Conservative website fi rst hired ‘ dossier’ fi rm

WASHINGTON — The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website funded by a major Republican donor, first hired the research firm that months later produced for Democrats the salacious dossier describing ties between Donald Trump and the Russian government, the website said Friday.

The Free Beacon, funded in large part by New York hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer, hired the firm, Fusion GPS, in 2015 to unearth damaging information about several Republican presidential candidates, including Trump. But the Free Beacon told the firm to stop doing research on Trump in May 2016, as Trump was clinching the Republican nomination.

After that, Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for Fusion GPS research that eventually became the basis for the dossier.

The Free Beacon on Friday informed the House Intelligence Committee that it had retained Fusion GPS. The intelligence committee is one of a number of congressional committees investigating Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 election and whether any of Trump’s associates aided the campaign.

The role of the website answers one of the lingering mysteries behind the events leading up to the production of the dossier and its publication by BuzzFeed in January. It has long been known that Fusion GPS was first hired by Republicans, but it was not known who was the source of the funding. This week, Trump and his allies seized on the fact that Democrats had paid Fusion GPS for the research as evidence that the dossier was part of a political smear campaign.

At the heart of the story is Fusion GPS, a Washingtonbased research firm founded by former Wall Street Journal employees.

The Free Beacon’s editor, Matthew Continetti, and its chairman, Michael Goldfarb, said in a statement that the website was not involved in the dossier.

“All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to The Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that The Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier,” they said.

There also was a new development regarding the Democratic involvement in the dossier, as The Washington Post reported that when Marc Elias, general counsel for Clinton’s presidential campaign, hired Fusion GPS in the spring of 2016 to investigate Trump, he drew from funds he was authorized to spend without oversight by campaign officials, according to a spokesperson for his law firm.

While the funding for the work came from the campaign and the Democratic National Committee, Elias kept the information about the investigation closely held as he advised the campaign on its strategy, according to the spokesperson, who requested anonymity.

Elias declined to comment.