"O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!"
Fusion GPS, the smear firm employed by Hillary Clinton to produce the Steele dossier that was used to justify Obama's eavesdropping on Trump officials and the ensuing investigation, got a New York Times op-ed to defend itself.
"We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties. To have done so is our right under the First Amendment," they write.
Being technically protected under the First Amendment is not anything to be proud of. Fusion GPS is certainly not the press, despite being veterans of it, it's a mercenary outfit that gets paid to target politicians. But it is interesting that Fusion GPS defaults to the First Amendment.
The more intriguing section comes in this paragraph.
"Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports."
Learning things from news reports is a great lefty tradition. Obama and Hillary learned about all their scandals that way. "I just turned on the TV one day and there it was."
But here's what the Fusion GPS gang that couldn't smear straight is referring to.
The co-founder of Fusion GPS, the firm behind the unverified Trump dossier, met with a Russian lawyer before and after a key meeting she had last year with Trump’s son, Fox News has learned.
The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting involving Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya occurred during a critical period. At that time, Fox News has learned that bank records show Fusion GPS was paid by a law firm for work on behalf of a Kremlin-linked oligarch while paying former British spy Christopher Steele to dig up dirt on Trump through his Russian contacts.
But hours before the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016, Fusion co-founder and ex-Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson was with Veselnitskaya in a Manhattan federal courtroom, a confidential source told Fox News. Court records reviewed by Fox News, email correspondence and published reports corroborate the pair’s presence together. The source told Fox News they also were together after the Trump Tower meeting.
The sources told Reuters that the negative information that Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya wanted to give to Republican Trump’s campaign at a June 2016 meeting in New York had been dug up by Fusion GPS in an unrelated investigation.
So Fusion GPS met with the woman at the center of the collusion narrative before and after the Trump Jr meeting, and allegedly supplied her with the material (or as the celebrity twitter experts like to say, "Kompromat") that was supposed to lure the Trump campaign into the trap. While working for the Clinton campaign.
Now the Fusion GPS bosses claim that they knew nothing about the meeting. And that "these Russians" should not be confused with the Russian sources of the Steele dossier paid for by Clinton\Fusion GPS.
If you're still following this, the Russians who had hired Fusion GPS, were not the same Russians providing Steele with free material on Trump (out of the goodness of their red hearts.) And so clearly Fusion GPS is blameless.
What Fusion GPS' bosses don't deny is being the source of the materials that the Russians were set to offer Trump Jr. They just deny that the Steele dossier came from their Russian client. That's not a denial. It's an indictment.