Thursday, January 11, 2018

Fusion co-founder: Dossier author feared Trump was being blackmailed

Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the author of the opposition research dossier on then-candidate Donald Trump and Russia was acting on his own volition when he went to the FBI because he was concerned that a presidential candidate was being blackmailed, according to the 312-page transcript of his testimony.
Simpson told the committee in closed-door testimony in August -- which was released publicly on Tuesday -- that he did not know how the FBI would react when ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, went to the bureau in July 2016.
"Chris said he was very concerned about whether this represented a national security threat and said he wanted to -- he said he thought we were obligated to tell someone in government, in our government about this information," Simpson said. "He thought from his perspective there was an issue -- a security issue about whether a presidential candidate was being blackmailed."
To date, no evidence has emerged that Trump was blackmailed.
Simpson also testified that Steele told him the FBI had similar intelligence from "an internal Trump campaign source" and that the FBI "believed Chris' information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization."
 

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