Commentary
In the Spygate scandal that the country has been watching unfold for the past two years, there’s one person who keeps surfacing: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson.He’s one of three former Wall Street Journal reporters who co-founded the political operative firm Fusion GPS in 2011. Along with Peter Fritsch and Thomas Catan, Simpson created the firm that keeps popping up in the most unexpected places.
To briefly sum up how Simpson and his Fusion GPS operatives were involved in every step of the Spygate scandal:
• Prior to Donald Trump winning the 2016 Republican nomination to run for president, the Washington Free Beacon was paying Fusion GPS for opposition research into Trump and several other GOP nominees. Once Trump secured the nomination, the Free Beacon dropped its contract with Fusion and had no further involvement.
• The Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) then stepped in and hired Fusion GPS to continue its opposition research into Trump. It’s at this point that Simpson hired retired British MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who began compiling his dossier. To hide the relationship between the Clinton campaign, the DNC, and Fusion GPS, the money to pay for this activity was laundered through the Perkins Coie law firm.
• Simpson and Steele then established contact with both Justice Department (DOJ) and FBI officials, along with several media outlets, and, on behalf of the Clinton campaign, began presenting “evidence” that supposedly showed that Trump secretly colluded with the Russian government. Media outlets published articles that placed several Trump people under suspicion of being compromised or agents of the Russians, and the FBI began investigations into these targets.
• In July 2016, just prior to and then again immediately after the meeting at Trump Tower between representatives of the Trump campaign—Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner—and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, Simpson met with Veselnitskaya. This wasn’t disclosed until he testified to Congress in 2018. It increasingly appeared that this meeting was an attempt by Fusion GPS operatives to set up the Trump campaign.
• Shortly before the 2016 election, the FBI made a show of disassociating itself from Fusion GPS, yet quickly created a secret back channel to the firm through top DOJ official Bruce Ohr, so that Simpson and Steele could continue feeding the FBI “evidence” for its Trump-related investigations.
And now? In the latest exciting installment of “Where in The World Is Glenn Simpson?” he turned up at a security conference in Colorado in 2018 chatting with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). At the time, Schiff was the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and now, thanks to the Democrats winning control of the House in last year’s midterm elections, he’s chairman of that committee.
Reporter John Solomon of The Hill stated in his Feb. 7 column that he was shown pictures of Schiff and Simpson talking together last July at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. What makes this meeting stand out is that Simpson was a key witness before Schiff’s intelligence committee and other congressional panels, testifying in November 2017 and again in October 2018. As Solomon wrote in his report, there’s no evidence that Schiff disclosed this contact with this key witness to the other members of the House Intelligence Committee.
It must be remembered that Schiff was among the most vocal in Congress in calling for former Attorney General Jeff Sessions to be investigated for Russian collusion because he failed to disclose he'd had a brief chat with then-Russian ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak in a room full of hundreds of people at the Mayflower Hotel.
Schiff also called for then-Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) to be recused and investigated for not immediately disclosing to the committee information that he was shown about illegal unmasking of intelligence intercepts related to the Trump transition team in March 2017. Nunes opted to share that information with the White House first, and he was subsequently recused from the House committee and investigated for doing that. The investigation cleared him of any wrongdoing and he returned to chair the committee.
Now, serious questions have been raised about Schiff since he met with a key witness and failed to disclose it. Both men related, through spokesmen, that they had discussed nothing of any consequence when they met briefly by chance at the Aspen conference.
Didn’t Sessions also just happen to briefly run into Kislyak at a public conference, yet that was turned into an issue to the point that Sessions had to undergo the ludicrous spectacle of having to come to testify to the congressional committees that he was, in fact, not working with the Russians to undermine the 2016 election.
What I find most interesting is the chain of events that led to these photos being shown to Solomon. Did someone just happen to be there to witness Schiff talking with Simpson—someone who also just happened to snap pictures of this meeting—and then the photos didn’t surface until someone just happened to show them to Solomon a few days ago? That’s either a lucky chain of happy accidents or these people have been under surveillance for some time.
I’ve suspected for the past two years that, far from being passive and limiting themselves to merely complaining about the Mueller “witch hunt” on social media and in interviews, Trump and his people have been very proactive against the Spygate plotters. They’ve just been keeping their countermoves under wraps until the right time.The Spygate plotters lost their surveillance ability when they were exposed and rooted out of the federal agencies one by one.
Instead, it’s the DOJ and FBI under the Trump administration, including DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who have been conducting their own investigations. What if the Spygate plotters themselves, as part of these investigations, have been under surveillance?
I am quite confident that corrupt officials at the DOJ and FBI—using what they knew was bogus, politically tainted propaganda as “evidence'” to launch investigations of Trump and his campaign people—would qualify as a domestic RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case.
Let’s see a show of hands. Who thinks Trump and Sessions—even though they were faced with a plot to overthrow a sitting president–didn’t conduct investigations and apply for surveillance warrants on the Spygate plotters?
Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter at @drawandstrike.
Friends Read Free