Trump Calls On FBI To Name Names: Who Paid For 'Dossier'?

Trump Calls On FBI To Name Names: Who Paid For ‘Dossier’?

October 22, 2017 By Robert Gehl

President Donald Trump is demanding the Department of Justice and FBI reveal who paid Fusion GPS, a leftist opposition research firm, to draw up the bogus “dossier” last year by former British spook Christopher Steele.
“Officials behind the now discredited ‘Dossier’ plead the Fifth,” Trump wrote on Twitter on Saturday. “Justice Department and/or FBI should immediately release who paid for it.”
Trump was tweeting about the co-founders of Fusion – Peter Fritsch and Thomas Catan. They asserted their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination during testimony with the House Intelligence Committee last week.
The committee has ramped up its efforts to investigate the source of the now-discredited “dossier,” The Daily Caller reports.
Fusion was working with people close to the Hillary Clinton campaign when it began working on the dossier. The committee has subpoenaed the two co-founders and their bank, TDBank, for records to disclose exactly who their clients were – who paid them to create the document.
Fusion so far has resisted all attempts to find out who is behind the dossier. Democrats are also trying to stymie efforts.
It is unclear whether the FBI and Justice Department know who paid Fusion GPS to produce the dossier, which BuzzFeed published on Jan. 10. But the agencies have reportedly used the document as part of the investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.
Steele, the former MI6 agent, met with FBI agents in July to provide briefings on his investigation of Trump. Some reports are that the agency decided to continue to pay Steele to continue his investigation. But it is unclear if he was paid by the FBI or someone else. From The Daily Caller:

Republican lawmakers have raised questions about the FBI’s involvement with Steele and the dossier, mostly because it is the product of a politically-motivated opposition research campaign. Republicans on the House Intelligence and Senate Judiciary Committees have pressed the FBI and DOJ about whether those agencies vetted the dossier prior to using it as part of its investigation into the Trump campaign.
So far, the agencies have not provided responses to those questions.
For its part, Fusion has largely refused to cooperate with congressional committees conducting Russia-related investigations.
Glenn Simpson, one of the co-founders of Fusion and the point-man on the dossier project, refused to identify Fusion’s clients in August, when he met with the Senate Judiciary Committee for 10 hours. The firm says that revealing its clients would hurt its business while undercutting the constitutional rights of its clients to engage in political activities.

The dossier claims that Russia had been supporting Trump for at least five years and that there had been contact between Russian officials and members of his campaign, including Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen.