Earlier this week Sen. Dianne Feinstein released a partially redacted transcript of Glenn Simpson’s Aug. 22, 2017 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that just last week Simpson himself, co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based strategic communications firm Fusion GPS that assembled and distributed the now notorious anti-Trump dossier, wrote a New York Times op-ed calling for Republican members of the committee to release his testimony.
Feinstein said at first that she was pressured to release the document. Now she says she wasn’t, and her statement was misunderstood. The mix-up adds further confusion as to who thought it advisable to subject the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative to more light. It discloses no further information to verify the research of Fusion GPS contractor Christopher Steele, the former British spy whose byline was used to promote the dossier as an “intelligence” product, rather than as opposition research for hire. Rather, the transcript raises some serious questions about the former MI6 officer who Feinstein’s committee colleagues Senators Charles Grassley and Lindsey Graham referred to the Justice Department for a criminal probe last week.
The release of the Simpson transcript is the latest salvo in a campaign of bare-knuckled political warfare that began when reports of Donald Trump’s sub rosa ties to Vladimir Putin first surfaced before the 2016 election. At that time, most of the press refrained from publishing articles sourced to a dossier that former FBI director James Comey called “salacious and unverified” and which the reliably liberal New York Times refused to touch. Those opinions changed abruptly after Trump won, as the result of what looks increasingly like a coordinated campaign involving outgoing Obama administration officials who leaked carefully chosen bits of classified information to a credulous press corps that had become used to printing handouts from the good guys and was especially eager to #Resist Trump.
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