Elias and another Perkins Coie partner, Michael Sussmann, hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS to try to create ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. This led to Fusion GPS paying money to former British spy Christopher Steele, who paid money to anonymous Russian sources via a British national named Edward Baumgartner, who had ties to Russia.
Did Putin’s pawns help assemble the Trump-smearing dossier?
NY Post ^ | 1/20/2018 | Paul Sperry
Posted on 1/20/2018, 7:46:45 PM by mojito
https://nypost.com/2018/01/18/did-putins-pawns-help-assemble-the-trump-smearing-dossier/
...Baumgartner had been working alongside Simpson as a Russian translator for a New York law firm defending a Russian holding company, Prevezon, in a money-laundering suit filed by the US Justice Department in Manhattan. Owned by Denis Katsyv, a Putin-tied oligarch, Prevezon was sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act. Also defending Prevezon was Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Russian lawyer who Simpson helped lobby Congress to repeal the Magnitsky Act by attacking William Browder, the banker-turned-human-rights-activist who championed it.
“He speaks Russian,” Simpson said of Baumgartner, after Senate Judiciary Committee staff asked about “subcontractors” he’d hired. “So he would work with the lawyers on gathering Russian language documents, gathering Russian language media reports, talking to witnesses who speak Russian, that sort of thing.” He added Baumgartner also has an “ability to interface with the court system in Russia.”
Simpson told the Senate that Baumgartner helped Steele, who was banned from entering Russia, figure out which hotels Trump stayed in while in Russia and if anyone ever offered him anything while there. But he did that mostly by “reading Russian newspaper accounts and that sort of thing.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...