The ignoble political opposition research company, Fusion GPS, is heading to a Florida U.S. District Court, no doubt kicking a screaming all the way, to answer questions about the infamous ‘dossier’ purported as penned by former British MI6 agent Christopher Steele.
At the center of this latest round of tough questions for one of Fusion’s co-founders, Glenn Simpson, is Russian businessman Aleksej Gubarev, who alleges his companies were defamed by the super spy and BuzzFeed News, the media outlet that published the report.
Christopher Steele
Gubarev wants to know who vetted Steele for the intelligence gathering and what he knew about the proposed scope of work. And unless the defendants repeatedly plead the fifth, he might just get some answers.
Fake News Dossier
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign (who siphoned off DNC resources) funded Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele’s seemingly deep dive into then-candidate Donald Trump’s supposed relations with the Kremlin.
Yet spokespeople on the Clinton campaign denied knowing of the so-called opposition research. Malarkey. Every campaign conducts the process of rooting through the dark recesses of the enemy – heck, most campaigns research their own candidate and staff. It is a common practice, although it typically doesn’t involve hiring foreign spies to fabricate dirt on the opponent. They can deny, deny, deny, but Hillary Clinton and the DNC were knee-deep in the muck on the dossier.
But there is speculation that Steele did not write the document at all. Rather, it is claimed, the poor research, language style, and disjointed sentence structure do not necessarily fit with the highest standards and intelligence of the high-level operative. Paul Roderick Gregory, an expert in all things Kremlin and Putin, opined in Forbes:
“It is full of names, dates, meetings, quarrels, and events that are hearsay (one an overheard conversation). It is a collection of “this important person” said this to “another important person.” There is no record; no informant is identified by name or by more than a generic title. The report appears to fail the veracity test in the one instance of a purported meeting in which names, dates, and location are provided. Some of the stories are so bizarre (the Rosneft bribe) that they fail the laugh test. Yet, there appears to be a desire on the part of some media and Trump opponents on both sides of the aisle to picture the Orbis report as genuine but unverifiable.”
What does pass the laugh test is that someone on the left had the brilliant idea of tagging the man who hated Trump the most to be the courier of the dossier to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and James Comey. Diabolical. And John McCain was an easy mark.
He pounced on the information like a cat on its prey and did the bidding of the Democrats. In his own words, he explained how the dossier was given to him by a British diplomat:
“Our impromptu meeting felt charged with a strange intensity. No one wise-cracked to lighten the mood. We spoke in lowered voices. The room was dimly lit, and the atmosphere was eerie.”
Drama, much? But seriously, why would anyone believe that messing with Russians to derail a Trump presidency was a sage idea? They must not be current on retaliatory acts from Putin’s posse.
Not Fake News
The dossier has done an incredible amount of damage… to news outlets who published without verifying any information, defaming businesses and individuals, and to the DNC and the Clinton campaign who were found to have lied about, well, everything, including knowing about and paying for the document.
Thirty-five pages that Christopher Steele claims are his intelligence gathering has led to an investigation of a different sort than anticipated. He is being sued by Aleksej Gubarev, along with BuzzFeed News, for defamation. Statements in the dossier claim Gubarev’s companies Webzilla and XBT Holdings “used botnets and porn traffic to transmit viruses, plant bugs, steal data and conduct ‘alerting operations’ against the Democratic party leadership.”
Fusion GPS has until August 31 to appear for a deposition. Ah, those unintended consequences once again rise in defiance against their creators as their day in court is looming.
