Glenn R. Simpson, co-founder of the research firm Fusion GPS, arrives for a scheduled appearance before a closed House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 2017. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Fusion GPS has been one of the most damaging entities in this country the last three years. The amount of division and falsities they’ve perpetuated, largely due to their “Trump Dossier,” is hard to overstate.
While our Trump critics everywhere lost their minds over Russians buying a few Facebook ads, Fusion GPS (financed by Hillary Clinton) was infiltrating our government at the highest levels to push their foreign sourced garbage, all in an attempt to stop Donald Trump from being elected. These corrupt actions have hamstrung foreign and domestic policy ever since, as a cloud has hung over Trump’s Presidency as a result.
It now looks fairly conclusive that the FBI colluded with Fusion GPS and their foreign spy (Michael Steele) to defraud a FISA court as an excuse to increase scrutiny of Donald Trump prior and after the election. In response, Congressional members like Adam Schiff have done everything they can to cover this up and obstruct the investigations into exactly what went down. As a result, there’s still a lot we don’t know but more and more things are starting to make their way into the light and none of it paints Fusion GPS in a good light.
New details have just come out on yet another Trump dossier claim falling apart and it comes from an unlikely source. A Russian named Aleksej Gubarev sued Fusion GPS for defamation in February of 2017 due to his being named in their dossier as a nefarious Russian hacker targeting the DNC.
The Daily Caller has the details.
Gubarev sued BuzzFeed and Steele in February 2017 over the dossier, claiming the allegations were defamatory. In one memo, Steele alleged Gubarev was “recruited under duress” by Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, and was a “significant” player in an operation to use botnets and viruses to steal information from Democrats.
As it turns out, this claim was sensational crap, just like the rest of the document’s most salacious accustions. Desperate to keep their credibility, Fusion GPS tapped one of their contractors named Edward Baumgartner to prove that Gubarev was who Michael Steele said he was. They got a very unexpected, and no doubt unwanted return on their investment.
“Our interviews of people familiar with Gubarev paint a picture of a relatively well-known person in the IT sector with an entirely positive reputation as a successful self-made entrepreneur,” reads the five-page report, which was provided as evidence in a lawsuit that Gubarev filed against BuzzFeed News.
“Our sources were uncertain about Gubarev’s alleged ties to the hacking and collection of compromising material on Trump. Their lack of certainty is entirely understandable given the highly secretive nature of intelligence work, on the one hand, and the technical difficulty of establishing someone’s potential ties to hacking.”
Let me cut through the obfuscating and translate that for you. Fusion GPS tapped one of it’s contractors to try to prove Gubarev was a Russian intelligence asset and in the end they came up completely empty. Though Gubarev’s lawsuit was eventually dismissed (he’s appealing), not on the basis of evidence, but on general 1st amendment grounds, it led directly to exposing Fusion GPS’s failures to corroborate yet another part of their dossier.
In the end, Baumgartner only found one source of concern regarding Mr. Gubarev. The false claims in the dossier itself.
Baumgartner’s report does not have a date, and Fritsch, the Fusion GPS executive, declined to provide those details during his deposition. But it is clear from Baumgartner’s document that it was created at some point after BuzzFeed published the dossier.
“The only cause for concern regarding Gubarev comes from an article recently published on the US web portal Buzzfeed about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia’s leaders, who had allegedly collected compromising materials on the newly elected US president,” the report reads.
This, like so many other claims Steele pedaled, was simply poorly sourced trash.
To this day, essentially none of the salacious claims about Donald Trump and Russia within the dossier have been shown to be true. Partisans will claim parts of it hold up to scrutiny but they do so by dishonestly conflating already known publicly known facts at the time as “verification” (such as Cohen traveling to Russia or that Putin was meddling in the election). It’s like writing a report in which one claims that Russia is cold and people saying “See, see! That’s true! It’s verified.” The self-licking nature of all of this has been a big problem, with dossier being used to prove the dossier by media figures desperate to lend credence to Trump/Russia conspiracy theories.
Meanwhile, the media are doing what they do, which is trying to spin this revelation as a proof that “maybe” their conspiracies are somewhat true. Spoiler: If you read past the headline below, it does no such thing.
Weird. These 5 outlets all covered the same exact angle from the unsealed BuzzFeed lawsuit documents. https://t.co/Rm0hqiKAjnhttps://t.co/yV4m2RYZo6https://t.co/rpn3E4HQUBhttps://t.co/44EGGZ5EThhttps://t.co/axFFB46xbB
— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) March 15, 2019
Hopefully, one day, we can get to the bottom of all this. While I hold no illusions that anyone will ever actually be held accountable, the public still needs to know just how far it’s government was willing to go to meddle in the 2016 election and by which sources they were relying on.
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