US House panel can now access records of firm

Washington, Oct. 29: The US House Intelligence Committee on Saturday said it had reached an agreement related to its subpoena of a Washington research firm’s bank records that would secure access to records for the panel’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The announcement came a day after a federal judge had given an unnamed bank more time to respond to the congressional panel’s subpoena to Fusion GPS, the research outfit that hired a former British spy to compile a dossier on presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online publication backed by billionaire Republican mega-donor Paul Singer, said on Friday it was the original funder of the Fusion GPS project to compile opposition research on multiple Republican presidential candidates, including Mr Trump.

The US President and other Republicans have alleged that Russians paid Fusion GPS for research on their own dealings with the president and his campaign.

But the Free Beacon said all the material it was provided came from public sources and that the effort was separate from a former British spy’s dossier of allegations of Russian financial and personal links to President Donald Trump’s campaign and associates.

Known as the Steele dossier because it was compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, the document identified Russian businessmen and others whom US Intelligence analysts have concluded are Russian intelligence officers or working on behalf of the Russian government.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee began paying Fusion GPS in April 2016 for research on Mr Trump, an arrangement that later produced the Steele dossier.