Mary Jacoby and Glenn Simpson. (Screen grabs via Gateway Pundit)

So this is interesting. Mary Jacoby, former Wall Street Journal reporter and the wife of Glenn Simpson – founder of Fusion GPS – has been in the news today after a new article by Lee Smith was published in The Tablet.

Smith’s excellent article is full of worthwhile information, and I highly recommend it. A couple of windows into it – to whet your appetite – are here and here.

Mary Jacoby wrote at length in June, on Facebook, about husband Glenn’s decisive role in the infamous “dossier” on Trump:

“It’s come to my attention that some people still don’t realize what Glenn’s role was in exposing Putin’s control of Donald Trump,” Jacoby wrote. “Let’s be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn.”

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Lee Smith points out this about that:

This assertion is hardly a simple assertion of family pride; it goes directly to the nature of what became known as the “Steele dossier,” on which the Russiagate narrative is founded.

The nature of the narrative, as Smith demonstrates, closely parallels news stories Simpson and Jacoby co-wrote about Russians and their lobbying representatives in the United States some 10 years ago. Some of it – information from the 2007 timeframe – is connected directly to what Mueller found in his current investigation on Paul Manafort.

(Interestingly, I had found some of the same Simpson/Jacoby articles in recent weeks, and had related thoughts, although not identical ones, about the bearing this journalistic background and prior mindset would have had on Simpson as he was working the oppo research on Trump.)

Again, Smith is the essential reading here.

But on a separate head: what a payoff from doing a little spadework on Mary Jacoby. She and Glenn Simpson were married in 1994, and at the time, the Washington Post had a little blurb on that event (Jacoby was a reporter at Roll Call at the time):

* Roll Call newspaper will be dispatching a contingent of reporters down to Little Rock this weekend, but not to cover any congressional campaign. Seems that scribes Glenn Simpson and Mary Jacoby are getting hitched tomorrow in the Arkansas city.

Why Little Rock? Because Mary Jacoby, an Arkansas native, is the daughter of Jon E.M. Jacoby, a long-time executive at Stephens Inc. – the Little Rock, Arkansas investment firm whose connections to the Clintons have come up over and over again in investigations of their varied and often questionable financial dealings.

The relationship was confirmed in a 2003 article by Garance Franke-Ruta for The American Prospect, who recounted that Mary Jacoby, the daughter of Jon Jacoby, a senior executive at the “Clinton-allied Stephens Group,” had left a reporting job with the (then) St. Petersburg Times to sign on as press aide to Wesley Clark, the retired general and Arkansan, who was gearing up for a 2004 campaign. Here are some interesting facts mentioned by Franke-Ruta:

Clark’s new Arkansas press aide Jacoby quit her post as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times to work for Clark; Jacoby’s father, Jon Jacoby, is a good friend of Clark’s, according to Spell, and knows him from Little Rock, where he is a director and executive of the Clinton-allied Stephens Group, Inc. and a senior executive at Stephens, Inc., the investment firm where Clark worked after returning to civilian life. Mary Jacoby has never worked on a political campaign before — though she did once work as a file clerk at Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm, subject of the Whitewater investigation, according to 1996 reports — and has extensive experience as a political reporter.

Jon Jacoby, for his part, was 51 in 1990, and had joined Stephens in 1963, early enough to be a key player in major Stephens accomplishments like launching the Wal-Mart IPO (1970) and building Alltel out of a handful of successful Stephens companies. I promise, there’s a reason you want to know this.

The Fortune brief in 1990 (link above) called Jacoby “Jack Stephens’s right hand.” According to the Stephens Inc history, Jacoby introduced Stephens co-founder Jackson Stephens in 1968 to the proprietor (Walter Smiley) of a hopeful startup, Systematics, which became one of the firm’s early big successes. It was ultimately bought by a major holding of Stephens, Alltel.

And why does this matter? Because the Rose Law Firm represented Stephens – one of its biggest clients – for many years. Stephens was involved with virtually every familiar name from the multifarious Whitewater investigation: Worthen Bank, Bank of Credit & Commerce International (BCCI), Mochtar Riady, the Lippo Group, Harken Energy (and those are just the big ones; see next link).

And in 1977, Hillary Rodham herself was involved in representation for Systematics – shepherded into Stephens by Jon Jacoby:

1977 Hillary Rodham Clinton joins the Rose Law Firm. Jackson Stephens joins with former Carter administration budget director Bert Lance and a group of Mideast investors–later identified as key figures in the corrupt Bank of Credit & Commerce International–in an unsuccessful attempt to acquire Financial General Bankshares in Washington, D.C. Amid the legal maneuvers surrounding the takeover attempt, a brief is submitted by the Stephens-controlled bank data processing firm Systematics; two of the lawyers signing the brief are Hillary Rodham and Webster Hubbell.

Stephens remained one of Rose’s biggest clients, and a key player in Arkansas politics, throughout the Clintons’ time in Little Rock.

There’s more. Jon Jacoby retired in 2003 from his position as an executive with Stephens (although he remained on the board of directors of the follow-on Stephens Group). In 2000, however, he had become the chairman of the Delta and Pine Land company, a premier property acquired in 2007 by Monsanto, in which the Stephens Group, in turn, has a major stake.

Hillary Clinton’s links to Monsanto have been decried by her left-wing critics for years (with the Delta and Pine Land company mentioned in them frequently, due to its holding of a particular patent). Monsanto has also been a big donor to the Clinton Foundation; see last link. In 2015, the far left was dismayed that Jerry Crawford, long-time Democratic operative and a lobbyist for Monsanto since 2009, was a top adviser to the Ready for Hillary PAC and was preparing the groundwork for her 2016 run.

Basically, given all this history, there is no way Hillary and Jon Jacoby don’t know each other.

This background on the connection of Mary Jacoby’s father with the Clintons in Arkansas sheds an especially interesting light on previous information about old Clinton connections, in an early contract accepted by Glenn Simpson after he left the Wall Street Journal.

I wrote about it January, right after the dossier was published by BuzzFeed. At the time of that contract (2009), Simpson was working through a separate company he had just founded, SNS Global, and was subcontracted by California Strategies, which was working for a UAE sheikh:

I thought at the time that Simpson looked awfully connected to the old Clinton crony club:

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that when Glenn Simpson moved on to found Fusion GPS, he promptly got high-level oppo work with the Obama 2012 reelection campaign. In the clubby world of lobbying and partisan activism, he and Fusion GPS don’t seem to have been just some random private intelligence resource – either for a deep-pocketed anti-Trump Republican in late 2015, or for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016.

Turns out they weren’t.