Free Republic

Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson struck a deal on Wednesday to testify voluntarily before the House Intelligence Committee next week to discuss his opposition research firm’s involvement in the Steele dossier. Simpson and his lawyer met with members of the committee for several hours to hammer out a deal for his closed-door testimony. The Daily Caller was informed that Simpson had indicated prior to Wednesday’s meeting that he would plead the Fifth during his deposition, just as his two co-founders, Peter Fritsch and Thomas Catan, did during interviews last month. But as part of the deal struck Wednesday, Simpson will...

Accounts of the phony Trump dossier debacle typically begin on January 10, 2017, when CNN and BuzzFeed publicized allegations about an alleged Russian honey trap operation against Donald Trump that dossier compiler Christopher Steele has admitted were unverified. But the story of the phony dossier actually broke over two months earlier when Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn reported Steele’s allegations on October 31, 2016 under the headline, “A Veteran Spy Has Given the FBI Information Alleging a Russian Operation to Cultivate Donald Trump: Has the bureau investigated this material?”. Corn had previously helped the Democrats sink Mitt Romney’s...

The Fusion GPS news-for-hire scandal has not only led to the public identification of the source of the “Trump Dossier”—a for-profit company that provides opposition research to whoever could write big checks, which is staffed by four former Wall Street Journal reporters led by Glenn Simpson. The scandal has also lifted the lid off a sewer of corporate information warfare and opposition research that the flailing institutions of the mainstream press now regularly re-package as news, without ever saying where it came from—or who paid for it. While the idea that the products of paid opposition research are being main-lined...

audio 11:08 Fusion GPS was hired by Democrats in 2012 to do opposition research on Mitt Romney. Some of the work that received the most media attention was focused on investigating the marriage records of a large donor to the Romney presidential campaign, Frank VanderSloot.[2][3] Planned Parenthood[edit] In August 2015, Planned Parenthood retained Fusion GPS to defensively investigate the veracity of a series of undercover videos released by pro-life activists that they claim showed Planned Parenthood officials agreeing to sell fetal tissues obtained through abortions to medical researchers.[2] Fusion GPS hired video and transcription experts to analyze the videos and...

Fritsch, who served as the Journal’s bureau chief in Mexico City and has lectured at the liberal Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, married into a family with Mexican business interests. His wife, Beatriz Garcia, formerly worked as an executive at Grupo Dina, a manufacturer of trucks and buses in Mexico City that benefits from NAFTA, which Trump opposes. Fritsch’s Fusion GPS partner Thomas Catan, who grew up in Britain, once edited a business magazine in Mexico, moreover. A third founding partner, Glenn Simpson, is reported to have shared dark views of both Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump. Before joining Fusion...

In the summer of 2015, Center for Medical Progress (CMP) began releasing its undercover videos exposing alleged profiteering on the part of Planned Parenthood and its partners in the biomedical fetal tissue procurement industry. The shocking videos forced America’s largest abortion provider into rapid defense mode, and smearing undercover journalist David Daleiden and his group became a top priority of Planned Parenthood. The group hired Fusion GPS to perform a forensic evaluation on CMP’s videos, the results of which were reported at Politico in August of 2015 with the headline, “Report for Planned Parenthood Finds Sting Videos Manipulated.”