Trump-Russia dossier firm just told all in bombshell NY Times op-ed

The opposition research firm that prepared the Trump-Russia dossier just broke its silence in a revealing New York Times op-editorial story which debunks the Republican spin machine desperate to prop up Donald Trump’s sinking presidency.

As Fusion GPS principals Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch explain in their story in the Times, their lengthy report on Trump’s wrongdoing was delivered to Congress in written and oral form, only to be ignored by Republicans.

For their own partisan reasons, GOP lawmakers are more interested in the research firm’s bank statements instead of following the money to Trump’s illegal activity. The Fusion GPS co-founders wroteThe Republicans’ Fake Investigations:”

Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories… We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter.

Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

A bombshell story in the Times this weekend revealed that the Trump Campaign’s convicted foreign campaign advisor was the true starting point for the FBI’s investigation into Russian election attacks against Hillary Clinton. Fusion explained:

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

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

Add your name to millions demanding Congress take action on the President’s crimes. IMPEACH TRUMP & PENCE!

Fusion GPS’s principals Simpson and Fritsch are former Wall Street Journal reporters who began investigating Donald Trump’s numerous ties to Russia when a partisan Republican news outlet, funded by mega-donor Paul Singer, hired them to begin the research.

Eventually, the Clinton campaign finished funding its research, which is when Fusion GPS hired an ex-MI-6 officer, Christopher Steele. He had recently worked with the FBI to bring down international soccer’s corrupt FIFA organization.

Coincidentally, the American informant who flipped after his role in FIFA’s corruption was revealed, happened to live in a $6,000 a month apartment in Trump Tower and was a friend of Donald Trump since the 1990s.

Ultimately, Fusion’s reporting was far more than just the 35-page dossier with explosive allegations of a “pee tape” which Buzzfeed exposed last January.

They delivered over 40,000 pages to the Senate, which Fusion wrote in the Times both contains Trump’s ties to numerous shady deals and silences multiple Republican conspiracy theories entirely:

We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.

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

Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.

Christopher Steele’s contacts to Russia uncovered information that Fusion considered “shocking” about Putin’s support for Trump, that he chose to alert the FBI and they deferred to their vendors’ expertise.

After the election, Fusion GPS and Steele – at the British former intelligence officer’s direction, without telling their clients – delivered a copy of their report’s conclusions to Senator John McCain, because they believed that the stakes were dire and the information wasn’t getting through. They wrote:

“The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power.”

Russia attacked America’s political process, our elections and has tamed our President to the point of our country’s former Director of National Intelligence decided to publicly call Trump Vladimir Putin’s asset.

Shamefully, the GOP is so highly adapted to covering up crimes and inventing false stories to investigate that they’d prefer to let a foreign country run the Oval Office, so long as a Republican is in power.

Fusion’s op-editorial is the most blatant reminder yet that the Republican Party’s Senators and representatives have abandoned their oaths of office to defend the Constitution of the United States of America from enemies domestic and foreign, preferring to lie and obfuscate and perpetually investigate the investigators at the FBI and Special Counsel Mueller’s office.

The fate of America’s democratic form of government hangs in the balance.

Grant Stern

Editor at Large

is the Executive Editor of Occupy Democrats and published author. His new Meet the Candidates 2020 book series is distributed by Simon and Schuster. He's also a mortgage broker, community activist and radio personality in Miami, Florida., as well as the producer of the Dworkin Report podcast. Grant is also an occasional contributor to Raw Story, Alternet, and the DC Report, an unpaid senior advisor to the Democratic Coalition, and a Director of Sunshine Agenda Inc. a government transparency nonprofit organization. Get all of his stories sent directly to your inbox here: