The funding of the political research into President Donald Trump that produced a dossier of allegations about his links with Russia was helped by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. This will probably spark complaints by Trump, who has previously described the dossier as a “phony stuff”.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research, The Washington Post reports citing unnamed people familiar with the matter. The unnamed people claim that after that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, who is a former British intelligence officer and has ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence. In April 2016, Elias and his law firm Perkins Coie retained the company on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. An unknown Republican client has funded GPS’s research into Trump during the primary election in the Republican Party.
The research of Fusion GPS was funded by Clinton campaign and the DNC until the end of October 2016, only a few days before the presidential election. Elias was getting Steel’s reports from Fusion GPS, but it is not known how much of that information was shared with the campaign and the DNC. Even though no one can tell whether someone in the organizations was aware of the roles of Fusion GPS and Steele, an unnamed person says that the campaign and the DNC didn’t get information from the law firm of Fusion’s role. Elias and Fusion GPS did not want to comment the matter, but the DNC did not miss the chance to attack Trump once again.
“Let’s be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened,” one DNC spokesman said and added that chairman Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNS hadn’t been involved in any decision making regarding Fusion GPS.
According to the spokesman, they were also unaware that Perkins Coie worked with the organization. Former spokesman of Clinton, Brian Fallon, claimed that he wasn’t aware of the hiring during the campaign.
The dossier is a compilation of reports that Steele prepared for Fusion GPS, and alleges that official Moscow collected compromising information about Trump as well as that the Kremlin was engaged in an effort to assist Trump’s campaign. FBI is investigating whether Trump associates helped Russians in that effort, even though the president denied the allegations and said that the FBI probe is a witch hunt.
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