Former Trump campaign associate Carter Page filed a defamation
lawsuit Monday against the Democratic National Committee and its law
firm, which commissioned the infamous Steele dossier. Page filed
the suit in federal court in Oklahoma against the DNC, the law firm,
Perkins Coie, and two of its partners, Marc Elias and Michael Sussmann.
Perkins
Coie, which also represented the Hillary Clinton campaign, is the firm
that hired Fusion GPS, the opposition researcher that investigated
Donald Trump’s links to Russia.
Elias was Perkins Coie’s main contact to Fusion GPS, which was founded by three former Wall Street Journal reporters. As part of the $1 million project, Fusion GPS hired former British spy Christopher Steele
to conduct the investigation. The result was a 35-page dossier full of
allegations that the Kremlin is blackmailing Trump and that the Trump
campaign conspired with Russian operatives to influence the election. (RELATED: Here Is How Much The DNC And Clinton Campaign Paid For The Trump Dossier)
Page, an energy consultant, features prominently in the dossier, though he vehemently denies its allegations.
In
the report, which was provided to numerous journalists and the FBI,
Steele alleged that Page was the Trump campaign’s back channel to the
Kremlin for the purposes of conspiring to influence the election. Steele
cited anonymous sources who claimed that it was Page’s idea to release
stolen DNC emails through Wikileaks. The dossier also alleged that Page
met secretly with two Kremlin insiders, Igor Sechin and Igor Diveykin,
during a trip to Moscow in July 2016. Page has repeatedly denied meeting
with either man.
Steele and Fusion GPS
briefed numerous reporters on the allegations about Page, though only
Yahoo! News published a story on the topic prior to the election. Page
previously sued Yahoo’s parent company, Oath, Inc., over the article,
which was published on Sept. 23, 2016. The lawsuit was dismissed in May,
but Page has appealed the decision.
The dossier’s claims about
Page did not stop just with media stories. The FBI relied heavily on
Steele’s unverified report to obtain four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants
against Page. The first warrant was granted on Oct. 21, 2016, shortly
after Page left the campaign. The fourth and final warrant expired in
September 2017. Follow Chuck on Twitter
American Greatness D Hawthorne| April 29th, 2018 Unparalleled government abuses of power are about to become public. The question is what we, the people, will do in response to this overt attempt by deep state players to strip us of our freedom.
Unraveling the Deep State Narrative: Third of a Three-Part Series. Read Part One. Read Part Two.
Four recent developments drive home the unsettling nature of our situation:
First, Charles Lipson writes how Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) “is making a deeply troubling allegation: An official investigation was mounted against an American presidential campaign with no official information to support it. If so, then U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were weaponized for partisan purposes.”
Andrew McCarthy, on the implications for equal justice under the law: “Too many Trump critics have abandoned all pretense of respecting due process.” Byron York adds: “…the generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head. Now, the question is: Can the accused prove the charges false? Increasingly, the president’s critics argue that the dossier is legitimate because it has not been proven untrue.”
Second, a redacted version of the House Intelligence Committee’s final report appeared on Friday, clearing Trump’s campaign of colluding with Russia but describing threetroubling matters: First, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn did not lie to FBI special agents. Instead, what Michael Walsh calls the Left’s “Star Chamber of Horrors” apparently forced Flynn to accept a guilty plea to stanch his financial bleeding, which included selling his home.
Also, Sean Davis reports Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “leaked details of a [Steele] dossier briefing given to then-President-elect Donald Trump to CNN’s Jake Tapper, lied to Congress about the leak, and was rewarded with a CNN contract a few months later.” The chronology of Clapper’s and CNN’s behaviors is a damning tale of intentional deep state sabotage of a president. Finally, a group of wealthy individuals has funded $50 million for a new effort by Fusion GPS, Christopher Steele, and a former staffer of Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California) to continue a Russian investigation.
Think about it. The Clinton campaign funded political opposition research that nobody anywhere has proven to be true, but the same players who generated these unverified tales are going to keep trying for more. Call it what it is: yet another attempt to overturn the 2016 election.
Third, this week also saw the unjustifiedcharacter assassinationof White House physician Admiral Ronny Jackson. The Left’s lies worked again. Neverending “lawfare“ is how the Left will make things too costly for anyone to affiliate with Trump, thereby neutering the president’s ability to govern. No end is in sight there, either. Ask Scott Pruitt.
Fourth, there was Obama’s CIA Director John Brennan’s brazen threat to Trump in response to the president’s tweet, saying “A highly partisan, incomplete, and deeply flawed report by a broken House Committee means nothing. The Special Counsel’s work is being carried out by professional investigators—not political staffers. SC’s findings will be comprehensive & authoritative. Stay tuned, Mr. Trump….” Stunning words, butnotnewbehavior.
These recent developments feed into an even more frightening bigger picture, as Victor Davis Hanson writes: “We are entering revolutionary times. The law is no longer equally applied. The media are the ministry of truth. The Democratic party is a revolutionary force. And it is all getting scary.”
Dennis Prager describes the underlying differences: “We’re in a fight over basic values . . . The Left . . . is opposed to every . . . core principle of liberalism,” adding “If the Left is not defeated, American and Western civilization will not survive. But the Left will not be defeated until good liberals understand this and join the fight. Dear liberals: The Left is [your enemy].”
Daniel Greenfield outlines the battle lines: “[The Left] wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The Left has rejected all forms of authority it doesn’t control . . . their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology. That’s why compromise has become impossible . . . This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.”
The Possum Stirs With some factual basis and no small amount of hope, 2018 will prove to be the year that we discover Attorney General Jeff Sessions played possum and fooled many people. Why would he act that way? With weaponized agencies, few to trust in an often-hostile Justice Department, and most likely only one try possible to take down the well-entrenched deep state rogues who are trying to unseat a president, no missteps can occur. Furthermore, Trump and Sessions have known for months now what everyone is only lately realizing: there is nothing to the Russian collusion charges. So if they knew they were clean, then they could set traps and be patient.
Sessions’ recusal from the Russia probe drove many people on the Right crazy. But the timing was essential. It followed the start of the inspector general’s investigationprior to Trump’s inauguration, and so has given Sessions “plausible deniability” for partisan maneuvering until the first IG report comes out in May. Then Sessions will have the credibility in the months ahead of the November midterm elections to root out the deep state with the same intensity he pursued and destroyed the Alabama KKK. It is even possible that Trump’s repeated public criticisms of Sessions have been meant to further enhance Sessions’ perceived independence.
Sessions won’t be beginning from a standing start when the inspector general’s final email investigation report (the first of several remaining reports) appears next month. He greatly ramped upleak investigations throughout 2017, personnel changes have already occurred, and some remaining staff may be cooperatingwitnesses. In December, Sessions made three important decisions: He re-opened an investigation into Obama’s squashing of the DEA’s Hezbollah drug-dealing investigation in order to keep his Iran deal on track. Ordered a new look into the Clinton Uranium Onecollusiondeal, which has real Russian players and a Mueller connection. Launched a new inquiry into the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play corruption.
The fact patterns behind these various scandals are generally known; it is only a matter of when to pounce.
Sessions recently directed Inspector General Michael Horowitz to expand his investigation into FISA abuses, building on a March 15 Senate request and the January 18 House Intelligence Committee report which cited sources not interviewed by the committee. That suggests prior coordination of efforts and information-sharing.
We have also learned Sessions appointed two key people: U.S. Attorney John Huber was appointed some time ago to work closely with Horowitz, operating from his home base of Utah. This appointment creates a potentially powerful tag-team able to move rapidly from the inspector general referrals identifying evidence of bad behaviors to criminal indictments. U.S. Attorney John Lausch was appointed to work closely with congressional oversight committees on document production, a longstanding problem in prior times and one that can better be addressed as the inspector general’s work is nearing completion. Lausch’s work will help keep Huber focused on his job and allow indictment-related documents to remain secret until legal referrals and indictments actions are prepared.
If you think Trump is a piece of work now, wait until he has public ammunition about an ongoing soft coup attempt against a legitimately elected president. Part of his power comes from reacting at just the right time and making other people look foolish or worse.
An Action Plan for the Fight of our Lives Wretchard T. Cat tweets: “The fight for the control of Washington, after a ton of preliminaries and battlespace preparation, is now truly underway.”
First, recognize that we are already in a war for America’s future and, so far, we are losing. The Left’s ongoing refusal to accept the results of the 2016 election and live according to the rule of law, along with their willingness to destroy people’s lives, are irreconcilable with a constitutional republic of self-governing people. There can be no negotiated settlement over such fundamental differences. We must boldly reclaim the righteousness of liberty and equal justice under the law on behalf of all Americans.
Second, winning the war will require unprecedented courage. It is highly likely that the deep state is already engaged in blackmail and bribery to neutralize opponents. We should expect such efforts only to increase and those efforts should be called out. Yet, we know that only a small number of Americans—acting like NSA Director Mike Rogers, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, and Inspector General Michael Horowitz—can change the momentum and get the liberty flywheel turning.
Winning will also require more people to adopt Trump’s “honey badger” mindset, afearlessnesswhich will be crucial as the fighting becomes more intense. Third, frame the 2018 election as an existential moment in our country’s history, as a choice between being a free people who rule themselves versus life as subjects ruled by and dependent upon a rogue ruling class. Openly call the latter out for the evil they are doing—a slow-motioncoup d’etat. Reclaiming the promise of self-government will be a multi-generation war.
The definition of winning the short-term 2018 battle is to swing election outcomes by holding the 2016 Trump base and persuading at least 7 percent (1 in 14) of the non-Trump 2016 voters (like AlanDershowitz and even President Clinton’s pollster Mark Penn) who, regardless of specific policy preferences, place a high value on retaining traditional liberal values such as civil liberties and equal justice under the law.
Fourth, let the American people learn the jarring truth by rapidly declassifying every relevant Obama Administration document that highlights abuses of power by Obama, Clinton, Brennan, Clapper, Mueller, Comey, McCabe, Holder, Lynch, Yates, Rice, Power, Jarrett, Podesta, Wasserman-Schultz, and various other Justice Department and FBI personnel. Take the public debate beyond “he said, she said” talk. Promote the inevitable black hat infighting as they increasinglyturn oneach otheronce the spotlight is on their wrongdoing.
Fifth, indict and punish every one of the rogues based on those facts. This, with no plea bargains for any higher-level people, is a crucial step toward rebuilding the confidence of the American people that equal justice under the law can be recovered. Then radically restructure the Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence community.
Sixth, after the IG reports come out, pardon those who have been subjected to prosecutorial abuses. Insist Congressimpeach Rosenstein—assuming he doesn’t resign first. All of this will neuter Robert Mueller, eliminating the need to fire him.
Seventh, make a clear case to the American people every week of every month, trusting they will recognize the choice before us is a stark one and rise to the occasion. Trust in their desire to see all Americans treated equallyunder the law and to live as a free people.
Reinhold Niebuhr described what we face: “There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war.”
Victory over this powerful enemy is uncertain. But we learned from our fight with Communism that evil’s Achilles’ heel is hubris and history teaches us they are vulnerable to the weapons of truthandcourage. In these dark times, how can we be anything but Americans, and accept the character call to rise to the challenge and be a heroic people?
Image credit: James Montgomery Flagg
Thank You American Greatness and Very Well Put, Mr Hawthorn.
Even in defeat, you have to pay the Clintons. The former first lady
and two-time presidential loser is forcing the cash-strapped Democratic
National Committee to dole out nearly $2 million for access to their
email list through Onward Together, according to The Intercept. The
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has paid $700,000 to use the
same data. It showcases that while Democratic voter enthusiasm is high,
the party apparatus is in a terrible state of disrepair. The army of
small-donors has collapsed, new donor attraction is lackluster, debts
are in the millions of dollars, with the DNC taking out a loan totaling
almost $2 million just to keep the lights on. And while the Obama
campaign gifted their data, the publication added that Democrats aren’t
viewing this as a favor at all since he turned his Organizing for Action
group into a direct DNC competitor, further hamstringing the national
committee (via The Intercept):
Heading
into the 2018 midterms, with Democrats hoping to take back the House of
Representatives and even make a run at the Senate, the party has spent
more than $2 million worth of campaign resources on payments to Hillary
Clinton’s new group, Onward Together, according to Federal Election
Commission filings and interviews with people familiar with the
payments.
The Democratic National Committee is paying $1.65
million for access to the email list, voter data, and software produced
by Hillary for America during the 2016 presidential campaign, Xochitl
Hinojosa, a spokesperson for the DNC, told The Intercept. The Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee has paid more than $700,000 to rent
the same email list.
Clinton is legally entitled to rent her list
to the party, rather than hand it over as a gift, but in 2015, Barack
Obama gave his email list, valued at $1,942,640, to the DNC as an
in-kind contribution. In 2013 and 2014, OFA had similarly made in-kind
contributions exceeding $3.4 million for uses of the list that cycle.
Obama’s
list was at one point considered to be the most valuable in politics
and raised more than twice as much money for the 2012 Obama campaign as
Clinton’s did for hers in 2016. The DNC agreement with the Clinton
campaign calls on the debt-ridden organization to fork the money over to
an entity of Clinton’s choosing, which wound up being Onward Together,
the operation she formed after her campaign ceased to exist. […] Despite
Obama’s willingness to gift the DNC with his email list, he is not seen
as a savior within the building. After he was elected in 2008, he
turned his campaign organization, Organizing for Action, into a parallel
DNC, starving the real one of funds. During that time, if a party
committee such as the DCCC wanted access to OFA, it had to rent it. When
he finally turned the OFA list over to the DNC in 2015, it had been
battered like a rental car, and the organization was a shell of itself,
mismanaged and neglected to the brink of insolvency. It was in that
context that the party committee struck up its secret deal with the
Clinton campaign to salvage itself — setting off the charges of
favoritism in the 2016 campaign that continue to dog the party today.
Did this go through a budget committee? No. Are stats parties fully funded right now? No. https://t.co/IgMfIRk6mK
We’ll
see if this has any impact on the party’s long-term goals, especially
their long walk out of the wilderness at the state-level, which will
take significant resources. Hillary Clinton promised to rebuild the state parties
should she win the 2016 election. The virtual wipeout of Democrats at
the state and local level occurred under Obama’s watch and the former
president did little to stem the tide. Since 2009 until the end of his
presidency, the Democrats lost 1,000 seats. They got walloped.
Now,
both Clinton and Obama, the titans of the party, are hamstringing it
from becoming financially solvent. Obama for creating a de facto
separate committee and Hillary saying, “pay me” for her data lists. So,
while the Republicans have their issues (recruiting crappy candidates,
gaffes, etc.) the Democratic problems seem to be much more systemic,
complicated further by a vampire-like Clintonite element bleeding the
virtually bankrupt DNC dry. Oh, and she's going to be fundraising for the Democrats ahead of the 2018 midterms with a dismal 27 percent approval
rating.
Democrats want the media and the GOP to stop talking about
Hillary and the 2016 election. Maybe that'll stop when they finally get
rid of her, but they can't; they don't have any heavyweights on their
bench to headline major money haul events. So, pick your poison.
DNC Chair Tom Perez refused to answer questions Tuesday about former interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile’s accusations against the Democratic group as he attended the gubernatorial victory party for Virginia Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam.
Brazile published excerpts of her latest book “Hacks” in Politico last week, which include incriminating accusations against the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign during the 2016 presidential election.
Her excerpts detail a “Joint Fund-Raising Agreement between the DNC, the Hillary Victory Fund, and Hillary for America” in which the Clinton campaign agreed to financially bail out a broke DNC in exchange for influence over DNC strategies before the Democratic primary.
But Perez had no desire to talk about the accusations of his predecessor Tuesday night.
“You know what,” Perez told The Daily Caller when asked about Brazile’s book, “We just won an election. That’s the last thing on my mind.”
When TheDC asked Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, who also attended Northam’s victory party, what he thought about the claims against the DNC, he refused to answer directly, stating, “Virginia Democrats have been about actually getting things done and people respond to that.”
The Clinton campaign addressed Brazile’s claims by accusing Brazile of spreading “false Russian-fueled propaganda.” The DNC, however, has not directly commented on Brazile’s accusations. Thank You Ms Nista and the DC.
dailycaller Thomas Phippen 9:15 AM 11/07/2017 The Democratic party was “leeched it of its vitality” by Former President Barack Obama and others in the lead-up to the 2016 election campaign, according to Donna Brazile, former interim chair of the Democratic National Committee.
“We had three Democratic parties: The party of Barack Obama, the party of Hillary Clinton, and this weak little vestige of a party led by [Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz] that was doing a very poor job getting people who were not president elected,” Brazile writes in her new book “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House,” released Tuesday.
Many of the revelations in Brazile’s book revolve around the deep debt the Democratic party was facing at the end of Obama’s presidency and the lengths it had to go to to survive a national presidential race. Obama’s use of party funds for private pollsters and focus groups drained the party, and Wasserman Schultz’s leadership as party chairman failed to address the problem. Clinton then bailed out the party in order to gain control of it, according to Brazile.
“This was not working to strengthen the party. He left it in debt. Hillary bailed it out so that she could control it, and Debbie went along with all of this because she liked the power and perks of being a chair but not the responsibilities,” Brazile said.
Obama, who swept the 2008 Democratic presidential primary away from then-senator Clinton, didn’t have the same connection to the DNC that other party leaders had.
“Barack never had seen himself as connected to the party. He had not come up through it the way Joe Biden and Hillary had, but had sprung up almost on his own and never had any trouble raising money for his campaigns,” Brazile wrote.
Obama “used the party to provide for political expenses like gifts to donors, and political travel.” Because he “also cared deeply about his image,” he used DNC funds for “his pollster and focus groups” late into his second term, even though he couldn’t run for president, Brazile said.
Paying of the party’s debt made the DNC beholden to Clinton and her the de facto head of the party, Brazile wrote. Most decisions had to be run through Clinton’s Brooklyn, N.Y., headquarters. Brazile referred to it as the “high command of Brooklyn” on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos Sunday.
Despite blaming Obama, Clinton and Wasserman Schultz for the party’s troubles, she admitted that the three do love the Democratic party.
“I knew that these three did not do this with malice. I knew if you woke any of them up in the middle of the night to ask them how they felt about the Democratic Party they would answer with sincerity that they loved this party and all it had done for the country and for them. Yet they had leeched it of its vitality and were continuing to do so,” Brazile said.
Brazile, who took over as interim chair of the DNC after Wasserman Schultz stepped down in scandal just before the Democratic National Convention in 2016, has been criticized for turning against her own in recent months.
“As I saw it, these three titanic egos–Barack, Hillary, and Debbie–had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes,” Brazile wrote.
Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez incorrectly stated "the Electoral College is not a creation of the Constitution" during a Tuesday night speech.
"The Electoral College is not a creation of the Constitution," Perez said during a lecture at Indiana University Law School. "It doesn’t have to be there."
The Electoral College, a mechanism for indirect election of the president created by the Founding Fathers as a compromise between smaller states and larger states, is clearly laid out in Article II of the Constitution: "Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress."
Perez has previously stated that President Donald Trump "didn’t win" last November’s election because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, but he has never denied the fact that it is part of the Constitution.
The DNC did not respond to an inquiry into whether Perez truly thinks the "Electoral College is not a creation of the Constitution."
There are many educational resources available on the Internet that provide clear explanations of what is in the document, including many from the National Constitution Center, which was established by Congress to provide a "non-partisan … understanding of the Constitution among the American people."
"Rather than being elected directly by the people, the president is elected by members of the Electoral College, which is created by Article II, Section 1," it explains.
Following his comment, Perez went on to explain his hopes that states agree to a "national popular vote compact," in which states agree to give their allocated electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.
"There's a national popular vote compact in which a number of states have passed a bill that says, we will allocate our vote, our electoral votes, to the person who wins the national popular vote once other states totaling 170 electoral votes do the same," Perez said. "I’m frankly proud to tell you that the first state to pass such a law was Maryland."
The main supporters of the plan put forward by Perez seem to understand it is a plan to circumvent the system created by the Constitution, not an argument that the system doesn’t exist.
Most critiques of the Electoral College, such as this one from Slate, which describes it as "a democratically indefensible anachronism that dilutes minority votes while disproportionately amplifying whites votes," also recognize that it is part of the Constitution.
"The Electoral College remains lodged in our Constitution, and this year, for the fourth time in history, it elevated to the presidency a candidate who lost the popular vote," writes Slate in its lead paragraph.
The comment from Perez came during a lecture honoring former Indiana Democratic Sen. Birch Bayh, who was accused last year of sexual assault by a writer who said Bayh groped her in the backseat of a limousine.
The DNC did not respond to an inquiry into whether Perez was aware of the allegations when he accepted the speaking opportunity.
The DNC was criticized earlier this month when it announced it would be keeping much of the money it was given by Hollywood megadonor Harvey Weinstein, who has been widely accused of rape and sexual assault. This entry was posted in Politics and tagged DNC, Tom Perez. Bookmark the permalink.
Thank You Mr Scher and Free Beacon.
And if there's One Thing you can always count on a Democrat for, it's having their facts right.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) released a former FBI informant from a confidentiality agreement, allowing him to testify before Congress about what he saw while undercover during a former President Barack Obama-era deal where a Russian-backed company bought a uranium firm with mines in the U.S.
Congressional committees have previously tried to interview the informant, whose name has yet to be released, due to the fact he was undercover for around five years, working to get information on Russia’s efforts to grow its atomic energy business in the U.S.
DOJ spokeswoman Sarah Isgur Flores told The Hill a deal was reached, clearing the informant to talk to Congress for the first time — nearly eight years after he first went undercover for the FBI.
“As of tonight, the Department of Justice has authorized the informant to disclose to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as well as one member of each of their staffs, any information or documents he has concerning alleged corruption or bribery involving transactions in the uranium market, including but not limited to anything related to Vadim Mikerin, Rosatom, Tenex, Uranium One, or the Clinton Foundation,” Flores said.
On Tuesday morning, two House chairmen announced a probe into new reports about Russian efforts to influence the Uranium One nuclear purchase that gave Russia control of roughly 20 percent of America’s uranium.
When Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, Russia routed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and former President Bill Clinton collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in Russian speaking fees as part of Russian efforts to influence the U.S. government to approve the deal, The Hill reported.
The informant’s attorney, Victoria Toensing, said former attorney generals under the Obama administration, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, are the reason her client hasn’t been able to “tell what all the Russians were talking about during the time that all these bribery payments were made,” on Fox Business Monday.
Cash from the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee may very well have ended up in the hands of Russian operatives who served as sources for the infamous and uncorroborated Trump dossier.
Here’s how.
It was revealed on Tuesday that the Clinton campaign and DNC began paying Fusion GPS, the research firm that commissioned the dossier, last April to continue research it was conducting on Trump. The Washington Post reported that Fusion approached lawyers at Perkins Coie, the firm that represented the campaign and DNC, offering to sell its investigative services. (RELATED: Clinton Campaign And DNC Financed The Dossier)
Marc Elias, a Perkins Coie partner, and the general counsel for the campaign and DNC, oversaw the operation, according to The Post.
It is not clear how much Democrats, through Perkins Coie, paid Fusion for the project, which lasted until early November. Federal Election Commission records show that the campaign and DNC paid the law firm $12 million during the election cycle.
After being hired, Fusion contracted in June with Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier. Steele revealed that detail in court papers filed in London, where the former British spy operates a private intelligence company.
It is unclear how much Steele was paid by Fusion, though according to a deeply reported Vanity Fair piece earlier this year, it is believed that his company was paid as much as $15,000 per month for the work, plus expenses.
How might the money from that tangled web end up in the hands of Russian operatives?
Steele reportedly paid intermediaries to obtain much of the information contained in the dossier. The former MI6 agent is believed to be persona non grata in Russia because of his spy activities there during the 1990s. But Steele maintains contacts on his old beat, and according to former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, the ex-spy paid intermediaries for dirt that ended up in the dossier. (RELATED: Michael Morell Has Serious Doubts About The Dossier)
Morell, a Hillary Clinton supporter, expressed concerns about that information exchange during an interview in March. During an interview in March, Morrel said that it was impossible to judge the information in the dossier without understanding who the sources were and how they obtained their information.
Morell, who at that time said he had read the dossier three times, said he wondered how Steele had talked to the sources.
“I have subsequently learned that he used intermediaries,” said Morell, who left the CIA in 2013.
Morell initially wondered what motivated Steele’s sources to provide the information in the dossier but subsequently found out that the retired spy paid intermediaries who, in turn, paid the sources.
“Then I asked myself, ‘why did these guys provide this information? What was their motivation?'”
“I subsequently learned that he paid them. That the intermediaries paid the sources, and the intermediaries got the money from Chris,” said Morell.
“And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you’re paying somebody, particularly former FSB officers, they are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call you up and say, ‘Hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for you,’ because they want to get paid some more.”
In the dossier, Steele cites numerous anonymous sources, many of which work in the upper echelons of the Russian government.
The first two sources cited in the dossier’s first memo, dated June 20, 2016, are “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” and “a former top level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin.”
A third source is referred to as “a senior Russian financial official.” Other sources in the dossier are described as “a senior Kremlin official” and sources close to Igor Sechin, the head of Russian oil giant Rosneft and a close associate of Vladimir Putin’s.
Steele also cited sources who claimed they were close to the Trump campaign. The fourth source used in the dossier is “Source D,” who is described as “a close associate of Trump.”
“Source D” is the only dossier source who has been identified by name. The Wall Street Journal and ABC News reported in January that he is Sergei Millian, the chairman of the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce. Millian has claimed to have done business in the past on behalf of Trump’s real estate company, but the Trump campaign has claimed he has overstated his relationship to Trump.
Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee added a notch to their belt Tuesday, with the bombshell revelation that the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee funded the infamous anti-Trump dossier.
“It’s very obvious, understanding that they leaked a story to the Washington Post to try to get it out there with as sympathetic spin as possible on an absolutely terrible story for them and Democrats,” speculated one source familiar with the House Intelligence Committee’s activities.
On Tuesday, a lawyer at Perkins Coie, where Elias is a partner, sent a letter to Fusion GPS’s attorney relieving the firm of its confidentiality obligations regarding the dossier project.
“In the circumstances,” wrote Perkins Coie’s Matthew Gehringer, “we believe it is appropriate to release Fusion GPS from this obligation as it relates to the identity of Perkins Coie.”
According to Gehringer, Fusion GPS approached Perkins Coie last March offering to continue its ongoing opposition research on Trump.
Fusion had been working since Sept. 2015 for an unidentified “Never Trump” Republican donor. Perkins Coie hired Fusion the following month. Shortly after, Fusion hired former British spy Christopher Steele to investigate Trump’s activities in Russia. The result is the infamous 35-page dossier full of salacious and uncorroborated allegations about Trump and his campaign.
The House Intelligence Committee has led the push to identify Fusion’s dossier client. The involvement of Democrats is significant, Republicans say, because of the dossier’s central importance to the FBI’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
Republicans like Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have expressed concern that the FBI may have relied on political opposition research to kickstart its Trump investigation.
TheDC is told that now that the identity of the dossier donor has been revealed, the committee will refocus on obtaining documents from the FBI and Justice Department related to its reliance on the dossier. The agencies have so far refused to comply with subpoenas for those documents.
According to The Post, Elias, the general counsel to both the Clinton campaign and DNC, is who made the deal with Fusion. Perkins Coie received more than $12 million from the campaign and DNC during the 2016 cycle, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Perkins Coie’s decision to out itself comes as Fusion GPS is battling the House Intelligence Committee in federal court over the release of its bank records. The records would identify all of Fusion’s clients for the past two years, the firm said in court filings for the case.
On Oct. 4, the committee issued subpoenas to Fusion’s three co-founders as well as to TD Bank, the research firm’s bank. Two of Fusion’s co-founders invoked their Fifth Amendment privileges during a brief interview with the committee earlier this month. And Fusion’s lawyers pressed a federal judge late last week to issue an injunction blocking TD Bank from giving its bank records to the committee.
A House committee source says that Fusion likely expected the federal court to order TD Bank to comply with the subpoena and that it was “better to get ahead of the story.”
“It’s clear they figured there was a really good chance they were going to lose,” the source said.
Democrat politicians and pundits are quickly losing control of the story surrounding Russian influence efforts within the United States.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that Clinton campaign lawyer Marc Elias hired Fusion GPS on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said Tuesday that Elias had “vigorously” denied being involved with the dossier, which is said to have relied upon Russian sources. Another NYT reporter, Maggie Haberman, similarly indicated that Democrats had repeatedly lied to reporters about their involvement with the dossier.
Prominent Democrats are now scrambling to distance themselves from the revelations. The DNC released a carefully-worded statement meant to distance current party leader from the dossier. The “new leadership” of the DNC, the statement said, was not involved with the dossier. Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who resigned as DNC chair last year amidst allegations that the DNC favored Clinton over Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has denied that she knew about the DNC’s involvement with the dossier.
The DNC and Clinton campaign previously faced ethical questions about their campaign activities when it was revealed that then-DNC vice chair Donna Brazile repeatedly fed Clinton debate questions in order to give her a leg up over Sanders in the Democratic primary. Brazile abused her position as a CNN contributor by acquiring challenging debate questions ahead of time and then passing the questions along to the Clinton campaign.
Former Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon, who is now a CNN contributor, said on Wednesday that Hillary Clinton “may” have known about the campaign’s involvement with opposition research firm Fusion GPS, which paid British ex-spy Michael Steele to craft the dossier. Steele reportedly relied on foreign sources, including some in Russia, to craft the dossier.
The dossier is only one part of Democrats’ Russia problem.
On Tuesday morning, two House chairmen announced a probe into new reports about Russian efforts to influence the Uranium One nuclear purchase, which gave Russia control of roughly 20 percent of America’s uranium.
The Republican chairmen of two House committees announced Tuesday that they’re launching a probe into the Uranium One deal and the Obama-era Department of Justice’s investigation of the deal.
When Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state, Russia routed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation, and Bill Clinton collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in Russian speaking fees as part of Russian efforts to influence the U.S. government to approve the deal, reports The Hill.
The Obama-era Department of Justice soft-pedaled their original probe into the Uranium One deal, according to that same report. The FBI was also aware of Russian intelligence efforts meant to influence Hillary’s decisions as secretary of state, according to another report.
The Trump campaign still has uncomfortable questions to answer in regard to Russian influence operations during the 2016 election.
New reporting Wednesday morning revealed that the head of Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm used by the Trump campaign, reached out to WikiLeaks to ask about Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange reportedly rebuffed the request for collaboration. The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., has faced scrutiny over a meeting he took with a Russian lawyer, who claimed to have damaging information on Clinton from the Kremlin. The discussions reportedly stopped short of actual collusion and the meeting is said to have been fruitless for the Trump campaign.
To date, the public still has seen no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, even though prominent Democrats have used the unproven accusations to attack Trump and call for his impeachment. Democrats may now have to answer their uncomfortable questions of their own about Russian influence operations.
The special counsel overseeing the Russia investigation, Robert Mueller, is reportedly probing the Podesta Group, a Democratic lobbying firm co-founded by Clinton campaign chair John Podesta. Tony Podesta, John’s brother, is reported to be in the “crosshairs” of Mueller’s investigation into Russian influence operations in the United States.
Mueller is examining whether Russia used Tony Podesta and Paul Manafort, who briefly served as Trump’s campaign manager, were part of Russia’s attempts to exert influence over the Obama administration, one source told Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
So they paid to have GPS Fusion cook up this pantload of nonsense so they could sell it, fraudulently, for month after month, to try to Impeach and Remove the opposition party candidate, - who the American Voters Chose over Their candidate - who beat them in a DEMOCRATIC election.
They PAID for this Trump Dossier garbage as a means to derail and obstruct the American Voter's will - through President Trump - from being implemented.
Countdown to MSM blackout of this report in 3, 2, 1, . . .
The Democrats have lodged what amounts to a charge of treason, non-stop, against their opponent for his crime of beating them fair and square in an election.
Says a lot about the left's howling about our vaunted 'Democracy' being in jeopardy because They're not in power, this time.
The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid opposition research firm Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump as part of a project that led to the infamous dossier compiled by a former British spy.
According to a bombshell report from The Washington Post, Marc E. Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and DNC, and his law firm, Perkins Coie, hired Fusion GPS last April to investigate Trump.
Fusion, which was founded by former Wall Street Journal reporters, then hired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele to look into the former real estate baron’s activities in Russia.
Steele, who worked in Moscow during his days in British intelligence, would go on to produce a 35-page dossier consisting of 17 memos dated between June 20, 2016 and Dec. 13.
The Post report helps settle a central mystery that has lingered around the dossier since it was published by BuzzFeed on Jan. 10. Fusion has refused numerous requests from Congress and in lawsuits involving the dossier to reveal the identities of its clients. News reports about Fusion’s clients had been vague. The dossier financier was generally described as an ally of Hillary Clinton’s.
One question that remains is who first hired Fusion to investigate Trump. A Republican donor who was vehemently opposed to Trump’s candidacy reportedly hired Fusion in Sept. 2015 to conduct routine opposition research.
According to The Post, the Clinton campaign and DNC paid Fusion through the end of Oct. 2016, just before the election. It is not entirely clear how much Fusion was paid for the project, but Federal Election Commission records show that the Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie a total of $5.6 million between June 2015 and Dec. 2016. The DNC has paid the firm $3.6 million since Nov. 2015.
The Post’s sources said that the Clinton campaign and DNC did not direct Steele’s research.
The surprise revelation that the Clinton campaign and DNC were directly connected to the dossier is sure to provide fodder for Republicans in Congress.
Republicans like Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have raised concerns about the political backing of the dossier because the Steele report was reportedly used by the FBI to form part of its investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government.
The FBI reportedly met with Steele multiple times during his investigation of Trump, first in July and then several months later. The bureau reportedly opened its investigation soon after meeting with Steele, though it is unclear if the dossier or the meeting with Steele is what prompted the investigation.
Steele’s report was also reportedly cited in an FBI application to conduct surveillance on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser who is featured prominently in the dossier. Steele, citing unnamed sources, alleged that Page, an energy consultant, served as the Trump campaign’s liaison to the Kremlin. Page has denied the allegations, as has Trump.
Democrats, the gift that just keeps on giving. dailycallerChuck Ross Reporter 11:05 AM 03/21/2017 A former official with the Democratic National Committee has worked in recent months with a convicted domestic terrorist-turned-activist known as the “Speedway Bomber” to gather information on Donald Trump, The Daily Caller has learned.
That work culminated in a Washington, D.C. meeting in December between the ex-DNC operative, Alexandra Chalupa, the convicted bomber, Brett Kimberlin, and a South Africa-born Israeli man named Yoni Ariel.
Ariel, whose real name is Jonathan Schwartz, traveled to Washington, D.C. to brief Chalupa and Kimberlin on his knowledge of Russia’s activities during the campaign.
Chalupa, an activist of Ukrainian heritage who is strongly opposed to Trump, also directed Ariel to the Justice Department, sources told TheDC.
Sources also informed TheDC that little came of the meetings.
Ariel’s connection to Kimberlin was first reported by BuzzFeed News last week, though Chalupa’s involvement with the bomber-activist is a new revelation.
According to BuzzFeed, Ariel flew to Rome on the third week of January to purchase a set of documents purporting to show that ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson paid Trump’s company more than $1.5 billion in June, seemingly to secure the position of secretary of state in a Trump administration.
Ariel, 60, paid $9,000 for the documents, which included copies of wire transfers and bank documents laying out a transactions involving ExxonMobil and a Chinese mining company.
After receiving the documents from a source unnamed in its report, BuzzFeed determined that the documents were part of an elaborate hoax involving shady businessmen, Italian diplomats, Democratic operatives, Kimberlin and Ariel.
Brett Kimberlin mugshot (Youtube screen grab)
Ariel, believing that the papers were legitimate, informed Kimberlin about the documents, and the convict agreed to pay for the Israeli’s three flights to Rome to procure them. Kimberlin also paid the $9,000 asking price.
Ariel gave the documents to Kimberlin, and, according to BuzzFeed, they were pitched to numerous outlets, including Bloomberg, The Washington Post and The New York Times, by an unidentified associate of Kimberlin’s.
Chalupa is not named in the BuzzFeed report, and Ariel did not discuss the fake papers with her. Instead, Chalupa met with Ariel to discuss Russia’s involvement in cyberattacks during the presidential campaign, a topic on which she had been heavily focused for months.
Ariel was put in touch with Chalupa through an official with Democrats Abroad, a group affiliated with the DNC that organizes expatriates.
“I can neither confirm nor deny that I met with whom I met,” Ariel told TheDC in a phone interview from Israel, though two sources independently confirmed that a meeting occurred.
The Chalupa-Kimberlin connection is surprising given both her prominent position with the DNC and his status as a convicted felon. Indeed, Ariel was surprised that someone formerly with the DNC would work with him.
“I had no idea of Brett’s background until the BuzzFeed article, and when I read it I was sort of surprised,” said Ariel.
“My initial though, why the hell are the DNC people dealing with a guy like this?”
Kimberlin earned the nickname “Speedway Bomber” by setting a string of bombs in Speedway, Indiana in 1978. Though nobody died from the blasts, one Vietnam veteran had his leg amputated due to injuries suffered during one bombing. Carl DeLong, the victim, committed suicide in 1983.
Kimberlin, who is in his early 60s, served 17 years in prison for the bombing spree. He gained more notoriety in prison after he concocted a story about having once sold marijuana to then-Vice President Dan Quayle. The story was propagated by Cody Shearer, a political operative who worked for the Clintons in the 1990s. After being released from prison, Kimberlin has battled conservative activists who have drawn attention to his newfound career as a left-wing operative.
Kimberlin now works on various voters’ rights initiatives, including in Ukraine.
As for Chalupa, she has served in several roles for the DNC while also working as an pro-Ukraine activist. A former staffer in the Bill Clinton White House, Chalupa worked as executive director for Democrats Abroad in the 2000s and as head of the DNC’s national ethnic outreach group during the 2016 campaign.
Alexandra Chalupa (Youtube screen grab)
In her spare time, Chalupa organized social media campaigns against Trump. One of those efforts encouraged activists to share the Twitter hashtag, #TreasonousTrump.
Chalupa, who founded the U.S. United With Ukraine Coalition in 2014, also led the DNC’s opposition research into any Trump ties to Russia, according to an essay she recently published at Medium.
Politico reported in January that Chalupa worked with the Ukrainian government to compile and disseminate research on links between Trump, his campaign advisers, and the Russian government.
To help spread that information, Chalupa relied on “a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives,” Politico reported.
One of the investigative journalists Chalupa worked with was Yahoo! News’ Michael Isikoff.
In a May 3, 2016 email released by WikiLeaks, Chalupa informed Luis Miranda, the DNC’s communications director at the time, that she had “been working with” Isikoff on stories involving Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine. She also said she had invited Isikoff to a conference with dozens of Ukrainian journalists to discuss Manafort, a former consultant to Viktor Yanukovych, a former Ukrainian president allied with Vladimir Putin.
Days before Chalupa’s email, Isikoff published an in-depth report on an ill-fated business partnership between Manafort and a Russian oligarch allied with Putin named Oleg Deripaska.
In her email, Chalupa hinted to Miranda of “a big Trump component…that will hit in next few weeks.” She also claimed that she was being targeted in state-sponsored computer hacking attempts because of her research on Manafort.
According to Politico, Chalupa was paid $412,000 for consulting work from 2004 through June 2016. The last payment was made on June 20 for $25,000, records filed with the Federal Election Commission show.
Ariel first got in touch with Chalupa and Kimberlin after Trump won the election, sometime in mid-November. The Israeli noted that he had written articles asserting that Trump colluded with the Russian government to influence the election.At the time of his first contact with Chalupa and Kimberlin, Ariel had not seen the documents that would later be debunked by BuzzFeed.
The documents soon ended up in the inboxes of several news outlets, but reporters quickly determined that they were rife with errors. Names were misspelled; dates didn’t make sense; the gist of the underlying claim didn’t pass the smell test.
Ariel, who says he once worked with the the anti-apartheid African National Congress, disputed some of the BuzzFeed report. He said that the article portrayed him as the party most responsible for pushing the documents. But he told The DC that he always had at least some doubt about the veracity of the papers. He also says that he did not send them to news outlets.
