On Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” political opposition research group Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson dismissed allegations that his firm’s research into then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was a “Democratic conspiracy.”
Mitchell asked, “Glenn, can you set people straight about the so-called Steele Dossier and why you think it’s being used by Republicans, by the president, by House Republicans, Devin Nunes certainly, to try to undermine the Mueller Report and a lot of the conclusions that go into the theory that Ukraine was involved somehow in targeting the president and not—something I should point out, not just the intelligence community consensus but also the bipartisan consensus of the Senate, Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee in only recent months.”
Simpson said, “Essentially, because the Steele dossier was a piece of campaign research that was when we were working for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, they think that by pointing that out over and over again, they can delegitimize everything that happened after that. As you point out, that’s just not right. It’s not accurate to say that the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign was triggered by the Steele Dossier. It’s also a fact that the first half of our investigation into Donald Trump that led us to hire Chris Steele was funded by the Republicans. So there was no Democratic conspiracy to frame Donald Trump. I’ve never been to Ukraine. The idea that the dossier comes from Ukraine is yet another phony conspiracy theory.”
Mitchell asked, “Why did you bring Christopher Steele in?”
Simpson said, “Chris is the leading authority on Russia worldwide and is well-respected by his colleagues. He served a tour in Russia, then rose to become the head of the Russia desk for MI6 before retiring in 2009. We had done other work with him, and he lived up to his reputation as a sterling analyst and researcher of information from the former Soviet Union. So that’s why we decided to work with him. The events that led to us hiring him were essentially this long investigation that began, commissioned by the Republicans to look into Donald Trump’s business career. And that began in September of 2015 before the Republican primaries had even started. And it went on for months and months and months, and more connections between Trump and people from the former Soviet Union kept coming up. And so we finally exhausted all the public records, and we decided we needed someone who could actually do some work inside Russia.”
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