Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Conservative site: Funded Trump probe
WASHINGTON — A conservative website said Friday that it paid a Washington research firm to start probing Donald Trump’s background when he was a presidential candidate — a move that set in motion a chain of events leading to a dossier alleging ties between Trump associates and Russia.
In a statement, the Washington Free Beacon said it retained Fusion GPS to provide research on multiple Republican candidates in the 2016 presidential election.
But the Free Beacon said its research ended before Fusion GPS hired a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, to produce a series of reports alleging links between Russia and those close to Trump.
“None of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier,” said the statement from Free Beacon editor in chief Mathew Continetti and chairman Michael Goldfarb. “We stand by our reporting and we do not apologize for our methods.”
The Free Beacon’s lawyers notified the House Intelligence Committee of its role in the matter Friday. Two people familiar with billionaire GOP donor Paul Singer said he provides financial support to the journalism website.
After the Free Beacon stopped paying Fusion GPS, the research firm offered in April 2016 to continue researching Trump for the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. That work came to include hiring Steele to investigate Trump’s possible ties to the Kremlin.
The Washington Post reported this week that Clinton’s campaign and the DNC had paid millions to a Washington law firm, which in turn paid Fusion GPS.
The Free Beacon said it did not know at the time that the Clinton campaign and the DNC hired Fusion GPS later to continue the work.
Also on Friday, a former U.S. intelligence official denied Republican suggestions that the dossier could have been used to justify surveillance as part of an investigation into Trump and his associates.
The former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the dossier didn’t exist as a formal document when the FBI began its investigation in July 2016, and it wouldn’t have been used as a basis to obtain eavesdropping warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It’s possible, however, that the FBI was made aware of some of the allegations that eventually went into the dossier, and those allegations played a role in the FBI opening its investigation, the former official said.
House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes and Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley are demanding answers about who paid for the dossier and whether U.S. agencies relied on its unverified accusations to launch a spy investigation. Some of the allegations in the dossier, including that there were some contacts between Russians and members of the Trump campaign, have since been confirmed.
Nunes has also subpoenaed bank records of Fusion GPS, which produced the dossier, prompting a court challenge to block disclosure.
After his hiring, Steele came up with a long list of unverified allegations about the then-presidential candidate, including contacts between Russian officials and his staff during his campaign, as well as claims that Moscow possesses salacious and compromising information about Trump.
Trump has denied the allegations in the dossier. But Republicans say they now want to know whether a dossier that was developed as political-opposition research was used by the government to justify counterintelligence action and surveillance.
“Now we need to find out how the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies used that information,” Nunes of California said in a statement. Grassley of Iowa has also asked the Justice Department and FBI a similar question.
Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said the financing of that anti-Trump research isn’t particularly pertinent to what the Russians did during the election.
Schiff and other Democrats are also quick to point to a broader slate of what they claim are Republican attempts to divert the probes’ focus.
For example, House Republicans announced this week they are looking into the Justice Department’s 2016 handling of Clinton’s use of personal emails while secretary of state, as well as President Barack Obama’s administration’s approval of a 2010 deal that gave Russians partial control over American uranium reserves.
Separately, Trump urged the Justice Department to allow an FBI informant to testify before Congress about the Russian uranium efforts, a senior White House adviser confirmed Friday.
Trump supported the request of Grassley, who last week asked the Justice Department to lift the undercover informant’s gag order.
“It is not unusual for a president to weigh in,” Trump’s senior adviser, Kellyanne Conway, said on CNN on Friday, rebutting numerous legal analysts who say otherwise.
“He believes — and many others do — frankly, that the FBI informant should be free to say what he knows,” Conway said.
Despite investigations that found no wrongdoing, Trump has repeatedly pointed to the Obama administration’s approval of the 2010 sale of U.S. uranium mines to a company backed by the Russian government as an example of Clinton’s helping the Russians.