Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch are the men behind research firm Fusion GPS.
Campaign Action
In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.
According to two former journalists, it’s not the dossier that is “fake.” And it’s not the news. What’s fake is Republican investigations into the Trump-Russia connection. The idea that the dossier was a political hit job whose contents have been disproved has become a key Republican talking point. So much so, that recent revelations showing that FBI investigations began when a drunken George Papadopoulos mouthed-off to an Australian diplomat have been greeted by complaints, not over their accuracy, but over the fact that they interrupted Republicans’ daily attack on “the dossier.”
But Simpson and Fritsch stand by both their process and their product.
Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
Republicans don’t want to let facts interfere with their narrative—especially when all the facts are against them.
Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?
And what they found was just what everyone else found—a seemingly unending list of connections showing that Donald Trump turned his real estate business into a money laundering operation for Russian oligarchs. In fact, it’s hard to find evidence that Trump’s real estate business had any substantial existence except for its role as a money laundering operation.
We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.
And when it comes to what Steele found when he looked into Trump’s other Russian activities, what happened in one Moscow hotel room was the least of it.
Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.
The meeting between Steele and FBI agents took place two months after the FBI began an investigation based on the information that had already reached them—much to the frustration of Republicans.
But the public deserves to know the truth about the Fusion GPS dossier, both its complete contents and the complete testimony of Simpson and Fritsch before Congress. Because what Republicans have been treating as a punching bag, still looks to be a bombshell.