HARI SREENIVASAN:
The secret funder of a once secret dossier of opposition research on Donald Trump has been unmasked. The dossier, produced during last year's presidential campaign, purported to document possible connections between Russians and Trump Organization business or the Trump campaign.
The Washington firm Fusion GPS had been hired to produce the dossier during the Republican primary season, and it eventually assigned the task to a British former intelligence officer named Christopher Steele. That's all been known for months.
Now, we know who originally hired Fusion GPS. The chairman and the editor of the conservative website Washington Free Beacon confirm they did so for information on "multiple Republican candidates."
At the same time, Free Beacon denied paying for the Steele dossier or having any contact with him. Free Beacon said its research ended before Steele began his work.
A key financial backer of Free Beacon is Paul Singer, a billionaire New York investor who is among the country's most active Republican donors. Since 2012, Singer has given more than 40 million dollars to Republican and conservative candidates for federal office, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Recipients included Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, who competed with Trump for the Republican nomination.
Earlier this week, another Washington law firm, Perkins Coie, which represented the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, said it continued to pay Steele for his work after Trump secured the nomination. The Steele dossier, published after the campaign by Buzzfeed, contained salacious and unverified information about Mister Trump and his 2013 visit to Moscow.
The White House had no comment today on the revelations about the original funding of the dossier. Yesterday, Trump press secretary Sarah Sanders said if there was any collusion with Russia, it was the Democratic National Committee and the Clintons who colluded.
The House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee says The Free Beacon has agreed to cooperate with its probe into Russian meddling into the election. The committee has also subpoenaed bank records from Fusion GPS.
For more on the mystery and controversy surrounding the trump dossier, I am joined by Associated Press reporter Tom Lobianco.
The House of Representatives Intelligence Committee says the Free Beacon has agreed to cooperate with its probe into Russian meddling into the election. The committee is also subpoenaed bank records from Fusion GPS. For more on the mystery and controversy surrounding the Trump dossier, I am joined by Associated Press reporter Tom LoBianco. So for people who haven't been following this closely, this is something, this is a document that we started hearing about really in the fall of last year as the campaigns were in full swing.
TOM LOBIANCO:
Yeah. I mean that seems to be you pretty much universally accepted at this point, with the stark exception of the president of course. Of course he has a political reason to fight back against that. But for everyone else there seems to be a pretty wide acceptance that that is the case. And we've seen evidence to that effect. We had the meeting that we discovered with Trump Jr., Paul Manafort for it and Jared Kushner and the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and we found that a little bit more about that this past week, learned that the document that she had handed over to them in the meeting was very similar to a document put together by the Kremlin for Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, someone who U.S. intelligence had alerted Dana Rohrabacher himself that that they were trying to basically court him as a spy, trying to groom him.
So, you know, look there's, we find out more and more the longer this goes on. Now you know was it effective? Did it swing the election? The White House will often say well you know no votes were changed, and that's not one of the the accusations that's out there. But the bigger question, did this influence the election? And was it collusion in the campaign between the Trump campaign and the Russian operatives? We don't have definitive answers on those yet. What we do know is that people are still pulling on these threads and we constantly find out more. So you know is this at the beginning, the finish, the middle? It's hard to tell but it sure feels like this could go on for a while.
