The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee helped fund research that resulted in a now-famous dossier containing allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia and possible coordination between his campaign and the Kremlin, people familiar with the matter said.
Marc E. Elias, a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, retained Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, to conduct the research.
After that, Fusion GPS hired dossier author Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer with ties to the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community, according to those people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, retained the company in April 2016 on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Before that agreement, Fusion GPS’s research into Trump was funded by an unknown Republican client during the GOP primary.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC, through the law firm, continued to fund Fusion GPS’s research through the end of October 2016, days before Election Day.
Okay so first off this is not really news.
In fact I wrote a post before election day that linked to a Mother Jones story which said the following:
This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul. (Before the former spy was retained, the project's financing switched to a client allied with Democrats.) "It started off as a fairly general inquiry," says the former spook, who asks not to be identified. But when he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit."
At the time David Corn, the author of the Mother Jones piece, did not identify Michael Steel by name, nor did he seem to know who the "client allied with the Democrats" was for sure, but I think most of us probably assumed they would be connected to the Clinton campaign or some big DNC donor.
The important point of the article was that people were finally reporting on what was in the dossier after the original Republican operatives stopped paying the bills, and the information was almost lost for all time.
Yesterday some troll in the comments section attempted to make the case that this muddies the waters and that it proves the Democrats were also engaged in the same sort of shady dealings to undermine the Republican candidate that the Trump campaign was in attempting to undermine the Clinton campaign.
But of course that is ridiculous as this is NOT a case of a campaign working hand in hand with an adversarial foreign government which hacked one party's computers, and payed millions of dollars to spread misinformation, to help that campaign's candidate get elected.
The Democrats were actually working to reveal information which has now proven critical in understanding just how compromised Donald Trump and his campaign staff were by the Russians during the 2016 campaign cycle.
Ultimately if Trump gets impeached this Russian dossier may prove to be the key to making that happen, and at the very least it allowed us to be vigilant when it came to how Trump defers to Vladimir Putin and focused our attention on the fact that he seems extremely reluctant to support the Russian sanctions voted into place by the majority of the Republicans in the House and Senate.
Here is how Josh Marshall of TPM summed this up yesterday:
The country owes the Democrats a debt of gratitude for keeping Steele’s research going. The FBI had apparently missed a lot of what he found.
I’ve heard some suggest that the Clinton campaign had denied that it helped fund Steele’s work. Or maybe that Elias had. I don’t know if that’s the case or not. It’s possible that the Clinton camp or the DNC didn’t know they had. The Post piece suggests they didn’t know that Fusion GPS was involved.
If someone lied, then by all means identify that person as lying. Even call them a liar. But in the big picture, who cares? Even in the small picture who cares. It was a service to the country. Donald Trump and his campaign knowingly accepted assistance from a foreign adversary power. There’s good reason to believe, though as yet no hard proof, that they agreed to help Russia in exchange for assistance subverting the 2016 campaign. The President is still actively covering up for the Russian effort, as of this week.
Whether the execs at top of the Clinton campaign knew about it, Marc Elias may have helped save his country by making the decision to fund this critical research. Thank you, Marc Elias! I know that sounds a bit hyperbolic but it’s really not.
Yes, and I agree completely with that.
We are suffering a national crisis right now in this country.
Marc Elias and the DNC attempted to keep that from happening, and failing that they may have been instrumental in providing the tools needed to eventually stop it.
In my book that makes them heroes.
Source http://ift.tt/2y82ykM
