Oh, wow. This should be interesting, indeed.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has managed to snag Glenn Simpson, the founder of Fusion GPS, to testify next Wednesday.
Fusion GPS is the political opposition research firm that commissioned the hotly debated anti-Trump dossier.
In 2015, Mr. Simpson’s firm, Fusion GPS, hired former British intelligence agent commissioned Christopher Steele to compile opposition research on then-candidate Trump. For months Mr. Steele’s salacious 35-page dossier of unverified information was cited by Democrats as the reason for a special commission to investigate Mr. Trump and his aides for a supposed role in Russia’s hacking of Democratic Party email servers.
Three men — Mr. Trump’s attorney, a campaign volunteer and a tech company CEO — have publicly said the parts about them in the dossier are fiction. A Russian diplomat whom Mr. Steele accused of wrongdoing also called the dossier a fantasy.
People accused of doing things that could land them in very hot water almost always cry innocence. And sometimes, they’re telling the truth.
We don’t really know, given the avalanche of information that has emerged since news of the dossier first broke.
One of the big questions for Mr. Simpson will likely be, “Who commissioned your services?”
Early on, Jeb Bush was the named culprit – a charge he vehemently denies.
Later, the talk turned to unnamed Democrats.
Simpson has refused to reveal the client behind the dossier, which came to light when Buzzfeed News printed parts of the dossier, despite there being no confirmation of any of the details included.
On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is scheduled to explore enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, will also hear testimony from British-American businessman Bill Browder.
Mr. Browder has called Mr. Simpson a “professional smear campaigner.”
Before the Trump dossier, Fusion GP worked on efforts to repeal the Magnitsky Act, a law enacted by the Obama administration in 2012 to punish Russian officials responsible for the death of Russian lawyer and whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in 2009.
Magnitsky served as an attorney for Mr. Browder.
Senator Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is also pushing to get former Trump campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and Donald Trump Jr. as part of next week’s hearings.
It’s all part of what seems to be a net that has grown wider and more twisted, with time. Perhaps Simpson can provide a key to unraveling some of the knots involved in this case.
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