Fusion GPS Admits They Used John McCain to Pass Anti-Trump Dossier to
Obama-Era Intel Agencies
EILAT,
Israel — The founders of the controversial opposition research firm Fusion
GPS admitted that they helped the researcher hired to compile the infamous,
largely discredited 35-page dossier on President Donald Trump to share the
document with Sen. John McCain.
The goal of providing the dossier to McCain, the Fusion GPS
founders explained, was to pass the information contained in the questionable
document to the U.S. intelligence community under the Obama administration.
The disclosure raises questions about whether McCain knew that
the information he delivered to the intelligence community was actually an
opposition document reportedly funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the
Democratic National Committee.
McCain’s office
did not reply yesterday to a Breitbart News request 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, 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.
