Dossier compiler feared blackmail
WASHINGTON — The former British spy who compiled a dossier of allegations about Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia brought the document to the FBI in July 2016 because he was worried about “whether a political candidate was being blackmailed,” according to a congressional interview transcript released Tuesday.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, revealed the transcript from an August closed-door interview with Glenn Simpson, a co-founder of the political opposition research firm Fusion GPS. The firm commissioned the dossier, which was initially paid for by a conservative website and then later by Democrats, including Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
Feinstein made the transcript public over the objections of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, who called the move “confounding” in a statement shortly after Feinstein made it public. Grassley said the release could undermine attempts to interview other witnesses in the committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
In the transcript, Simpson said Christopher Steele, the former British spy who wrote the dossier, took it to the FBI and said his concern was “whether or not there was blackmail going on, whether a political candidate was being blackmailed or had been compromised.”
The dossier is a compilation of memos written by Steele during the 2016 campaign that contained allegations of connections between Trump and Russia, including that Trump had been compromised by the Kremlin.
Trump has derided the dossier as a politically motivated hit job. Following his lead, several GOP-led committees are now investigating whether the dossier formed the basis for the FBI’s initial investigations. Simpson has denied that it did and, according to the transcript, told investigators that the FBI told Steele that the government also had intelligence from “an internal Trump campaign source.” Simpson would not name the source.
According to Simpson, Steele flew to Rome to meet an FBI agent stationed there for his second debriefing before the November election. He said the FBI contact told Steele that there was renewed interest in his research because the bureau had corroborated some of the material.
Simpson told investigators it was his understanding that the FBI “believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.”
Citing Republicans’ attempt to discredit the dossier, Simpson had called for the release of the closed-door interviews he has done as part of congressional Russia investigations, including his interview with the Judiciary committee. He has also talked to the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Feinstein said Americans deserve to see what Simpson said.
“The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice,” Feinstein said in a statement. “The only way to set the record straight is to make the transcript public.”
The disagreement between Grassley and Feinstein is further evidence of conflict on the panel after an initially bipartisan investigation.