PoppaGringo wrote:
Hillary Clinton Defends Campaign: Yes, We Paid for Trump Dossier. So What?
By Andrew Kerr
November 2, 2017 at 11:19am
Former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton defended her campaign Wednesday evening for funding the salacious Fusion GPS dossier that claimed there were ties between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia during the 2016 election.
Clinton told Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah that “of course” there was a difference between her campaign paying for the opposition research, which relied on high-level sources within the Kremlin, and allegations that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to influence the outcome of the election.
“I think most serious people understand that,” Clinton said. “This was research started by a Republican donor during the Republican primary, and then when Trump got the nomination for the Republican Party, the people doing it came to my campaign lawyer.”
“He said ‘yes,’” Clinton said of her campaign lawyer, Marc Elias. “He’s an experienced lawyer, he knows what the law is, he knows what opposition research is.”
Hillary Clinton Defends Campaign: Yes, We Paid for Trump Dossier. So What?
The Washington Post reported last week that Elias had retained Fusion GPS in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee to conduct opposition research into Trump.
Fusion GPS, in turn, retained former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele between June 20 and Dec. 13, 2016.
Current reporting indicates that the unnamed Republican donor Clinton was referring to was long removed from the picture by the time Steele began compiling the dossier.
Steele produced a collection of 17 memos concerning Trump and Russia, including the infamous and unsubstantiated allegation that Trump solicited prostitutes to perform lewd acts on a hotel bed where former President Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, had previously stayed.
Elias emphatically denied any knowledge of the dossier for a whole year, according to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.
The Times’ Kenneth Vogel added that he received vigorous pushback from Elias when he tried to report the story earlier this year.
When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying "You (or your sources) are wrong."
Clinton pivoted to “an even bigger problem” after noting that the dossier wasn’t made public until after the election.
“The American people didn’t even know that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign because of connections with Russia starting in the summer of 2016,” Clinton said. “I know that voters should have had that information.”
However, the fact that the Clinton campaign and the DNC had obfuscated from the public its payments to Fusion GPS for opposition research into Trump is an issue in and of itself, according to the Campaign Legal Center, which filed a Federal Election Commission complaint last week against the campaign and the DNC.
“They failed to accurately disclose the purpose and recipient of payments for the dossier of research alleging connections between then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia, effectively hiding these payments from public scrutiny, contrary to the requirements of federal law,” the CLC said in a statement.
Hillary Clinton Defends Campaign: Yes, We Paid for... (
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Certain evidence does seem to indicate that attempts were made to hide the financing of that dossier; campaign financing irregularities could bring federal charges. (Important to note, despite lies now being told: nothing in that Dossier was ever leaked to the Press or used on social media to discredit tRump.)
Here is what we know (and be patient to carefully and completely read what follows.
The Dossier:
Background: The “dossier” is a collection of 17 memos concerning President Trump and Russia written by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, between June 20 and Dec. 13, 2016. Steele produced his memos under a contract with Fusion GPS, a strategic intelligence firm run by former journalists. The memos are written as raw intelligence, based on interviews Steele had with unidentified Russian sources (identified, for instance, as “Kremlin insider”), some of whom he paid for information. Raw intelligence is essentially high-grade gossip, without the expectation it would be made public unless it is further verified. The memos, among other things, allege the Russian government had been seeking to split the Western alliance by cultivating and supporting Trump and also gathering compromising information — “kompromat” — on him in an effort to blackmail him. The memos, among other allegations, claim the Russian government fed the Trump campaign “valuable intelligence” on Clinton.
The dossier mirrors a separate conclusion by U.S. intelligence agencies that the Russian government intervened in the U.S. election in an effort to bolster Trump and harm Clinton, such as through hacking the Democratic National Committee and distributing materials to WikiLeaks to publish at key moments. As the official declassified report stated:
“We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin intensely disliked Clinton because he was convinced that when she was secretary of state she had promoted anti-Putin, pro-democracy efforts in his country. The FBI considered the information gathered by Steele to be of sufficient importance that it considered paying him for his research, although it later dropped the idea.
What’s New: The DNC and Clinton campaign were revealed as the “Democratic donors” who paid Fusion GPS for Steele’s research. (Technically, Perkins Coie, the law firm of Marc Elias, an attorney representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, funded the research.) Separately, a “Republican donor” who had earlier hired Fusion GPS for information on Trump was revealed to be the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. But that earlier effort--important to note--is unrelated to the Democratic-funded research that yielded the dossier, as Steele was hired by Fusion GPS after work for the Free Beacon had ended.
We should note that, in another assignment, Fusion had been hired by a U.S. law firm in early 2014 to assist on the defense against a civil action filed by the U.S. government alleging fraud by Prevezon Holdings. Prevezon is owned by Denis Katsyv, the son of a senior Russian government official.
Why is that relevant? Natalia Veselnitskaya, who was also working for the law firm on the Prevezon case, met with Trump campaign officials at the Trump Tower in June 2016, including Donald Trump Jr., campaign manager Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner, the husband of Ivanka Trump. Donald Trump Jr. agreed to meet with Veselnitskaya after an intermediary promised dirt on Clinton. She arrived with a memo containing talking points that had been previously shared by Yuri Chaika, Russia’s prosecutor general who is known as a master of kompromat.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2017/10/29/the-dossier-and-the-uranium-deal-a-guide-to-the-latest-allegations/?utm_term=.2108ae1ac85b&wpisrc=al_trending_now__alert-politics--alert-national&wpmk=1