Clinton’s identity, too, was kept hidden, in this case behind the screen of Elias’s law firm, Perkins Coie. and Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. donor fled.Īt that point, Fusion switched clients and political parties, pitching its services to Marc Elias, the lawyer for the D.N.C. Once Trump secured the nomination, however, the G.O.P. They don’t identify that donor but note, helpfully, that he arranged for them to contract their opposition-research assignment through the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative Web site known to be funded by Paul Singer, a New York hedge-fund magnate. After firing off a quick e-mail to a big conservative donor they knew who disliked Trump, they were hired. (They declined to disclose their client.) So, in 2015, as Trump gained momentum, but before he clinched the nomination, Simpson and Fritsch again decided to look for political work. In the past, they had worked mostly for corporate clients, but in 2012 they had also done some political-opposition research on the Republican Presidential nominee, Mitt Romney. Their involvement in his campaign began as a business proposition. Although Carl Bernstein helped to break the news of its existence on CNN, his friend and Watergate-reporting partner Bob Woodward dismissed it almost instantly as “garbage.” During impeachment-hearing testimony last week, the former White House national-security adviser Fiona Hill, one of America’s foremost experts on Russia and a professional acquaintance of Steele’s, described the dossier as “a rabbit hole” and suggested that Steele may have been “played.” But the authors defend Steele’s work, and their own, arguing that it has proved “strikingly right.”Īs the authors tell it, they became obsessed with Trump almost accidentally. Steele’s dossier has been debated, denounced, derided, and occasionally defended almost since the moment it was first published, in January, 2017, by BuzzFeed News, against Steele’s wishes. Whether Simpson and Fritsch’s score-settling, tell-all account will change any minds remains to be seen, but they present a mountain of evidence that Trump’s dealings with corrupt foreign players-particularly those from the former Soviet Union-are both real and go back decades. After nearly three years without a word from Steele, while the so-called pee tape and his other sensational findings sparked furious controversy, the former M.I.6 spy speaks directly and on the record about his own part for the first time in the book, an advance copy of which was given to The New Yorker. Fusion was the firm that hired the former British spy Christopher Steele to research Trump’s ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign.
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