A newly released Senate committee transcript reveals that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson was disposed to believe the salacious golden showers claim in the Trump dossier because Russians have cameras in ‘all the luxury hotel rooms.’
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California on Tuesday released the previously sealed transcript of Simpson, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who spoke to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Simpson relayed how he came to hire former British intelligence officer Chris Steele, with whom he had worked previously – and said it was Steele’s decision to bring material he uncovered to the FBI in the summer of 2016.
He told investigative lawyers that he found Steele’s memos ‘really serious and really credible’ both because of Steele’s reputation and his own prior reporting on the Russians and their work with western lobbyists.
Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. The firm continues its research into Trump and Russia, according to a report
With respect to the salacious and unproven claim about Donald Trump’s conduct in a Moscow hotel room during the Miss Universe pageant, Simpson said he didn’t have any ‘additional facts’ beyond what Steele included in the dossier without verification.
‘I mean, it’s probably in here somewhere actually, but it’s well known in intelligence circles that the Russians have cameras in all the luxury hotel rooms and there are memoirs written about this by former Russian intelligence agents I could quote you,’ Simpson told the committee.
‘So the problem of kompromat and kompromating is just endemic to east-west intelligence work. So that’s what I’m referring to. That’s what he’s referring to,’ he said.
Simpson defended the dossier, and was asked about a portion relating to Donald Trump’s trip to Moscow
About nine hours into Simpson’s grilling, his attorney, Josh Levy, objected to questioning about a source – and revealed that someone had been ‘killed’ after the the publication of the dossier. Buzzfeed published it in January, 2017.
‘It’s a voluntary interview, and in addition to that he wants to be very careful to protect his sources. Somebody’s already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work,’ Levy said.
Earlier, Simpson expressed his own concerns about revealing information that could endanger someone.
One salacious and unverified claim dealt with Donald Trump’s alleged conduct in a Moscow hotel room
The unverified incident described in the dossier was at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Moscow
‘There are some things I know that I just don’t feel comfortable sharing because obviously it’s been in the news a lot lately that people who get in the way of the Russians tend to get hurt,’ he said.
He said it was Steele’s idea to bring what he found to a contact he had at the FBI.
‘He said he was professionally obligated to do it. Like if you’re a lawyer and, you know, you find out about a crime, in a lot of countries you must report that. So it was like that,’ Simpson said.
Fusion GPS hired ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele
Simpson defended the credibility and reliability of ex MI6 agent Christopher Steele
‘Chris said he was very concerned about whether this represented a national security threat and said he wanted to — he said he thought we were obligated to tell someone in government, in our government about this information,’ Simpson said.
‘He thought from his perspective there was an issue — a security issue about whether a presidential candidate was being blackmailed.’
After a delay of Months, Steele heard back from the FBI, meeting with an agent in Rome.
Simpson says Steele told him the FBI had a source within the Trump campaign.
‘Essentially what he told me was they had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source and that – that they — my understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization,’ he said.
After the Oct. 31 publication of a New York Times story which stated the FBI had not proved any collusion with the Trump campaign, Steele backed off his cooperation, Simpson said.
‘Sometime thereafter the FBI — I understand Chris severed his relationship with the FBI out of concern that he didn’t know what was happening inside the FBI and there was a concern that the FBI was being manipulated for political ends by the Trump people and that we didn’t really understand what was going on. So he stopped dealing with them,’ he said.
Simpson had done previous work reporting on Paul Manafort’s work on behalf of a pro-Russia Ukrainian president. Manafort went on to chair Trump’s presidential campaign
Feinstein said in a statement as she released the transcript: ‘The innuendo and misinformation circulating about the transcript are part of a deeply troubling effort to undermine the investigation into potential collusion and obstruction of justice.’
She added: ‘The only way to set the record straight is to make the transcript public.’
Fusion GPS continues to probe ties between President Trump and Russia, according to a new report.
Simpson finds himself caught in the crosshairs as Republican congressional committees probe the origins of the dossier and his firm’s role in its creation – in addition to simultaneously representing other clients like a Russian lawyer who attended an infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting withDonald Trump Jr.
Simpson says Steele decided to bring his findings to the attention of the FBI. Former FBI director Robert Mueller was later named special counsel and picked up the bureau’s Russia probe
The dossier compiled by ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele remains an area of intense scrutiny in Congress.
Republicans want to know if it formed the basis of the FBI’s Russia probe, although there have been reports that it was other strands of information that got things started, including information revealed by a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton that made its way back to the FBI.
Even with all the unwelcome attention, Fusion GPS’ work on Russia work continues, the New York Times reported. The paper wrote that it continues to explore ties between Trump and Russia, citing several people briefed on its research.
Simpson’s firm began conducting opposition research on Trump after getting hired by the conservative Washington Free Beacon.
After Trump won the Republican primary, it took payment from the Perkins Coie law firm on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
The dossier, which Simpson has described as more of a series of memos, went on to describe a web of relationships between Trump associates and Russians, as well as an infamous unverified passage about Trump’s supposed conduct in a Moscow hotel room.
Fusion attorney Theodore J. Boutrous Jr. says the firm now has a legal defense fund and that its legal fees have spiraled.
Fusion, in a statement to the Times, defended the firm’s work – which anti-Putin crusader William Browder has described as smears for hire.
‘We collect facts,” Fusion said in a statement. ‘Occasionally, the facts turn out to be helpful to people we deplore, like Vladimir Putin, or undermine people for whom we have considerable sympathy, like William Browder,’ who pushed for the Magnitsky Act sanctions.
Said Browder of Simpson: ‘He’s a professional smear campaigner and liar for money. The credibility of anything that he does is in question.’