John McCain Stays
Silent on Involvement in Hoax Trump Dossier After Fusion GPS Revelations
by Aaron Klein 11 Jan 2018
TEL AVIV — For
the past three days, Sen. John McCain’s
office has not responded to Breitbart News phone and email inquiries seeking
clarification of the Arizona politician’s role in delivering the infamous,
largely discredited 35-page dossier on President Donald Trump to the U.S.
intelligence community under the Obama administration.
In a New York Times oped last week, the founders
of the controversial opposition research firm Fusion GPS admitted that they helped get the dossier to
McCain using an “emissary,” with the goal of McCain passing the information
contained in the questionable document to U.S. intelligence agencies.
The disclosure raises questions about whether McCain knew
that the information he delivered to the Obama administration was actually an
opposition document reportedly funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic
National Committee.
Breitbart News has been seeking clarification on this
issue since Tuesday. However, McCain’s office did not reply yesterday to phone
and email requests for comment on the matter.
Last December, it was revealed that it was McCain who
notoriously passed the
controversial dossier documents produced by the Washington opposition research
firm Fusion GPS to then FBI Director James Comey, whose agency reportedly utilized the
dossier as a basis for its probe into alleged Russian interference in the
2016 presidential election.
Writing in a New York Times oped last
Tuesday, Fusion GPS founders Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritch relate that they
helped McCain share their anti-Trump dossier with the intelligence community
via an “emissary.”
“After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his
intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary,” the Fusion GPS
founders related.
“We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national
security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power.”
It was not clear from their statement whether McCain knew
Fusion GPS was behind the dossier. Fusion GPS paid former intelligence
agent Christopher Steele to do the purported research for the document. Steele
later conceded in
court documents that part of his work still needed to be verified.
In October, the Washington Post reported that
in April 2016, attorney Marc E. Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS to conduct the questionable
anti-Trump work on behalf of both the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Through
Perkins Coie, Clinton’s campaign and the DNC continued to fund Fusion GPS until
October 2016, days before Election Day, the Post reported.
On January 10, CNN was first to report,
based on leaked information, that the contents of the dossier were presented
during classified briefings one week earlier to then-president Obama and
president-elect Trump.
Just after CNN’s January 10 report on the classified
briefings about the dossier, BuzzFeed published its
full unverified contents.
In October, McCain denied providing the dossier to
BuzzFeed and said that he only gave the material to the FBI. “I gave it to no
one except for the director of the FBI. I don’t know why you’re digging this up
now,” McCain told the
Daily Caller during what the news website described as a testy exchange.
While the Fusion GPS oped sheds some light on the manner
in which McCain obtained the dossier, the Fusion founders did not name the
“emissary” who delivered the document to McCain.
A January 11 statement from McCain attempted to explain
why he provided the documents to the FBI but did not mention how he came
to possess the dossier or whether he knew who funded it.
“Upon examination of the contents, and unable to make a
judgment about their accuracy, I delivered the information to the director of
the FBI,” McCain said at
the time. “That has been the extent of my contact with the FBI or any other
government agency regarding this issue.”
Sir Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to
Moscow, said McCain
first consulted him about the claims inside the dossier at a security
conference in Canada
shortly after last November’s presidential election.
Wood stated that McCain had obtained the documents from
the senator’s own sources. “I told him I was aware of what was in the report
but I had not read it myself, that it might be true, it might be untrue. I had
no means of judging really,” Wood further told BBC Radio 4 in January.
Last Month, Wood related that he served as a “go-between”
to inform McCain about the dossier contents. “My mission was essentially to be
a go-between and a messenger, to tell the senator and assistants that such a
dossier existed,” Wood told Fox
News.
In March, Vanity Fair raised questions about
the alleged involvement of David J. Kramer, a former State Department official,
in helping to obtain the dossier directly from Steele. The issue was also raised in
a lawsuit filed against Steele by one of the individuals named in the dossier.
The dossier contains wild and unproven claims that the
Russians had information regarding Trump and sordid sexual acts, including the
widely mocked claim that Trump hired prostitutes and had them urinate on a
hotel room bed. It also claimed there was an exchange of information
between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.
Those allegations remain unsubstantiated following
numerous public hearings. Indeed, former CIA Director John Brennan made clear
in testimony last
May that after viewing all of the evidence that was available to him on the
Russia probe he is not aware of any collusion between Russia and members of
Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Dossier was
reportedly basis for Obama administration moves
According to the BBC, the dossier served as a
“roadmap” for the FBI’s investigation into claims of coordination between
Moscow and members of Trump’s presidential campaign during the Obama
administration.
In April, CNN reported that
the dossier served as part of the FBI’s justification for seeking the FISA
court’s reported approval to clandestinely monitor the communications of Carter
Page, the American oil industry investor who was tangentially and briefly
associated with Trump’s presidential campaign.
Senior Republican members of the Senate Judiciary
Committee have reportedly requested
that the FBI and Department of Justice turn over applications for any warrants
to monitor the communications of U.S. citizens associated with the
investigation into alleged Russia interference in the 2016 presidential
election.
In testimony last May, former FBI Director James
Comey repeatedly refused
to answer questions about his agency’s ties to the dossier.
In further testimony to
the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Comey admitted he pushed back
against a request from President Donald Trump to possibly investigate the
origins of “salacious material” that the agency possessed in the course of its
investigation into alleged Russian interference.
Dossier
discredited
Major questions have been raised as to the veracity of
the dossier, large sections of which have been discredited.
Citing a “Kremlin insider,” the dossier, which misspelled
the name of a Russian diplomat, claimed that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen held
“secret meetings” with Kremlin officials in Prague in August 2016.
That charge unraveled after Cohen revealed he
had never traveled to Prague, calling the story “totally fake, totally
inaccurate.” The Atlantic confirmed Cohen’s whereabouts in New York
and California during the period the dossier claimed that Cohen was in
Prague. Cohen reportedly produced his passport showing he had not traveled to
Prague.
In testimony in May, the FBI’s Comey confirmed that
the basis for the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia allegedly
wanted Trump in office was not because the billionaire was, as Sen. Al Franken
(D-MN) claimed during a hearing, “ensnared in” Russia’s “web of patronage”
– just as the dossier alleged. Instead, the FBI chief provided two primary
reasons for Russia’s alleged favoring of Trump over Clinton during the 2016
presidential race.
One reason, according to Comey, was that Putin “hated”
Clinton and would have favored any Republican opponent. The second reason,
Comey explained, was that Putin made an assessment that it would be easier to
make a deal with a businessman than someone from the political class.
Comey’s statements are a far cry from the
conspiracies fueled by the
dossier alleging Putin held blackmail information on Trump.
Citing current and former government officials,
the New Yorker reported the
dossier prompted skepticism among intelligence community members, with the
publication quoting one member saying it was a “nutty” piece of evidence to
submit to a U.S. president.
Steele’s work has been questioned by
former acting CIA Director Michael Morell, who currently works at the Hillary
Clinton-tied Beacon Global Strategies LLC.
Morell, who was in line to become CIA director if Clinton
won, said he had seen no evidence that Trump associates cooperated with
Russians. He also raised questions about the dossier written by a former
British intelligence officer, which alleged a conspiracy between the Trump
campaign and Russia. …
Morell pointed out that former Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper said on Meet the Press on
March 5 that he had seen no evidence of a conspiracy when he left office
January 20.
“That’s a pretty strong statement by General Clapper,”
Morell said.
Regarding Steele’s dossier, Morell stated, “Unless you
know the sources, and unless you know how a particular source acquired a
particular piece of information, you can’t judge the information — you just
can’t.”
Morell charged the dossier “doesn’t take you anywhere, I
don’t think.”
“I had two questions when I first read it. One was, how
did Chris talk to these sources? I have subsequently learned that he used
intermediaries.”
Morell continued:
And then I asked myself, why did these guys provide this
information, what was their motivation? And I subsequently learned that he paid
them. That the intermediaries paid the sources and the intermediaries got the
money from Chris. And that kind of worries me a little bit because if you’re
paying somebody, particularly former FSB [Russian intelligence] officers, they
are going to tell you truth and innuendo and rumor, and they’re going to call
you up and say, “Hey, let’s have another meeting, I have more information for
you,” because they want to get paid some more.
I think you’ve got to take all that into consideration
when you consider the dossier.
Let’s connect the dots:
Fusion GPS
Democratic
National Committee (DNC) hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump.
Note: Robert F. Bauer
is a general counsel at the Democratic
National Committee (DNC), a partner at Perkins
Coie, was a White House counsel for the Barack Obama administration, and Barack Obama’s personal counsel.
Obama attorneys aid Obama in illegal activities, Robert
Bauer Perkins Coie help Obama hide birth certificate records, Payments to
attorneys
Posted on September 28, 2010
| 216 comments
Perkins Coie
hired Fusion GPS to investigate Donald
Trump.
Barack
Obama’s personal counsel was Robert
F. Bauer, the president for the Barack
Obama administration, and is married to Michelle Obama.
Michelle Obama is
married to Barack Obama, was the first
lady for the Barack Obama administration,
and an advocate for the ONE Campaign.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Foundation
to Promote Open Society was a funder for the International Rescue Committee.
George
Soros was the chairman for the Foundation
to Promote Open Society.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Cindy Hensley
McCain was an advocate for the ONE
Campaign, and is married to Senator
John S. McCain III.
John S. McCain III
is married to Cindy Hensley McCain,
and a U.S. Senate senator.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Tom
Brokaw is an overseer at the International
Rescue Committee, was an anchor for the NBC Nightly News, and the interim host for Meet the Press.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Maureen White was
a national finance chair for the International
Rescue Committee, and a national finance chair for the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Democratic
National Committee (DNC) hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump.
Robert F. Bauer
is a general counsel at the Democratic
National Committee (DNC), a partner at Perkins
Coie, was a White House counsel for the Barack Obama administration, and Barack Obama’s personal counsel.
Perkins Coie
hired Fusion GPS to investigate
Donald Trump.
Washington
Free Beacon hired Fusion GPS to
investigate 2016 Republican presidential candidates, hired in 2015 to
investigate GOP candidates.
Paul E. Singer is
a funder for the Washington Free Beacon,
an investor in the Washington Free
Beacon, and supported same-sex
marriage in New York.
Clifford S.
Asness supported same-sex marriage
in New York, and is a director at the International
Rescue Committee.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Cindy Hensley
McCain was an advocate for the ONE
Campaign, and is married to Senator
John S. McCain III.
John S. McCain III
is married to Cindy Hensley McCain,
and a U.S. Senate senator.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Tom
Brokaw is an overseer at the International
Rescue Committee, and was an anchor for the NBC Nightly News.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Maureen White was
a national finance chair for the International
Rescue Committee, and a national finance chair for the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Democratic
National Committee (DNC) hired Fusion GPS to investigate Trump.
Meet the Press
is an NBC News program.
Tom
Brokaw was an interim host for Meet
the Press, an anchor for the NBC
Nightly News, and is an overseer at the International Rescue Committee.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Cindy Hensley
McCain was an advocate for the ONE
Campaign, and is married to Senator
John S. McCain III.
John S. McCain III
is married to Cindy Hensley McCain,
and a U.S. Senate senator.
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Michelle Obama,
was an advocate for the ONE Campaign,
the first lady for the Barack Obama
administration, a lawyer at Sidley
Austin LLP, and is married to Barack
Obama.
Barack
Obama is married to Michelle Obama,
Robert F. Bauer was his personal
counsel, the president for the Barack
Obama administration, and an intern at Sidley
Austin LLP.
Sidley Austin
LLP was a consulting firm for Canada.
Chrystia
Freeland is the foreign minister for Canada, and
was a contributor for MSNBC.
Harold E. Ford Jr. is a
political commentator at MSNBC, was
an overseer at the International Rescue
Committee, and a 2008 Bilderberg conference participant (think
tank).
ONE Campaign is
a partner with the International Rescue
Committee.
Cindy Hensley
McCain was an advocate for the ONE
Campaign, and is married to Senator
John S. McCain III.
John S. McCain III
is married to Cindy Hensley McCain,
and a U.S. Senate senator.
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