Excerpts from the testimony of Glenn Simpson, of Fusion GPS, the research firm that commissioned the controversial “Russia dossier,” provides new details about the genesis of the infamous document.
But in September or October of 2015—Simpson was vague about the exact date—a client hired Fusion GPS to investigate Donald Trump.(The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site that has received funding from the hedge-fund billionaire Paul Singer, has acknowledged hiring Fusion GPS to investigate candidates during the Republican Presidential primaries.) Simpson said the mandate was to carry out an “open-ended” examination of Trump’s business record, including his bankruptcies, and, he added, “it evolved somewhat quickly into issues of his relationship to organized-crime figures.”
Things changed in the spring of 2016, after Fusion GPS got a new client, which we now know to have been the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. (This fact emerged in October, well after Simpson’s testimony, when lawyers from the Judiciary Committee demanded Fusion GPS’s bank records.)
“What people call the dossier is not really a dossier,” Simpson said. “It’s a collection of field memoranda, of field interviews, a collection that accumulates over a period of months . . . . He’d reach a point in the reporting where he had enough to send a new memo; so he’d send one.”
https://www.guy-who-commissioned-the-trump-russia-dossier-speaks
