by WorldTribune Staff, July 27, 2018

Major media analysts and assorted fact-checkers have asserted that Hillary Clinton never used the infamous “dossier” that her campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) paid for.

But, “a check of the public record shows otherwise,” Rowan Scarborough noted in a July 26 analysis for The Washington Times. “Although the campaign never specifically cited the dossier by name … the Clinton-financed dossier was used to fuel an FBI investigation into the Trump team that continues today by special counsel Robert Mueller.”

A Republican congressional staffer said: “Of course they used the dossier. They paid for it, and the people they paid gave the dossier to the press and the FBI before the election. So that right there is the campaign using the dossier. It’s their operation, and they’re paying for it.”

Scarborough noted that Clinton’s campaign “received a steady flow of briefings on its paid-for Christopher Steele dossier, whose unverified Trump-Russia collusion charges made their way into election news stories and Clinton talking points.”

The record shows that the Clinton campaign and DNC financed the dossier as part of $1 million funneled to the DNC’s law firm Perkins Coie and then to Fusion GPS for opposition research on candidate Trump, Scarborough’s analysis notes.

Steele, a former British intelligence agent, was paid about $160,000 by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson. According to the FBI’s wiretap applications, Steele paid sub-sources who collected anti-Trump information from Kremlin operatives.

Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence “established the fact via witnesses that Steele’s claims were regularly briefed to the Clinton campaign starting in June 2016,” Scarborough wrote.

The House intelligence committee report’s Chapter 4, “Campaign Links to Russia,” details the dossier-to-Clinton flow. Finding No. 39 states, “Christopher Steele’s information from Russian sources was provided directly to Fusion GPS and [name redacted] and indirectly to the Clinton campaign.”

After news broke that Russia had allegedly hacked Democratic computers, the Clinton campaign “stepped up charges that Trump was in cahoots with Moscow. Republicans believe the source was Steele,” Scarborough wrote.

In his book “Russian Roulette,” Yahoo News investigative reporter Michael Isikoff calls his old friend Simpson, “the Clinton campaign’s chief undercover oppo man. In April, Elias and Simpson worked out a deal: Fusion GPS would be retained by Elias’s firm, Perkins Coie, with the investigators’ fees and expenses paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. Once again, the arrangement would be obscured on campaign disclosure reports filed with the Federal Election Commission.”

Isikoff in September 2016 wrote the first dossier story, which was immediately tweeted and repeated by the Clinton campaign.

“Even before that story, the Clinton-bought information emerged in an Aug. 27, 2016, letter from then-Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, to then-FBI Director James B. Comey. Reid called for an investigation into the same charges leveled anonymously by Steele,” Scarborough wrote.

Reid, a Clinton supporter, “received the information from then-CIA Director John Brennan, who contends that the senator released the Trump charges without his approval. But it shows that Clinton loyalists were able to circulate Steele’s charges inside the Obama administration and Reid was the public conduit,” Scarborough wrote.

“Simpson led Fusion as it oversaw Steele’s information flow to the FBI. Steele personally briefed agents. Fusion set up a line of communication from one of its anti-Trump researchers to a Justice Department official to the FBI agent leading the investigation, Peter Strzok,” Scarborough noted.

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