The Sordid History of the Firm Behind the Trump-Russia Dossier

Weekly Standard ^ | Jan 12, 2017 | Mark Hemingway

[Yashcheritsiy]

Thursday's New York Times has a report on how the highly suspicious dossier alleging that Donald Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence agents came into existence. Among the other interesting revelations was that the dubious opposition research report was put together by the research firm Fusion GPS:

The story began in September 2015, when a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Mr. Trump put up the money to hire a Washington research firm run by former journalists, Fusion GPS, to compile a dossier about the real estate magnate's past scandals and weaknesses, according to a person familiar with the effort. The person described the opposition research work on condition of anonymity, citing the volatile nature of the story and the likelihood of future legal disputes. The identity of the donor is unclear.

What's interesting about this revelation is that Fusion GPS has an institutional reputation for doing shoddy and underhanded political work, and nearly all of it has been at the behest of Democrats looking to attack Republicans. In 2012, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberly Strassel did some blockbuster reporting on Fusion GPS's alarming efforts to dig up dirt on donors to Mitt Romney and socially conservative causes:

[Yashcheritsiy]

LOL, Democrats actually have a fake news generating resource on call so they can pass along completely invented nonsense to the MSM to try to give the appearance of the credibility of "experts" and "studies."

[Perseverando]

Rush is talking about this at this moment.

[bankwalker]

a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Mr. Trump

I wonder who that could be.

[Grampa Dave]

For the unfiltered story re this fake news:

4 channel trolling the mediots, ABCNNBCBS, CIA, NSA, Rats, Intel Idiots, McAnal, and the Never Trumpsters on FR and around America.

[GOPJ]

The story began in September 2015, when a wealthy Republican donor who strongly opposed Mr. Trump put up the money to hire a Washington research firm run by former journalists...

Was that Jeb Bush? We have a right to know...

[dragnet2]

the highly suspicious dossier alleging that Donald Trump was compromised by Russian intelligence agents came into existence

Highly suspicious? For cripes sake, it sounded as if it was concocted and written by an 11 year old boy.

[Responsibility2nd]

Fusion GPS.

As is always the case - Follow the Money.

Do that here and you will see a direct like to Hillary and Jeb.

[Responsibility2nd]

Link. Not like.

[thinden]

bbb

[mazda77]

We will find out. It will be obvious when he throws himself off the John Hancock building and bounces off the sides of it all the way down.

Just kidding, wishful thinking, but not about the finding out. That will come along about a week after the 90 day report is submitted from Pompeo and Kelly.

[Mariner]

They are a hit squad that will generate a report to say anything you want it to say, and support their contentions with either inflated facts or full-on fabrications.

That’s what they do for a living.

[wtd]

FWIW:

A 4Chan participant self identifying as "Tom" is familiar with the origins of the "Golden Showers" segment of the anti-Trump dossier and shares specific details with Jeff Kuhner.

• Listen here to the cued up portion of Kuhner Report 1/11/2017

  Rough transcript of relevant details:

• Kuhner: "Tom on PeeGate in Mass, go ahead Tom..."
• Tom:..."OK I'll start at the beginning. What happened is Rick Wilson put out a tweet that kind of offended a lot of people on the political section of a website called 4Chan. Uh, so, it angered a lot of people-actually, the funny thing is it wasn’t many Trump supporters. It was mostly Jeb supporters that were in on this.

  Um, this started back in January of 2016. So, after that, we kind of got together and wrote some, you know – it was all joke stories. What’s funny is like half these things, like, things that you read about the pee stuff – that, all most of it came from Rick Wilson’s son. We found that his son was writing stuff like this on the internet. So, we kind of like compiled a little joke story and it was just meant to annoy Rick Wilson. So, Rick Wilson got it and he took it – he didn’t understand that a lot of it was written by his son or was based off of things that his son wrote. Um, so, Rick Wilson passed it up the chain through McMullen.

• Kuhner: Ok, now Tom, before you continue I want to ask you this…Because what you said to us on the phone was you were kind of ‘in on this’, correct?
• Tom: Yeah, a lot of us got together and we were – and we came up with a joke story…
• Kuhner: Basically a joke story, what they call ‘fan fiction’.
• Tom: Yeah,
• Kuhner: And, Rick Wilson, what you said, is an establishment Republican, a big #NeverTrump’er, close with the Bush’s – Jeb Bush, but also with ties to Marco Rubio and John McCain, correct?
• Tom: Correct.
• Kuhner: Ok, and then so, you pushed it to Rick Wilson. He obviously took the bait. Then, what did he do with the info?
• Tom: Ok, so then, um, somehow , I don’t know if it was him or one of the members of his staff – but they presented it to McMullen, uh, and then, uh, who you know what pages he’s got ties to and uh, then McMullen passed it onto McCain and then McCain passed it on to Comey an now at some point in these transactions a lot of, uh, more Russian stuff was added so that not all of this – a lot of the things were changed in it and like the Russians , uh, they put more of a Russian spin on it than what we had originally come up with.
• Kuhner: The five years that they had been cultivating Trump that they had been cultivating for five years – and they wanted him to buy properties and hotels and they tried to put sweeteners in there to hook him in. Right, all of that was, I think that was added by the CIA – correct, Tom?
• Tom: Yeah, yeah. These are all fake things that they just put a spin on it. Which is funny, that they just throw it into a story that they thought was true to begin with. And, um, what they – ok, so, after that, like, we put in things like’ Manafort’. If you know that towards the end,’ Manafort ‘ is misspelled three different times. And so, we put that in on purpose to see if (transmission is garbled) it would ?
• Kuhner: Tom, hold on, you’re breaking up on me. Tom, can you hear me? Hello? Ah! Ok, we just lost Tom. Did we lose him? Let’s try it..ok…we’re going to try to call him back because the sixty-four-thousand dollar question – I think I know the answer but ‘why would you have done this in the first place?’. Why? Now, I think the answer is, look, Rick Wilson is a very obnoxious guy. He’s always, he was always insulting Trump supporters throughout the entire campaign. He was rabidly anti-Trump. So, ok, we’ve got him back? OK, I think it was ‘let’s just prank him and just basically pull of a hoax, never thinking it was going to get this far. Tom, do we have you back on?
• Tom: Yeah, okay, so
• Kuhner: Tom,
• Tom: So, we never thought it was going to go this far, exactly. And
• Kuhner: Tom, why did you do it (cross talk)…Tom, if you don’t mind me asking, why did you do it in the first place?
• Tom: To annoy Rick Wilson. It wasn’t meant to, like, scuttle anyone or see who would publish it or this and that. It was just to annoy Rick Wilson.
• Kuhner: Ok, we’re missing like why would this annoy him? Wouldn’t he love this, that, you know . . .?
• Tom: No, we’re gonna show the stuff that his son – like, where we had all the things that show what his son had said half these things (cross talk)
• Kuhner: Ah, so basically to embarrass him, to humiliate him. You believe something that your own son wrote as fiction.
• Tom: Correct. Yes.
• Unidentified female co-host: I have a question. Are you going to come out on other than this talk show that you and your friends made up this joke? (cross talk) Are you going to go public with it?
• Tom: We have someone right now who is working with a lawyer to prove that the documents he presented with Rick Wilson are, in fact, from January. Well, in fact, I’m turning them over .
• Kuhner: Well, Tom, listen. I really want to thank you for calling the show because you’ve completely clarified this. I’ve got to ask you one final question, Tom, ok?
• Tom: Absolutely.
• Kuhner: So, this started off as a hoax, as a prank, as a joke to go after Rick Wilson. Is it not frightening that what starts out as a prank, as a joke, ends up being in out intelligence report? Ah, we lost him again. Ok. Hopefully we can get him back on. I mean, I want you to think about this. That the CIA put this in their intelligence report and not only was this put in their intelligence report – this completely bogus story – unverified – unsubstantiated – clearly in fact, a hoax orchestrated – but then, they send it around (this is the key point) to everybody on Capitol Hill – all majors, the top senators got this briefing. People in the intelligence community supposedly got this briefing. Obama supposedly got this briefing.

  So, complete fake news was taken up by the CIA , just unconditionally, without any vetting, without any fact-checking and then they pass it off as ‘truth’, as the real thing to bring down a president-elect. I want you to think about that.

  And on top of it, he just admitted it. By the way, McCain has now admitted it. He was the guy that sent the staffer off to meet with this supposed British agent who also had this bogus dossier and he fed it to Comey to bring down Trump as well.

  This is our intelligence community? Then they’re even caught adding a Russian spin to it, on top of it all, to make the story even worse for Trump and to, sort of make his connection with Putin even tighter?

  They’re making everything up!

  And these are the people entrusted with the national security of The United States?

  Listen, my friends, heads have to roll.

  Jake Tapper has to go.

  McManiac (McCain) has to resign over this. He needs to be forced to resign over this.

  And the CIA, it is now time for major sweeping reforms and a purge of all of these political hacks at the CIA.

  Agree/disagree

[Zathras]

Sure sounds like Jeb and I’d be willing to bet Cruz and Romney caught wind of it too.

[GeaugaRepublican]

I think the logical party is Mitt Romney and other anti-trump Repubs. Why?

Mitt saw how effective this firm was against Mitt’s supporter, Frank VanderSloot.

It is not unusual to hire the professional who beat you last time.

[xzins]

McCain

[b4its2late]

I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of connection to Soreass and this group.

[GOPJ]

Nonetheless, Planned Parenthood produced a "forensic report" concluding that the videos had in fact been manipulated.

The author of that report was none other than Fusion GPS. If you bothered to read the details of Fusion GPS's report it made some damning concessions, even admitting there was no "widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation." But overall, the report was calculated to be misleading and was nothing but an underhanded PR stunt for Planned Parenthood.

Naturally, Fusion GPS's report was uncritically covered by a credulous media. Politico's headline was "Report for Planned Parenthood finds sting videos manipulated." ...

Indeed, it seems that the media have been uncritically amplifying Fusion GPS's disinformation campaigns for years now. Their involvement in the Trump report that blew up in BuzzFeed's face these past few days should be unsurprising, and prompts a host of questions. What other big stories was Fusion GPS involved in pushing? Surely, the group has been behind other stories where they were not disclosed as a source. Further, Fusion GPS is predominantly associated with Democratic causes...

More info about 'the swamp' ping

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks!

Great title: Pee Gate!

[lonevoice]

Interesting article, worth clicking on to read in its entirety. President Trump has a memory like an elephant when it comes to his enemies, and he likes to make them pay, however long it takes. If I were involved with any of this sordid business, I wouldn’t be sleeping very well.

[Eleutheria5]

Mitt? John? A Bush? Michael Moore;?