quote:

Originally posted by pedropcola:
Well, I am downwind, so there's that...

Okay, that is a good reason to leave the button alone. While there may or may not be any innocents in DC, there are certainly good people downwind.

Fusion GPS continues research on Trump amid growing concern for Congressional Committees


The controversial research firm Fusion GPS is still investigating alleged ties between President Trump’s 2016 election campaign and Russia, according to several sources who spoke to this reporter.

What’s not known is who is paying for the continuing research? Fusion GPS officials could not be reached immediately for comment.

In October, the Washington Post revealed that Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign paid the now embattled research firm Fusion GPS to fund the research into the dossier. Marc E. Elias, who was a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC allegedly retained Fusion GPS, but the campaign failed to disclose those payments on its finance records.

Rep. Ron DeSantis, a Florida Republican and Chairman of the National Security Subcommittee, sent a letter last week to House Speaker Paul Ryan, asking him to direct Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes , R-CA to declassify documents given to the committee related to the dossier. He asked Nunes to utilize the process known as Rule X to make the documents available to the American people and said Fusion GPS’s continuing research into President Trump should be investigated.

DeSantis told this reporter that releasing the information on the dossier and the classified FISA applications is the first step in getting the truth to the public.

“Congress needs to determine the role played by Fusion GPS in the Russia matter and that includes any current Fusion activity,” said DeSantis. “Fusion has not been forthright with Congress and the American people deserve the facts.”

The New York Times was the first to allude to Simpson’s continuing investigation into Trump’s alleged ties with Russia in a recent expose on Simpson stating, “But the work has not stopped. Fusion continues to look into ties between Mr. Trump and Russia, according to several people briefed on the research. Mr. Simpson’s specific areas of focus, and information about any current benefactors, are closely guarded.”

DeSantis said the first step is to “declassify these documents for the American people,”

“I want to see the cast of characters that are in the dossier and how it was used to get the warrants on the Trump campaign. We deserve the truth and I’m hopeful it will be very soon,” said DeSantis, who added that he expects the House Intelligence Committee report on the FBI and the Inspector General’s investigation into the FBI’s handling of the Clinton email scandal to be delivered at roughly the same time in the upcoming month.

A Republican Congressional staff member, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said “it’s imperative to know who’s paying Fusion GPS for its current investigation. There appears to be a concerted effort on the part of the dems to try to deflect from the explosive information now in the hands of the committees and we still don’t have the answers we need regarding Fusion’s role.”

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-CA, has now asked the House Intelligence Committee to release Simpson’s transcripts from his interview with the committee. Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-CA, and minority chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee released her panels interview with Simpson, who had also asked for it to be made public.

But according to numerous sources the decision to release Simpson’s interview backfired.

The most fascinating part of Simpson’s interview was that Steele was told by an FBI agent that there was a confidential informant, a “human source from inside the Trump organization.” Shortly after Simpson’s testimony was made public, Fusion GPS backtracked those statements through NBC reporter Ken Dilanian who tweeted that “there was no walk in source” and that Simpson was referring to George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign. The New York Times reported on Dec. 30 that it was a conversation between Papadopoulus and an Australian diplomat at a bar in London that led to the investigation.

“It backfired,” said a Congressional official. “I doubt Glen Simpson really wants his testimony to be public and Feinstein’s release took him by surprise. Why did Simpson lie about it in his testimony and his (New York Times) op-ed?”

Congressional members say there are more questions than answers with regard to the 35 page dossier put together by former British spy Christopher Steele, which contained false and unverified information. In fact, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who testified before the House Intelligence Committee, had cited only one fact in the dossier that had been verified by the bureau and that was that Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page had traveled to Moscow.

Page allegedly was willing to voluntarily speak to the FBI in September, 2016 but the FBI didn’t interview him for another five months during which time “the FISA warrant was allegedly approved,” according to a source with knowledge.

Representatives of the House Intelligence Committee, Senate Intelligence Committee, House Judiciary Committee, and Senate Judiciary Committee have examined the FISA documents related to the dossier in a secure room at the Justice Department, according to a recent article published by Byron York. According to York and sources who spoke to this reporter they were not allowed to remove the documents from the room but took extensive notes from the material that was provided by the Department of Justice. Nunes’ committee had been stonewalled for months before the DOJ agreed to turn over the documents, as recently reported.

Members asked Nunes, R-CA, of the House Intelligence Committee to make all relevant documents pertaining to the dossier and FBI interviews with witnesses available to all 435 congressional members, as first reported by Fox News Ed Henry.

https://saraacarter.com/2018/0...essional-committees/

Report: FBI Agent Shared Russia Probe Information With Christopher Steele

An FBI agent shared the name of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos with Trump dossier author Christopher Steele during a meeting in early October 2016.

That new bit of information was revealed in a column published Wednesday by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.

Ignatius reports that Steele, a former MI6 agent, met with an old FBI contact in Rome around Oct. 1, 2016 to share findings from his investigation into Donald Trump’s and the Trump campaign’s associations with the Russian government.

“At this meeting, the FBI official asked Steele if he had ever heard of Papadopoulos,” reports Ignatius, who cited an official familiar with the meeting as his source.

According to Ignatius, Steele had not heard of Papadopoulos, a little-known energy consultant who joined the Trump campaign as a volunteer adviser in March 2016. He pleaded guilty in October to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian nationals while working on the campaign.

Ignatius’ report reveals for the first time that an FBI agent shared information about the bureau’s investigation with Steele, who operates a private research firm in London.

The former British spy was hired in May 2016 by Washington, D.C.-based opposition research firm Fusion GPS to investigate Trump’s activities in Russia.

Two months later, he met for the first time with an FBI contact in London. By that time, Steele had compiled the first memo of his dossier. That document alleged that the Kremlin had blackmail material on Trump and that he had been cultivated as an asset for five years.

Trump and the White House have vehemently denied Steele’s claims.

The dossier is at the center of a heated partisan dispute. Republican lawmakers have questioned how important Steele’s allegations were to the FBI’s counterintelligence probe and whether the FBI vetted the ex-spy’s information.

Republicans have also questioned the FBI’s relationship with Steele. It has been reported that when the met with Steele in October, he was offered $50,000 if he could corroborate information about the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. The New York Times has reported that Steele was never paid, while CNN reported last year that he was compensated for expenses. (RELATED: Here’s How Much The FBI Planned To Pay Christopher Steele)

Democrats have accused Republicans and the White House of attempting to smear Steele and the dossier in order to detract from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

The possibility that the FBI shared information about its Russia investigation with Steele was raised last week with the release of a transcript of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson’s Senate Judiciary Committee testimony.

Simpson told investigators in the Aug. 22 interview that the FBI believed Steele’s allegations to be credible because the bureau “had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source.” (RELATED: 7 Revelations From Glenn Simpson’s Senate Testimony)

News outlets jumped on the claim and interpreted it to mean that the FBI had a mole from within the Trump campaign who provided information about possible collusion.

But a source close to Fusion GPS clarified Simpson’s testimony, saying that he misspoke. Simpson was actually referring to the Papadopoulos connection.

It was not entirely clear from Simpson’s transcript how he would have heard about the Papadopoulos connection by the time of the Senate interview.

The FBI had received information about Papadopoulos from the Australian government.

The New York Times reported last month that during a booze-filled conversation at a London bar in May 2016, Papadopoulos told Alexander Downer, the Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom, that he had learned that the Russian government obtained Clinton campaign emails.

A month earlier, Papadopoulos met with a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud who claimed to have been told by Russian government operatives that the government had “thousands” of Clinton emails. The timing is significant because it was before hacks of the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta had been made public.

The looming question is whether Mifsud was being truthful to Papadopoulos and whether the campaign aide informed the Trump team about the possible Clinton dirt.

Papadopoulos’ claims to Downer were not immediately shared with the FBI. The Australian government only decided to share the information with the bureau in July 2016, after WikiLeaks released the DNC’s hacked emails. The FBI opened it counterintelligence investigation into possible collusion shortly after.

It was reported last month that the information about Papadopoulos was one of the sparks for the FBI’s investigation. A trip that Carter Page, another Trump campaign adviser, made to Moscow in July 2016 was also one of the catalysts for the probe. Page is accused in the dossier of being the campaign’s liaison to the Kremlin for the alleged collusion operation. Page has vehemently denied the charge.

It is possible that information from Papadopoulos did end up in the dossier. During the campaign, he was in contact with Sergei Millian, a Belarusian-American businessman who is reported to be one of the sources for some of the most jarring claims in the dossier.

http://dailycaller.com/2018/01...-christopher-steele/

Meet Hillary Clinton’s Other, Much More Powerful and Shadowy Oppo Research Firm

Executives with London-based Hakluyt & Company contributed thousands of dollars to 2016 Democratic presidential nominee's campaign
by Mark Tapscott | Updated 18 Mar 2018 at 10:14 AM

Fusion GPS has gotten all the headlines. But there was a second even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against Donald Trump.

Meet London-based Hakluyt & Company, founded by three former British intelligence operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations pay huge sums.

Where Fusion GPS was created by three former Wall Street Journal reporters with links to the U.S. intelligence community, Hakluyt — with offices in London, New York, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney — was founded by an enterprising trio of former British intelligence operatives with deep connections throughout the world’s official and corporate corridors of power and influence.

Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Henry Williams as “one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world” and as “a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking … ”

The firm’s “style appears to be much more in the mold of the Christopher Steele dossier. Clients pay for pages of well-sourced prose from Hakluyt’s contacts across the globe,” Williams wrote.

Hakluyt isn’t familiar to the American public. But what has become well-known in recent days is the role played by one of the London firm’s most visible figures in drawing the FBI into the world of Trump-Russia collusion allegations, a world largely created by Steele in the infamous “dossier” bearing his name.

When the drunken junior Trump foreign policy adviser George Papodopoulous boasted in a London bar in May 2016 about Russian intelligence operatives peddling hacked emails that were damaging to Clinton, his most interested listener, according to The New York Times, was Alexander Downer, Australian high commissioner to the U.K.

It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos’ comments, which became one of the “driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” The Times reported.

Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt’s advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive:

But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client cocktail soiree at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.

His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.

The News Corp. Australian Network quoted an unnamed British diplomatic source explaining that Hakluyt “operates in the shadows, it’s not exactly open and transparent and so any serving, and that’s the difference, serving diplomat with access to sensitive information and insight associating with the group raises a worry in Whitehall.” Whitehall is the British government’s equivalent to the White House.

Downer’s continued involvement with Hakluyt locates the shadowy operation in the world of the Clintons. As previously reported by LifeZette, it was Downer in 2006 who as Australian foreign minister signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation.

The MOU committed $25 million from the Australian government to the foundation for HIV/AIDs programs in Papua New Guinea, China and Vietnam. A subsequent audit was unable to account for how those funds were spent.

Earlier this year, the FBI asked retired Australian police detective Michael Smith to provide information he uncovered concerning the 2006 deal — suggesting the bureau’s investigation of the Clinton Foundation is focused on the controversial charity’s domestic and international activities.

Downer is also connected to another firm of great importance in the international intelligence world. That would be China’s telecommunications giant Huawei, on whose Australian board he served on for several years, beginning in 2011. U.S. intelligence experts have long described Huawei as a tool of Chinese espionage in America.

But Downer is not the only Clinton fan in Hakluyt. Federal contribution records show several of the firm’s U.S. representatives made large contributions to two of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign organizations.

Jonathan Selib of Brooklyn, New York, listed himself as a “consultant” and his employer as Hakluyt when he made four contributions totaling $3,200 to Hillary for America and one contribution worth $2,350 to the Hillary Victory Fund during the Democratic presidential primary. Selib also contributed to the congressional campaigns of Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and John Lewis of Montana. Selib was formerly chief of staff for Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.).

Another Hakluyt executive, Holly Evans, contributed $500 to Hillary for America the day after Selib’s June 27, 2016, donations to the same Clinton campaign entity. Evans listed Rye, New York, as home and described herself as a Hakluyt “executive.” Her resume includes stints advising Vice President Dick Cheney and working on the National Security Council during the second Bush administration.

The link between Clinton and Hakluyt is ironic considering the former secretary of state’s strong commitment to liberal Democratic environmental causes.

A third Hakluyt executive, Andrew Exum of Washington, D.C., made multiple contributions to several Democratic congressional candidates, including Elisa Slotkin in Michigan and Daniel Helmer of Virginia. Exum served as a U.S. Army infantry officer and as former deputy assistant secretary of defense under then-President Barack Obama. He has also been a contributing editor of Atlantic magazine.

The link between Clinton and Hakluyt is ironic considering the former secretary of state’s strong commitment to liberal Democratic environmental causes. Hakluyt’s record includes being caught planting spies in Greenpeace and other environmental groups on behalf of energy giants British Petroleum (BP) and Shell.

https://www.lifezette.com/poli...-oppo-research-firm/

There's a story out there if anyone took the time to write it.