distributing Russian pension payments.
The oligarchs associated with the school in Russia where Carter Page spoke in July 7, 2016. Simpson believed that a Russian intelligence agent named Evgeny Buryakov had tried to recruit Carter Page, and that Page had been a long-time target of Russian intelligence.
Alex Shnaider, a Russian-born Canadian national who was a partner of Trump in developing Trump International Hotel and Tower in Toronto. Simpson says that Shnaider’s father-in-law, Boris Birshtein, was important in the history of the alliance between the KGB and the Russian mafia, and managed the KGB’s offshore funds after the fall of the Soviet Union, mainly at Romania-based Raiffeisen Bank.
The Intersection of Prevezon and Trump
Questions inevitably were asked of Simpson about his having worked with Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower.
Simpson never shared any of Christopher Steele’s info with Natalia Veselnitskaya or even with most of his own staff at Fusion. None of the info that Fusion used in its Trump research came from Veselnitskaya.
“I would certainly agree with the observation that for these matters to have intersected in the way that they did is, you know, remarkable. And it caught me totally by surprise, and I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means, if it means anything.”
Miscellaneous information:
Simpson found that Trump estimated his property values very low for tax purposes. However, Simpson believed that Trump was not low-balling to save money, but was in fact giving an accurate record of those property values.
Simpson believed that Nigel Farange went to the Ecuadorian Embassy more than the one time reported in the press and provided data to Julian Assange on a thumb drive.
In one of Steele’s reports, Simpson learned that the Kremlin’s the U.S. Presidential election operation was run by Sergei Ivanov, a former KGB agent.
“Putin seems to be very interested in the Jewish diaspora,” ie, Jewish Russians who have emigrated to other countries.
“The Orthodox church is an arm of the Russian state now.” A lot of senior church officials are ex-KGB, and they use the church as a way to move money around.
Russia has been working on infiltrating “soft” conservative organizations, including the NRA. Alexander Torshin and Maria Butina were names that came up.
Nobody asked Simpson to research Hillary Clinton in 2015 or 2016, but she came up in the course of some of his investigative work. Simpson said that nothing in his research into the Clinton Foundation was relevant to the Russia investigation.
Simpson was asked if someone had been killed as a result of the information in the Steele dossier, and Simpson said that that was not the case. This contradicted a statement by Simpson’s attorney, Levy, during the Senate Judiciary testimony.
U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) mentioned that Republicans on the Committee are not letting Committee Dems in the loop on documents that are being requested from witnesses, etc.
Simpson was asked if he was currently being paid by anyone to continue the Trump research. He refused to answer.
Analysis
Simpson’s testimony about Fusion’s Trump research provides a wealth of leads for journalists and law enforcement to pursue, and seems to make abundantly clear that Trump’s statement that “I have nothing to do with Russia” is false.
If Simpson’s research is accurate, it is well within the realm of possibility that Donald Trump was knowingly or unknowingly involved in money laundering during his real estate career, and in particular, money laundering for Russian oligarchs and Russian mafia figures. Because of the interconnectedness in Russia of the mafia, the oligarchs, and the Kremlin, it is likely that such activities would have come to the attention of Vladimir Putin, who would no doubt be eager to use such “kompromat” as blackmail fodder/leverage over the President of a country that Putin viewed as responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union. It follows that Putin would be supportive of such an individual’s 2016 Presidential candidacy, knowing that he could make use of such an individual in the Oval Office to sow discord and chaos, and to undermine the foundations of America’s institutions.
A particular highlight of Simpson’s testimony was the interactions with the FBI. Steele had brought the information from his first memo to the FBI in early July, 2016, after which there were apparently months that Simpson and Steele had no idea if the FBI had done anything with that information. In mid-late September, the FBI asked Steele for all of his Trump-related research, and Steele provided it, again, not knowing what, if anything, was going to be done with it. Then, less than two weeks before the election, FBI Director James Comey broke with precedent and policy to announce on October 28 that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, and three days later, on October 31, Simpson and Steele read in the New York Times that the FBI had been investigating Trump for Russian connections but had found nothing – a conclusion that completely contradicted the information that Steele knew that he had given to the FBI.
At that point, one can imagine the fear and confusion that Simpson and Steele must have felt. They had provided the FBI with a large amount of credible information pointing to a huge, active operation by a hostile foreign power (with a history of deep government corruption, organized crime, and political assassinations) to support one U.S. Presidential candidate over the other. Yet bewilderingly, the FBI seemed to be publicly denying that any such operation was happening, and was instead taking unprecedented actions that would almost certainly undermine the campaign of the candidate that Russia hoped to defeat. At that moment, it certainly must have crossed the minds of Simpson and Steele that the FBI could possibly be somehow complicit in Russia’s operation or complicit with Trump’s Campaign. Realizing that the FBI knew the identities of the two men who could expose the operation – Simpson and Steele – must have resulted in an absolutely terrifying time for those two men.
Of course, the obvious questions concern the intersection of the Trump investigation and the Prevezon case. The fact that Fusion was doing paid work as part of opposition research campaign against Trump (with attention to Russia) at the same time that the Russian lawyer of Fusion’s client on another project met with Trump Campaign officials at Trump Tower to pass on research gathered by Fusion seems like an incredible coincidence. My gut tells me that it is exactly that – a coincidence – but it is certainly enough to reasonably warrant some of the “conspiracy theory” lines of questioning engaged in by House and Senate Republicans.
Another area that seems odd is the chance meeting between British citizen Sir Andrew Wood and U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) after the election. According to a U.S. Representative questioning Simpson, Wood was an associate of Orbis, the company that Steele worked for. Wood bumped into McCain at a security conference in Nova Scotia and notified him of Fusion’s Trump investigation.
It seems reasonable to assume that Steele was the one who had informed Wood about the Trump research. Not knowing Wood’s role at Orbis, it may also have been reasonable for Wood to have been attending a security conference. However, the fact that Rinat Akhmetshin (Natalia Veselnitskaya‘s hired lobbyist who had been at the Trump Tower meeting) was on the roster of attendees at that same conference seems highly coincidental. Akhmetshin might have seen the event as a place to meet U.S. legislators and lobby them on behalf of HRAGI, but his surfacing at this particular event under these particular circumstances raises additional questions.
Despite these oddities, Simpson truly comes across as a credible and forthcoming witness, and it is difficult to be suspicious of him given how thoroughly and readily he responded to questions. At times, he seemed to be pushing back against his lawyers’ advice because he wanted to give even more information. It is also difficult to believe that the information that Fusion uncovered about Donald Trump does not point to an undisclosed history of potentially illegal or unethical activities between Trump and the Russians, knowledge of which would almost certainly have made its way back to the Kremlin for blackmail purposes.
– rob rünt
Read more of this special series:
The Trump-Russia Web
Disclaimer: This is an in-depth look at the Prevezon-related parts of Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 17, 2017 and before the House Intelligence Committee on November 14, 2017. The information below was presented by Glenn Simpson in his testimony, and is not being represented here as either fact or as the opinion of the webmaster unless specifically stated. All statements and assertions should be read as if prefaced by “Glenn Simpson states that …” Any content that I add will be surrounded by [brackets] and will likely include a link or reference to the source.
Natalia Veselnitskaya is the attorney for Cyprus-based investment company Prevezon Holdings. She is also the Russian attorney who met with Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner at Trump Tower.
[In 2013], Veselnitskaya hired U.S. law firm Baker Hostetler to help defend Prevezon against charges by the U.S. Department of Justice that Prevezon had been engaged in money laundering in the United States. Baker Hostetler hired Glenn Simpson’s firm, Fusion GPS, for research to help support Prevezon’s case. Fusion’s involvement in the case was directed by Baker attorney/partner Mark Cymrot.
Baker Hostetler is a well-regarded conservative law firm. They have a legal obligation to research who their clients are to ensure that the firm is not accepting payments from a foreign government. Simpson therefore assumed that Baker had done the work to make that determination before Fusion was brought into the case.
Payment of Baker Hostetler in the case was made by Prevezon, and was directed by Veselnitskaya. Baker Hostetler in turn paid Fusion. There were no direct payments to Fusion by either Prevezon or Veselnitskaya. To assist in gathering Russian language documents and locating witnesses, Fusion hired Edward Baumgartner, a Russian-speaking consultant. Baumgartner would later work on the Trump investigation for Fusion after the Prevezon case ended.
According to Prevezon, the money laundering allegations against them originated from a high-level Russian organized crime figure, Demetri Baranovsky, who had been posing as an anti-corruption campaigner in Russia and blackmailing various Russian companies. Baranovsky had threatened to expose Prevezon for money laundering. Prevezon had notified the Russian authorities of the threat, and Baranovsky was prosecuted and jailed for blackmail.
Veselnitskaya had been Prevezon’s lawyer in that case and had detailed knowledge of it. Baranovsky’s money laundering allegations against Prevezon were brought to the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice by investment manager William Browder. Glenn Simpson had met Browder years earlier as a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. At that time, Browder had spoken highly of Putin, and insisted that Putin was not corrupt at all – an opinion which Browder had thoroughly reversed by the time that he had contacted the DOJ about Prevezon. The DOJ investigated Browder’s allegations against Prevezon, and took the issue to trial.
Through its research for Baker Hostetler, Fusion GPS determined that Baranovsky had in fact been jailed for blackmailing. When Fusion attempted to interview Browder about the allegations, Browder refused. Baker Hostetler tried to subpoena him, but Browder denied having any presence in the U.S., and therefore claimed not to be legally obligated to respond to a subpoena. It seemed odd to Simpson that Browder would feel strongly enough about Prevezon to tip off the DOJ, but would be unwilling to testify to any of his accusations under oath. Fusion also gradually found Browder’s dealings in Russia to raise an increasing number of questions.
Fusion began researching Browder to help Baker Hostetler compel him to testify under oath in court about his role in the case. In 2014, Fusion determined that Browder’s hedge fund, the Hermitage Fund, was registered in Delaware, proving that he did in fact have a U.S. presence. Shortly after Fusion made this discovery, Browder took his name off the registration, claiming that it had been there by mistake.
Browder also claimed to own no property in the U.S., but Fusion discovered that Browder had a $10 million mansion in Aspen, Colorado, registered under the name of a shell company. Browder also owned vehicles registered at that Aspen address under his own name.
When Simpson learned that Browder would be speaking at the Aspen Institute in the summer of 2014, Fusion saw it as an opportunity to serve him with a subpoena. They hired two subcontractors to serve the subpoena in the Aspen Institute parking lot. Browder refused the subpoena, ran back to his car, and drove back to his mansion. Browder later said that the subpoena had been improperly served because he had nothing to do with the United States, and the subpoena was also improper because it was for a case in New York, but had been served in Colorado. Browder also stated that he had thought that the two men approaching him to serve the subpoena were KGB assassins coming after him.
Fusion continued its research into public records on Browder and learned that he had a number of shell companies in Cyprus and other tax havens around the world. Simpson believed that Browder was using these shell companies to channel money into Russia and to hold Russian securities. When the Panama Papers came out in 2015, Fusion also learned that in 1995, Browder had incorporated an offshore shell company in the British Virgin Islands, and had later transferred the shares from the Hermitage Fund to this shell company.
According to Simpson, “one of Putin’s primary rules for business was you can do a lot of things, but you’ve got to pay your taxes.” Simpson believes that Browder’s tax evasion in Russia was how Browder began to fall out of favor with Putin. Putin’s government prosecuted some of Browder’s shell companies and forced Browder to make a massive tax payment in 2006 [in the amount of $230 million].
During the course of Fusion’s investigation in the Prevezon case, Fusion GPS and Baker Hostetler shared information back and forth, with Baker being the central repository for information. Simpson trusted the integrity of the information that he received from Baker, due to the quality of their information on past projects. Fusion did not do any research to verify the information from Baker because “that would have been an enormous task and it would have made no sense,” since Baker was the client for whom Fusion was gathering and researching information. [Note: this means that it is possible that some of Baker’s info came from Prevezon or from Veselnitskaya without being verified.]
Baker Hostetler directed Fusion to be available as an information source to answer reporters’ questions and to actively contact the press to encourage coverage of the Prevezon case. Simpson recalled providing information to Bloomberg, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Legal 360, Financial Times, NBC, and probably Reuters, Politico, and New Republic.
William Browder turned out to be an “especially aggressive media self-promoter and promoter of his story,” so most of Fusion’s interactions with the press were reactive – responding to news outlets pursuing negative stories about Prevezon based on the story that Browder had already told the press: “a lot of what we were doing was simply responding to his wild allegations, unsupported wild allegations.” Simpson would raise questions about Browder’s credibility, pointing out to reporters that Browder was unwilling to testify to his statements in court under oath, and that he ran whenever Fusion tried to subpoena him.
Simpson peripherally knew Rinat Akhmetshin (former Russian intelligence officer, now an American lobbyist hired by Natalia Veselnitskaya to help persuade Congress to repeal the Magnitsky Act). Simpson had originally met Akhmetshin years earlier while working at the Wall Street Journal covering some stories about Kazakhstan. Akhmetshin had mentioned at that time that he had had a low level position in Russian intelligence, but Simpson was not aware of any current connections between Akhmetshin and Russian intelligence or the Russian government. In light of recent new reports, Simpson is interested to know if Akhmetshin is connected to the Russian government. Simpson was aware that Akhmetshin periodically still went to Moscow.
Akhmetshin had never hired Fusion or vice versa. Akhmetshin attended a handful of the Prevezon meetings at Baker Hostetler, but Simpson was unclear on what his role was. Baker directed Fusion to pass some of its research on to Akhmetshin, and that information was likely used in turn to help Akhmetshin in his anti-Magnitsky lobbying efforts for Veselnitskaya through her organization, HRAGI.
Ed Lieberman, an attorney specializing in international taxes, was hired by Baker Hostetler to look into tax evasion issues by William Browder and Hermitage Capital. Simpson believed that Lieberman had known Rinat Akhmetshin from college. Lieberman was now also working with Akhmetshin to lobby Congress to repeal the Magnitsky Act. Simpson was not aware of any ties between Lieberman and the Russian government.
During the course of the case, Simpson met Veselnitskaya several times. Initially, he communicated with her through Baker Hostetler about Prevezon’s extortion case against Baranovsky. Baker attorney Mark Cymrot had mentioned to Simpson that Veselnitskaya had been a prosecutor in Russia Simpson had no knowledge of her possibly being an agent for the government of Russia or Russian intelligence.
After the initial communications, Simpson saw Veselnitskaya in courtrooms and at a small handful of dinners, most of which were organized by Cymrot. Simpson spoke very little with Veselnitskaya beyond simple cordialities, because she does not speak English and he does not speak Russian.
One of the dinners was in New York on June 8, 2016, and was a dinner for people working on the Prevezon case. Veselnitskaya was at that dinner. Baker attorney John Moscow may have been there as well.
The next day, June 9, Simpson attended a court hearing in the Prevezon case. Veselnitskaya was there, possibly with Rinat Akhmetshin and translator Anatoli Samochornov. After the hearing, Simpson met with some PR people from Weber Shandwick, and then went home to his family.
[That same day, June 9, Veselnitskaya, Akhmetshin, Samochornov and others met at Trump Tower in New York with Trump Jr., Manfort and Kushner. The stated purpose of that meeting had been to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on Hillary Clinton. According to Trump Jr., Veselnitskaya just wanted to talk about Russian orphans. Simpson had no awareness of that meeting at the time.]
On June 10, Mark Cymrot held a social dinner at Barcelona restaurant in Washington DC for a group of his friends. Simpson and his wife attended the dinner, and Veselnitskaya was there as well. Simpson was sitting at the opposite end of the table from Veselnitskaya, and there was “not a lot of chit-chat” between them due to the language barrier and physical distance.
After news of the Trump Tower meeting broke in the New York Times, Simpson spoke with others working on the Prevezon case (not Veselnitskaya or Akhmetshin), including Mark Cymrot, Ed Baumgartner, and Baker attorney Paul Levine, and they too were very surprised about the Trump Tower meeting. Simpson wondered if some of the information shared there had been information that he had gathered for the Prevezon case.
Simpson’s perception of Veselnitskaya was that she was “a very smart and ambitious lawyer, but not like a big political player in the Kremlin.” He recalled her regularly having problems with her visa being accepted to get into the United States.
Simpson recalls meeting Denis Katsyv, the owner of Prevezon, at a handful of meetings or client dinners, but they did not speak much – again due to the language barrier. Prevezon was described to Simpson as Baker Hostetler’s client, and Denis was introduced as Prevezon’s owner. Cymrot told Simpson that Baker had already looked into Katsyv and determined that he was a legitimate businessman who invested in real estate. Simpson accepted this assessment as credible due to the reputation of Baker Hostetler and his past dealings with them. Simpson never met Denis’s father, Pyotr, a Russian government official, and did not know about him until Fusion had to start responding to Browder’s accusations.
Simpson acknowledged knowing Chris Cooper, a public relations person [at the Potomac Square Group] who used to work at the Wall Street Journal. Simpson would occasionally refer PR work to Cooper, and encouraged Baker Hostetler to hire him to do PR work for Prevezon during the money laundering trial.
Cooper created what Browder alleges is a “fake documentary” about Browder and Magnitsky. When Cooper sought to screen the film, Browder hired an aggressive attorney and threatened a libel lawsuit against anyone offering to show the film. Newseum – a Washington DC museum dedicated to journalism and the First Amendment – was not intimidated by Browder and showed the film on June 13, 2016, just days after Veselnitskaya’s meeting at Trump Tower.
Simpson was unclear whether Prevezon or HRAGI was behind the showing, but Fusion GPS provided names of journalists and others to be added to the invitation list, and Simpson may have personally invited some journalists as well, because the film questioned Browder’s credibility, and Browder’s media efforts had been hampering Fusion in their work for Baker on the Prevezon case.
Simpson stated that he was only peripherally involved with HRAGI and did not recall any interactions with the organization. Simpson acknowledged knowing and having lunch once with Lanny Wiles, a well-connected Republican consultant and lobbyist who may have been working for Prevezon or HRAGI.
Simpson was only vaguely aware of HRAGI’s lobbying efforts. He did recall Akhmetshin or Cymrot mentioning a meeting with Paul Behrends, a Congressional aide to U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). [Rohrabacher has been an outspoken defender of Russia and a loyal Trump ally, and Behrends, the main contact on Capitol Hill for Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin, has an interesting history in Washington DC: in a matter of just a couple years, Behrends went from being a fierce hawk against Russia to being a cheerleader for them] [Politico]. There was also e-mail evidence of a meeting with U.S. Representative French Hill (R-AR). Simpson did not believe that HRAGI or Prevezon were connected with the Russian government.
Simpson did not personally know Emin Agalarov, Aras Agalarov, or Rob Goldstone, although he knew who they were. [Goldstone arranged and attended the Trump Tower meeting, allegedly prompted by the Agalarovs] Neither Simpson nor Fusion had ever paid or been paid by any of them, and Simpson did not believe that any of them were working with Prevezon.
Since the election, there have been attempts to hack into Fusion GPS’s communications system. Simpson’s attorney Levy, present with Simpson during his testimony, stated that Fusion has received death threats. When Simpson was asked a question about his sources, Levy said that “Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work.”
Simpson was asked a number of questions pertaining to names of his clients, communications with his clients, and naming sources of information – topics which the Senate Judiciary Committee had apparently agreed in advance not to go into. At the advice of his attorney, Simpson declined to answer those questions.
What did Glenn Simpson tell the House Intelligence Committee about the Prevezon case that he did not already say in his Senate testimony?
Baker Hostetler is one of Fusion GPS’s oldest clients. Fusion has done 4-5 projects for them. Simpson describes them as a Republican-oriented law firm of “very serious, sober, reputable attorneys.”
Regarding the Prevezon case, Baker approached Fusion in late 2013 to determine whether it was provable that money from a specific fraud in Russia had gone into some specific real estate projects in New York. Baker attorney John Moscow led Simpson through the financial information of the case, and persuaded Simpson that the money trail between the Russian fraud and New York properties was not clear. Baker retained Fusion in early 2014.
The first thing that Fusion did was to investigate Prevezon. Natalia Veselnitskaya was introduced to Simpson in mid-2014 as a former Russian government lawyer who had retained Baker on behalf of Prevezon. She had told Baker Prevezon’s story about being blackmailed by Russian organized crime figure Baranovsky, who had been jailed for extortion. Baker passed Veselnitskaya’s story to Fusion. Fusion checked the story out, and it appeared to be true.
Fusion then wondered how allegations from a jailed criminal in Russia had gotten to the U.S. Department of Justice. Baker subpoenaed an ICE agent who informed them that they had gotten the information from William Browder.
In addition to Browder’s mansion in Aspen, Colorado, Fusion also uncovered that he had a house in New Jersey. In addition to trying to serve Browder with a subpoena in Colorado, Fusion tried to serve him another time, and then again in New York outside the Daily Show. That attempt at a subpoena was videotaped, and Browder ran down the street without taking the paper.
Simpson’s House testimony contained a few miscellaneous details elaborating on his previous Senate testimony:
Ed Baumgartner, who worked on both the Prevezon case and the Trump project, traveled to Russia with the lawyers as part of his work on the Prevezon case. Simpson did not go to Russia.
In researching Denis Katsyv for the Prevezon case, Simpson did not find Katsyv to “have a media profile of an oligarch” – no mafia connections, no meetings with Putin, no denial of visas to the U.S. However, Denis’s father, Pyotr Katsyv, is a Russia government official.
Browder’s shell companies based in Cyprus likely included Giggs Enterprises Limited, Zhoda Limited, and Peninsular Heights Limited.
The Russians regularly do fake news stories on Browder and have even done a documentary accusing him of murder.
At the Prevezon hearing on June 9, 2016, the day of the Trump Tower meeting, former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey argued on behalf of Prevezon as their appellate lawyer.
Much of the House Intelligence Committee’s Prevezon-related questioning focused on three things: the period around the time of the Trump Tower meeting, specific information from Simpson’s Prevezon research, and the flow of that information.
According to one of Simpson’s House Intelligence Committee questioners, when Veselnitskaya was at the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, she presented information about William Browder and the Magnitsky Act. Simpson had read news accounts of that.
Regarding Simpson’s own activities on June 9, after attending the Prevezon hearing (where Veselnitskaya was present), Simpson met with Shandwick public relations “at a hotel somewhere” to explore having them do PR work for the Prevezon case.
The next time that Simpson saw Veselnitskaya was at the dinner in Washington DC organized byBaker attorney Mark Cymrot. During this second testimony, Simpson could not recall if the dinner was on June 10 or 11.
Committee questioners showed Simpson an October 27, 2017 New York Times article, “Talking Points Brought to Trump Tower Meeting Were Shared With Kremlin” [New York Times] as well as a memo from the office of Yuri Chaika, Russia’s Prosecutor General. According to the Times article, Veselnitskaya’s Trump Tower talking points largely matched the memo from Yuri Chaika – in some cases paragraph for paragraph.
[The e-mail to Trump Jr. that sparked the Trump Tower meeting had promised information on Clinton from the “Crown Prosecutor of Russia.” Journalists and others had initially interpreted this to be an exaggerated/inaccurate description of Veselnitskaya, but it was more likely referring to Chaika.]
[Veselnitskaya’s talking points (New York Times) focused on Browder and the Magnitsky Act, but also included allegations that two major Democratic donors – New York billionaires the Ziff brothers – had committed fraud and tax evasion by illegally investing through William Browder’s company and not paying taxes (amounting to millions of dollars) to Russia on the investment. Putin claimed that the U.S. government was ignoring these allegations against the Ziff Brothers because they were major political donors. Veselnitskaya asserted that the alleged tax evasion tainted any potential donations to Clinton from the Ziff brothers. This was her “dirt” on Clinton.]
[Chaika’s memo had been given to pro-Russia U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) during an American Congressional delegation to Moscow in April 2016. Veselnitskaya and Chaika were known to have communicated in the months before the June 9th Trump Tower meeting, and worked together to provide the info on Browder and the Ziff brothers to Rohrabacher. Veselnitskaya later got the same info to U.S. Representative French Hill (R-AR). Veselnitskaya then asked Aras Agalarov to help her set up the meeting at Trump Tower to present the information.]
Simpson’s research on Browder had also included information on the Ziff brothers. Baker Hostetler would have given that information to Veselnitskaya for the Prevezon case.
Simpson did not believe that Veselnitskaya was sharing that information with the Kremlin or acting on behalf of the Russian government. Simpson did not recall if she had ever told him that she knew Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika, but she “may have alluded at times to giving information to the [Russian] government for purposes of tax law enforcement” to recover unpaid taxes.
Simpson acknowledged that, because Browder was antagonistic toward both Prevezon and Putin, Putin would likely have been more supportive of Prevezon’s side in the Prevezon case.
As an explanation for how Fusion’s research ended up being used in the Trump Tower meeting, Simpson said:
“In retrospect, I think what might have happened was that – so when the case started it wasn’t about William Browder. It was about a technical argument about whether you could prove that money from something in Russia went into this real estate development. And so it didn’t have a political dimension to me particularly, it was a technical argument. And that is how the case was introduced to me, and the fight was going to be over what the bank records showed.
“So it was a reasonably interesting case, but not very potentially controversial. But as we went into discovery, you know, the discovery trail led to Vladimir Putin’s biggest critic [William Browder].” [This ultimately resulted in Simpson doing work that could be repurposed to oppose the Magnitsky Act.]
“My view is that when we started producing actual information in court that was embarrassing to [Browder], and tended to raise questions about [Browder’s] activities in Russia, that [Veselnitskaya and ultimately Chaika and Putin] opportunistically began to exploit that.
“And that would fit with my view of Ms. Veselnitskaya as well, which is that she viewed the success that we had in finding certain kinds of information as a ticket to political advancement in Moscow. There is only one way up in Russia, and that is to do something that impresses Vladimir Putin.” Developing a relationship with a potential President of the United States would also be a way to impress Putin.”
Simpson was proud of the information that he had gathered in the Prevezon case, but disagreed with the pro-Putin slant that Veselnitskaya added to it in her Trump Tower talking points.
Asked if it bothered him that the information from his research had been used in what he himself at one point in his testimony had described as a Russian Government-directed operation, Simpson stated:
“It all happens to be accurate. And so, you know, if someone used this research that they, you know, commissioned through a law firm for a legitimate legal purpose, took it and repurposed it in some other way, I can’t say as I am upset by that. I must say in my business, right, I am in the information business, so when people commission research from you, it becomes their property when you are finished with the research, when you give it to them. So if they decide to go and use it for something else, I mean, that’s just beyond my control. So I will add that, you know, as someone who is not a fan of Vladimir Putin, I don’t take any great – I certainly am not happy to do anything that anyone would think was helping Vladimir Putin. And so to the extent that this has subjected me to an unfair accusation that I was engaged in some kind of Kremlin operation, I find that very regrettable.”
Analysis
Simpson’s testimony sharply contradicts some of Browder testimony, and paints Browder as a more complex figure than Browder’s portrayal of himself as a wrongly persecuted anti-corruption crusader. Browder’s various shell companies in tax havens around the world muddy the waters of Browder’s story considerably. Was Browder’s $230 million in taxes in fact paid to the Russian government, as Browder claims, and then stolen by the government and laundered overseas for the benefit of Putin and others (creating a pretext for turning Browder into a fugitive)? Or was Browder truly guilty of tax evasion, using his shell companies to hide the money, as the Russian government accused him of? Or is the answer something in between? Regardless, one comes away from Simpson’s testimony with a more multi-dimensional understanding of Browder.
Browder’s evasiveness and unwillingness to testify under oath are somewhat consistent with Browder’s story. If Browder truly is considered by Putin to be a major enemy – a likelihood that seems to be agreed upon by all – it is reasonable for him to be fearful when seeing two strange men approaching him in a Colorado parking lot or on the streets of Manhattan, and it is reasonable for him to be cagey about putting himself in a well publicized location like a courtroom, where he could potentially be assassinated upon entering or leaving. According to accounts of Browder’s Senate testimony, he showed up flanked by two large bodyguards. [Esquire]
Yet Browder has also willingly spoken at publicized events, like his appearance at the Aspen Institute, so his wariness and overabundance of caution seems to be selective.
The major takeaway from Simpson’s testimony about his Prevezon work, however, is that information gathered by Fusion GPS ended up being used by a likely Russian operative, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and ultimately by Russian Special Prosecutor Chaika, to further the interests of the Russian government. That was how the information was used in the Trump Tower meeting, and how it was used in lobbying efforts with U.S. Congresspersons Rep. Dana Rohrobacher (R-CA) and Rep. French Hill (R-AR).
The most important question is whether or not Simpson was aware that Fusion’s research was going to be used in that way and whether or not Simpson provided the research information to someone that he knew was a likely Russian government operative.
The explanation that Simpson gives for how things evolved seems very plausible, and I personally believe it: the case started out as a normal case of technical research, Browder came up in that technical research, and behaved in an actively antagonistic yet evasive way that raised questions. Browder’s actions prompted further investigation into him and his business ties, which produced incriminating information. Veselnitskaya, recognizing the value of that information to her career in Russia, opportunistically took it to the Russian government, who began making use of her and the information to undermine the Magnitsky Act – a major personal goal of Putin’s. In such a situation, where a reputable, conservative law firm with a known track record of prudence had introduced Simpson to Veselnitskaya merely as a lawyer, it was reasonable for Simpson to take that initial understanding of who she was at face value, and to not anticipate the possibility that during the course of the case, she would become an operative for the Russian government.
In general, Simpson appeared to be extremely forthcoming in both of his lengthy, voluntary testimonies, often answering questions with far more thoroughness than required, and at times even including names and dates without prompting.
However, Simpson’s haziness about the events around June 9, 2016 seems inconsistent with his detailed recollection of the events and characters of the Prevezon case (and of Trump’s background). Most notably, regarding his own actions, Simpson seemed unclear about the exact reason that he had gone home on June 9. In the Senate testimony, he said “My son’s junior prom was that night or senior prom and I was under some pressure to go home and be a dad” (p. 260-261). In the House testimony, he said “it was my son’s high school graduation. It was an event for my son’s high school graduation” (p. 121). He also said in the Senate testimony that the Washington DC dinner that he and Veselnitskaya attended was on June 10, and in the House testimony he said that it was on June 10 or 11.
This foggy recollection could be easily attributed to Simpson being more engaged in his research work than in his personal life. Yet given that his actions during this particular time period are crucial to understanding his involvement with Veselnitskaya and her Trump Tower meeting, one would think that he would have looked through his own calendar book and other records between the Senate and House testimonies so that he could give a clearer answer.
Nonetheless, it is also worth noting that in over 16 hours of testimony – 10 without having sworn an oath, then six under oath – with at times aggressive questioning, these were the only inconsistencies between his first and second testimony, and they are not even inconsistencies, but merely an inability to remember exact details of his own life from two specific days that had been over a year in the past by the time he was first asked to account for them.
– rob rünt
Read more of this special series:
The Trump-Russia Web
Disclaimer: This is a summary of part of Glenn Simpson’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on August 17, 2017 and before the House Intelligence Committee on November 14, 2017. The information below was presented by Glenn Simpson in his testimony, and is not being represented here as either fact or as the opinion of the webmaster unless specifically stated. All statements and assertions should be read as if prefaced by “Glenn Simpson states that …” Any content that I add will be surrounded by [brackets] and will likely include a link or reference to the source.
Who is Fusion GPS?
The following are details of how Glenn Simpson described his company, Fusion GPS.
Fusion GPS (the Washington DC trade name of Simpson’s company Bean LLC) is a small research, strategy and consulting firm based in Washington DC, with approximately 12 employees. The company handles a small number of projects each year. Their clients are mainly corporations and law firms, but they occasionally do research for major political campaigns as well, although political work is not their “niche.”
Fusion primarily collects public record information, sifts through it to determine which information is relevant to their client, and analyzes that information. Their law firm clients, who prefer clear, documented evidence that will be useful to them in a court of law, appreciate Fusion’s focus on document-and-data-based research. Fusion also interacts with the press regularly. Fusion typically responds to inquiries from media instead of actively sending out information, although they also sometimes pitch stories and send out press releases when their clients ask them to.
Fusion’s process is generally not directed by the client: rather than being told to find information that will result in the answer that the client wants, Fusion gathers as much information and data on the given topic, determines what that information might mean and/or what questions it might raise, and then goes in the direction that the data points them. Fusion makes clear to their clients up front that this is how they operate. Simpson states, “if you predetermine the result that you’re looking for, you tend to miss things.”
Fusion is hired to do “reliable treatments” of a subject – to produce accurate information, positive or negative, that can help their client understand the person, business or event that they are dealing with. The goal is not to do a “hit piece,” even for political clients. That does not mean that some information gathered will not be unflattering to the subject: it means that Fusion believes the information that they gather – flattering or unflattering – is accurate. It does not serve Fusion’s clients well to be given an inaccurate understanding of the subject being researched.
Fusion gathers facts, which Simpson described as “provable facts,” “established facts,” and occasionally “factual allegations.” Simpson makes a distinction between the first two, which are objectively verifiable, and allegations, which are unconfirmed.
Because Fusion’s clients are often attorneys, and attorneys’ clients are not always honest with the attorneys, one of the first things that Fusion does in analyzing their gathered information and data is to try to assess whether the attorney’s client’s story matches with known facts. Much of Fusion’s work is described as “decision support” – helping Fusion’s client learn what the facts are so that the client can decide how best to proceed.
Fusion has a small staff, and intentionally chooses researchers who do not have strong partisan leanings, because “ideological prisms are not helpful for doing research.” Fusion occasionally hires subcontractors for tasks that do not fall under their areas of expertise. In order to ensure the integrity of the information that Fusion provides, all Fusion subcontractors (as well as Fusion themselves) sign a non-disclosure agreement before being engaged for a project: in general, this means that nobody working for Fusion on a project may discuss the project outside of Fusion, and Fusion does not discuss one client’s project with another client. To further ensure the integrity of the information that Fusion takes in, Fusion does not let subcontractors on a given project know of each other’s existence. Fusion often does not even let subcontractors know who the client is unless Fusion believes that there may be a need to verify that the subcontractor does not have any conflict of interest.
Clients generally hire Fusion for 30 days at a time: at the end of each 30 days, the client gets a report with Fusion’s findings, and if they want more, they sign up for another 30 days. When Fusion completes a project, they are often asked to hand over all copies of the documentation for the case so that the client can ensure that it has been disposed of. Simpson said that he could not answer whether the Steele dossier was handed over to the client.
Read more of this special series:
The Trump-Russia Web
Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, was hired by Fusion GPS to gather “human intelligence” on Trump’s business practices and connections in Russia. The ultimate purpose of this research was to help Hillary Clinton’s Presidential Campaign. Steele’s research took the form of 17 memos that came to be known as the “Steele dossier” or the “Trump dossier.”
Steele, who had been the MI6’s top “Russianist” but who had been outed by a former colleague as a British spy, chose to do his research from outside of Russia by hiring subcontractors whom he believed to be able to gather good intelligence for him by talking informally with key Russian government insiders. Steele would filter out what he believed to be disinformation and then pass the information on in his memos to Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS.
The detailed summary below of the Steele dossier puts the memos in what is likely their proper chronological order based on the Bates numbers (the memos appear to be out of sequence in the Buzzfeed document). The date of memo #2 otherwise makes no sense.
A likely explanation for the gaps in the Bates numbers is that Steele or his company used the other numbers for other projects.
Disclaimer: The information below was compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele between June-December, 2016, as part of an investigation into Trump’s business practices and connections in Russia. The research involved Steele paying his trusted contacts in Russia to informally interview people likely to have relevant info. Steele and is not being represented here as either fact or as the opinion of the webmaster unless specifically stated. All statements and assertions should be read as if prefaced by “Steele states that his sources tell him …” Any content that I add will be surrounded by [brackets] and will likely include a link or reference to the source.
At the direction of Putin, the Russian government has been “cultivating and supporting” Donald Trump for at least five years with the goal of sowing discord in the U.S. and in the Transatlantic Alliance in general.
The Kremlin has also provided Trump with intelligence on Hillary Clinton for several years.
The Kremlin has a dossier of decades of kompromat on Hillary Clinton, primarily in the form of private (bugged/intercepted) conversations in which she contradicts her public positions on issues.
The dossier on Clinton is managed by chief Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on instructions from Putin.
None of the Clinton dossier has been made available outside of Russia or to the Trump Campaign.
The Kremlin has tried to develop kompromat on Trump over the years by tempting him with highly profitable real estate and business deals in Russia, but Trump has never gone through with a deal there.
The Kremlin has nonetheless successfully developed kompromat on Trump in the form of a videotape of him engaged in an embarrassing sex act with multiple prostitutes in the Presidential Suite of the Moscow Ritz Carlton in 2013.
The Kremlin believes that over the years, it has developed sufficient kompromat to successfully blackmail Trump.
Memo #2
July 26, 2015
[based on Bates numbers, I believe that the date is supposed to be June 26, 2016]
2016/086
Russia has a well-developed cyber-offensive program run by the FSB, whose four main targets are, in order of priority:
Foreign governments, especially western
Foreign businesses, especially banks
Russia’s elite
Political opponents inside and outside of Russia
Russia has had limited success breaching foreign governments, but has found great success targeting western businesses and banks.
The FSB recruits individuals – particularly those with connections to Russia – using financial and business incentives.
The FSB often uses coercion and blackmail to recruit qualified IT (information technology) cyber operatives, including targeting Russian-born U.S. citizens on business trips to Russia.
Due to the large number of recruits, the Central Bank of Russia has had difficulty covering over the large amount of money that must be laundered to pay them.
FSB operatives have successfully penetrated the “Telegram” encrypted communications system used by some businesses.
There has also been a large amount of cyber crime by individuals in Russia operating outside of government control, including by 15 Russian organized crime groups.
Memo #3 July 19, 2016 2016/094
Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page had a secret meeting with Putin associate Igor Sechin, CEO of Russian oil company Rosneft.
Sechin offered Page future Russian cooperation on energy production in exchange for lifting of Ukraine-related sanctions against Russia. Page was positive but noncommittal toward the offer.
Igor Divyekin, a spy with the Internal Political Department of the Putin Administration, also met with Page during his Russia visit to make him aware of Russia’s dossier of kompromat on Hillary Clinton. Divyekin offered to make the information available to Trump’s team.
In order to encourage Page’s cooperation, Divyekin may also have suggested that Russia had kompromat on Trump.
Memo #4 Undated 2016/095
A source within the Trump Campaign admits that the Trump Campaign and the Kremlin are cooperating in a relationship managed by Paul Manafort, using Carter Page and others to transmit information.
Putin hates Hillary Clinton and wants to see her defeated.
Russia had leaked the DNC e-mails via WikiLeaks, rather than directly, to ensure “plausible deniability.” The leak was done with full knowledge of Trump and his top associates, and Trump reciprocated by aligning campaign priorities with Putin’s agenda for Ukraine.
Russian interference in the Clinton Campaign was being done using
Russian agents within the Democratic Party
Russian hackers in the U.S.
Russian hackers in Russia
Russian agents and hackers in the U.S. received money and communications through the Russian pension distribution system.
In exchange for intelligence on Clinton, Trump’s team provided information to the Kremlin on U.S.-based Russian oligarchs and their U.S. assets.
The Trump Campaign source said that Trump and his team didn’t mind negative media coverage related to Russia, which helped distract from more damaging issues like his dealings in China that have involved large bribes and kickbacks.
Trump had tried numerous times to get business in Russia but was unable to, and instead ended up using Russia’s prostitutes.
Memo #5 July 30, 2016 2016/097
A source within the Trump Campaign said that there was increasing concern within the campaign about the DNC hacking and the media exposure of it.
The Kremlin was similarly concerned and planned to pull back on their activities in order to maintain “plausible deniability.”
Intelligence had been exchanged between the Kremlin and the Trump team for at least eight years. In return, Trump and his associates supplied information about oligarchs in the U.S. and their families.
There is more kompromat yet to be released on Clinton.
The Kremlin will not use their ample kompromat against Trump because he and his team have been “helpful and co-operative.”
Memo #6 August 5, 2016 2016/100
Hacking of DNC e-mails was largely coordinated by Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov and his “black PR team.”
Peskov is worried that he will be blamed for blowback against Russia over the hacking.
Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov believes that the hack went too far, wants the operation to stop, and recommends that the Kremllin “sit tight and deny everything.”
Russian Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev is concerned about damage that the hack may do to U.S.-Russia relations, and is openly refusing to cover up for Peskov.
People in the Kremlin opposed to Peskov’s efforts have discussed forcing Trump to withdraw from the Presidential race “on grounds of his psychological state and unsuitability for high office.”
Memo #7 August 10, 2016 2016/101
Sergei Ivanov wishes the Kremlin to keep a low profile and not engage in further leaks for now.
Instead, the Kremlin will spread rumors and disinformation in the U.S. that exploit current DNC leaks.
Disinformation will target educated youth in the U.S., whom the Kremlin believes can be convinced to vote for Trump as a protest against the establishment, which Clinton embodies.
Even if Clinton wins, turning educated youth against her will weaken her ability to lead and her ability to hinder Russia.
Putin is pleased with the Kremlin’s U.S. Presidential operation, which he feels has successfully divided hawks and elites in the U.S.
The operation has three areas of focus:
Offer assistance to Americans sympathetic to Russia
Gather intelligence
Disseminate kompromat
The operation has included support and indirect funding of trips to Moscow for U.S. political figures, including Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn.
Memo #8 August 10, 2016 2016/102
A Trump Campaign insider reports that the aim of the DNC hacks was to sway Sanders supporters (seen as anti-establishment and having a “visceral dislike of Hillary Clinton”) toward Trump and away from Clinton.
This targeting strategy was Carter Page’s idea.
The Trump Campaign underestimated the hacking’s potential backlash from U.S. media, political left, and right-wing elites, and a change in tactics is being considered.
The Trump Campaign will make more use of media to get alternate messaging out.
The operation’s current short-term goal is to neutralize Clinton’s efforts to make Putin a “bogeyman” – efforts which make her appear more patriotic than Trump.
There is anger within the Trump Campaign that Putin’s efforts seemed to go beyond merely helping Trump to actually undercutting the U.S. democratic system of government.
Memo #9 August 22, 2016 2016/105
Putin met with pro-Russian former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych (now in exile in Russia) on August 15, 2016 in Volgograd, Russia.
At that meeting, Yanukovych told Putin that he had authorized large kickback payments to Manafort, but assured Putin that there was no paper trail.
Putin and others in the Kremlin were skeptical due to Yanukovych’s past clumsy efforts at covering his tracks. The Kremlin is concerned about potential exposure and embarrassment.
Manafort had been doing business in Ukraine until he joined the Trump Campaign in March 2016.
Manafort was ousted from the Trump Campaign in part because of the revelations in the press about his ties to Ukraine, but also because of internal campaign hostility toward him and his strategy and policy ideas.
Memo #10 September 14, 2016 2016/111
Putin has ordered that Kremlin and government officials not publicly or privately discuss Russia’s intervention efforts in the U.S. Presidential campaign.
A Kremlin insider confirmed that “the gist” of allegations of Russian meddling is true.
Putin has gotten conflicting advice on the operation from different factions:
Those who urged caution to prevent blowback: Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak; the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and foreign policy adviser Yuri Ushakov.
Those who believed that the operation would be “effective and plausibly deniable with little blowback:” Sergei Ivanov and the SVR.
Ivanov’s advice had proven wrong, so Putin fired him on August [12th] 2016 [Wikipedia].
The Kremlin intends to release further kompromat on Clinton (still managed and controlled by Peskov under direction of Putin) after mid-September.
Some Putin advisers recommend not releasing further Clinton kompromat, but instead provoking Clinton to rail against Putin, which they think would make her look “weak and stupid.”
One goal of Russia’s election operation is believed by some in Moscow to be to shift the policies of both Clinton and Trump toward positions more beneficial to Russia, including:
Opposing TPP and TPIP which are not in Russia’s interests
Changes in positions on Syria and Ukraine
A Russian diplomat to the U.S., Mikhail Kulagin, was removed from the U.S. by Russia because of Kremlin concerns that his extensive involvement in the “veterans’ pensions ruse” would be exposed by the press.
Memo #11 September 14, 2016 2016/112
Relations are relatively good between Putin and the Alpha [Alfa] Group, which does political favors for Putin in exchange for business/legal favors for Alfa. [Alfa Bank’s server was detected by U.S. intelligence to be mysteriously “pinging” a Trump campaign server during the 2016 Presidential campaign.] [Fortune Magazine]
Putin is listening to advice from Alfa leaders Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven regarding how to deal with the U.S., because he does not trust the counsel of his own advisers.
Putin and Fridman recently conversed in person, but communication between them is generally handled by Oleg Govorun for “plausible deniability” due to Govorun’s low profile.
Govorun currently heads the Russian organization responsible for interactions with CIS, the other nations of the former Soviet Union.
In the 1990s, Govorun had worked for Alfa Bank delivering large amounts of illicit money to Putin, then Mayor of St. Petersburg.
Alfa had kompromat on Putin from his corrupt practices in the 1990s, but Putin nonetheless has leverage over them in the form of Kremlin officials’ disapproval of Alfa’s financial activities.
Memo #12 September 14, 2016 2016/113
Trump has a history of paying bribes in St. Petersburg, Russia to try to get real estate deals there.
The bribes were paid “discreetly and only through affiliated companies, making it very hard to prove.”
Trump also participated in sex parties in St. Petersburg, but all witnesses have recently been bribed or coerced to be silent.
Araz [Aras] Agalarov would likely have knowledge of Trump’s activities in St. Petersburg.
Memo #13 October 12, 2016 2016/130
Kremlin officials are having “buyer’s remorse” over their U.S. Presidential election operation.
Kremlin officials are surprised that leaks about Hillary Clinton have not been more damaging to her campaign.
More hacked Clinton material has been released through sources like WikiLeaks, and will continue to be released until the November election, but the most damaging material is already public.
Putin is angry at Kremlin officials who “overpromised” about Trump’s chances and reliability, and who minimized the risk of blowback.
The Trump operation was intended to destabilize the U.S. and the Western-oriented international community in general.
Putin sees Western destabilization as advantageous to Russia.
The Trump operation was initially run by the Russian Foreign Ministry, then was run by the FSB, and is now being managed by Putin’s administration.
Win or lose, Trump will be valuable to Russia because he will remain divisive.
Memo #14 October 18, 2016 2016/134
More details on July 2016 meeting in Moscow between Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and Trump adviser Carter Page (Memo #3)
The meeting took place on July 7 or 8, 2016, while Page was in Moscow to speak at the Higher Economic School.
Sechin offered Page and Trump associates up to 19% privatized stake of Rosneft in exchange for getting economic sanctions lifted. Page said that the sanctions would be lifted if Trump won.
Until October 17, 2016, Sechin believed that Trump could win, but is now looking for other avenues to work with the U.S.
Trump lawyer Michael Cohen has been key in the Trump-Russia relationship.
Memo #15 October 19, 2016 2016/135
Paul Manafort had managed the Trump-Russia relationship until he was fired as Trump Campaign Manager in August: then Cohen began handling that relationship.
Cohen is now working to limit exposure of the Trump-Russia operation, and met secretly in August 2016 with Kremlin lawyers in an EU country.
Areas of concern to Cohen include how to deal with U.S. media revelations of Manafort’s relationship with pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and of Carter Page’s secret July meeting with Kremlin officials.
The goal is to ensure that nothing can be proven.
To further avoid detection, the Kremlin used trusted agents as intermediaries such as [the Institute of] Law and Comparative Jurisprudence [IZISP] to communicate. Cohen remained the main point of contact for Trump.
There is further confirmation of shakeups within the Kremlin related to the Trump operation and the desire to cover it up.
Memo #16 October 20, 2016 2016/136
Michael Cohen’s secret meeting with Kremlin representatives in August happened in Prague, Czech Republic.
The meeting was arranged by the NGO Russotrudnichestvo, possibly in their office, to create “plausible deniability.”
Russotrudnichestvo’s Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Russian Foreign Relations Committee, is an important figure in communications between the Trump Campaign and Kremlin. He arranged and possibly attended the meeting.
The meeting was originally scheduled for Moscow, but was moved to Prague to be less obvious.
Memo #17 December 13, 2016 2016/166
Cohen’s meeting in Prague happened in either in the last week of August or first week of September, and he had three other people with him.
One Russian involved was Oleg Solodukhin (via Russotrudnichestvo).
The agenda/discussion included:
Need to make sure that payments to hackers are deniable.
General need to cover tracks from interactions between Russia and the Trump Campaign.
Contingency plans if Hillary wins the election, including making payments to hackers quickly and discreetly and ensuring that they keep a low profile.
Limiting damage from revelations in U.S. press regarding Manafort and Page.
Romanian hackers should “stand down.”
Other operatives should go to Plovdiv, Bulgaria and “lay low.”
From March-September, 2016, [name redacted] company “and its affiliates used botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data, and conduct ‘altering operations’ against the Democratic Party leadership.
Operatives were paid by both the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign, but their loyalties are to Sergei Ivanov and the Russian government in general.
Analysis
Steele’s memos describe a covert Kremlin operation, consistent with known and documented events, to damage the Clinton Campaign and help Trump win the Presidency. If Steele’s findings are accurate, there was active cooperation between people in the Trump Campaign and the Kremlin. Worse, the memos depict the man who has become our President as potentially subject to blackmail by Vladimir Putin – a cunning leader whose interests are hostile to the U.S.
Some potentially relevant background:
During the Cold War, Putin was a high level officer in the KGB and later the FSB – somewhat equivalent to the CIA. He rightly blames the United States for the Soviet Union’s collapse, and would like to see Russia restored to the global power and glory that it enjoyed during the Cold War Era. Putin particularly despises Hillary Clinton, whom he sees as having actively worked to undermine his and Russia’s power.
Part of Putin’s rise to power is believed to have involved an incident similar to the videotaping of Trump in the Moscow Ritz Carlton. The KGB and FSB were known to have hidden cameras and other recording devices in many of the rooms of Russia’s top hotels. In 1997, six years after the fall of the Soviet Union, then-FSB head Putin publicly released video footage of Russia’s Prosecutor General, Yury Skuratov, having sex in a hotel bed with two women, resulting in Skuratov resigning in disgrace. The event was widely believed to have been an FSB operation. [New York Times]
Two years later, Russian President Yeltsin appointed Putin Prime Minister of Russia as a reward for exposing government corruption. Putin moved on to replace Yeltsin.
If Steele’s dossier is accurate, Putin may be using a method against the United States that has yielded positive results for him in the past.
– rob rünt
Read more of this special series:
The Trump-Russia Web
This series explores in depth the House and Senate testimonies (165 pages and 312 pages, respectively) of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson, as well as a handful of related documents, in hopes of providing a clearer picture of the story behind the Trump dossier and the meeting at Trump Tower.
Additional documents covered in this series include:
The Trump dossier, compiled by Christopher Steele (June-December, 2016)
The notes of Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer at the Trump Tower meeting (June 9, 2016)
The introductory statement of William Browder to the Senate Judiciary Committee (July 26, 2017)
The Nunes memo (released February2, 2018)
Each Simpson testimony takes two tracks. Republicans mainly focused their questions on Fusion’s research work on a legal case against a company called Prevezon Holdings. Democrats mainly focused on opposition research that Fusion did for partisan clients into Donald Trump.
My Biases
I have strong (generally left-leaning) opinions about Trump/Russia, but my goal is to be as neutral as possible in this series: my ultimate objective is to understand the truth. I began writing this as much to help myself figure things out as to present it to others. As such, there is information in this series supporting both Democratic and Republican biases.
My general belief has been that Donald Trump may or may not have personally “colluded” with Russian efforts to help him win the 2016 Presidential campaign, but that some of his campaign staff were involved with the Russians and cooperated with Russian efforts. I also believe that over the course of his real estate career, Trump has been involved in money laundering, and that a fair amount of that has been for Russians.
I believe that the Kremlin may very possibly have “kompromat” on Trump, in the form described in the Steele dossier. More likely, however, I think that they also have kompromat on Trump related to money laundering for Russian organized crime figures and oligarchs. I believe that Trump knows that the Kremlin has this kompromat on him, which is why he is so uncharacteristically positive about Putin and Russia, and why his actions related to Putin have been so opaque.
I believe that because some of Putin’s kompromat on Trump relates to Trump’s finances, it is essential for Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation to include an in-depth examination of those finances in order to understand possible motives for “collusion.” Because money laundering is, by its nature, intentionally complex and its purpose is to conceal and obscure the truth within that complexity, Mueller’s investigation will likely need a very long time to reach completion.
I came away from Simpson’s testimonies with all of these beliefs intact. However, I also came away with an awareness that there is much more to the story than what I had heard – including a not-insignificant connection between Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, the attorney who met with Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner at Trump Tower. Glossing over this connection would enable readers to avoid potentially coming to an understanding that is less cut and dry than the generally accepted Democratic narrative: this series will not ignore that connection.
Why were Glenn Simpson’s testimonies made public?
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, appointed by President Trump, named former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to conduct an independent investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, potential cooperation between the Kremlin and the Trump Campaign, and allegations that President Trump obstructed justice. The U.S. House and Senate have also been conducting their own investigations.
Of all of the investigations, Mueller’s is the one most likely to reveal the truth in depth, due to Mueller’s advantages of time, resources and staff, as well as a decreased likelihood of partisan influence in what he allows as evidence in his investigation.
Many Republicans and Democrats have (differing) objections to the way that some of these investigations are taking place. Many Democrats support the proper completion of all investigations, and believe that Republicans – including some on the investigating committees – are trying to sabotage the investigations and undermine the credibility of Mueller and the FBI, possibly as a pretext for cutting short Mueller’s investigation before anything damaging to Trump is discovered.
Many Republicans believe that people within the FBI are part of a “deep state” operation to sabotage the Trump Presidency. They believe that the work of Fusion GPS was either a part of that effort, was part of a misinformation campaign by the Russian government, or was part of a partisan effort to help Clinton win the election by creating a fake reason to investigate and discredit Trump as a candidate and as President.
On August 17, 2017, the Senate Judiciary Committee interviewed Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS, the organization whose contractor Christopher Steele produced the infamous Trump dossier. Simpson voluntarily made himself available for 10 hours of interviewing. On November 14, 2017, Simpson gave and additional 6 hours of testimony under oath to the House Intelligence Committee.
On January 5, 2018, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called for an investigation into Christopher Steele’s distribution of information from his Trump investigation. Simpson said that Fusion stood by their research, and expressed a desire to make the transcript of his testimony public.
On January 9, 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), concerned that Grassley’s and Graham’s demands were potentially part of Republican efforts to undermine the investigation, made public the entire transcript of Simpsons Senate Judiciary testimony without advance notice to the rest of the Judiciary Committee. The testimony provided an extremely revealing look into the information that is shaping opinions on both sides of the aisle.
On January 18, 2018, after Simpson also expressed a desire for his House testimony to be made public, the House Intelligence Committee made public the entire transcript of that testimony as well.
– rob rünt
Read more of this special series:
The Trump-Russia Web
The Week In Trump 