Newly-filed court documents confirm that Fusion GPS, the company responsible for the debunked “Trump dossier”, paid off three journalists between June 2016 until February 2017, the Washington Examiner reported.
Republicans have wanted to know if the dossier was used to feed anti-Trump stories to the press during and after the campaign. This does seem to be the breakthrough they were looking for.
The three journalists – still unnamed – are known to have reported on “Russia issues relevant to [the committee’s] investigation,” the House Intelligence Committee said in a court filing.
Fusion has requested the court block release of the documents that explain the payments made to reporters.
It looks like reporters were moonlighting as anti-Trump operatives and then bringing the data to their jobs as reporters. Much of the dossier or all of it was obtained from the Kremlin.
Fusion GPS has admitted the payments were made but said it was for research.
That’s believable said no one ever.
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Fusion GPS attorney Josh Levy actually said,”This is simply another desperate attempt by the president’s political allies to discredit Fusion GPS’s work and divert attention from the question these committees are supposed to be investigating: the Trump campaign’s knowledge of Russian interference in the election.”
Fusion was paying off journalists at the same time these dossier stories ended up in the major newspapers as “leaks” and “exposes”. Yet, we are all to believe the real story is the Trump Russia collusion for which there is no evidence whatsoever.
One of the documents filed by lawyers for the House Intelligence Committee said each of the three reporters who received payments had written about the Russia probe, which could indicate that reporters were using Fusion GPS’s work to write their stories.
“Additionally, the Committee seeks transactions related to three individual journalists, [names redacted], each of whom have reported on and/or been quoted in articles regarding topics related to the Committee’s investigation, some of which were published as recently as October 2017,” the committee wrote.
They also set up meetings with the dossier author and no less than five major media outlets.
Additionally, a filing by lawyers for the House Intelligence Committee asserts that Fusion GPS “brokered meetings for dossier author Christopher Steele with at least five major media outlets in September 2016, including Yahoo news.”
One of the first reports about the dossier was in Yahoo as a result of the meeting. It was the story about Carter Page who has a defamation suit against them.
The FBI and DoJ told the various congressional committees investigating the dossier that they can not verify any of the substantive claims and some have been completely debunked.
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