It’s time for a public accounting of exactly how Fusion GPS spent close to a million dollars of unreported campaign expenditures in its quest to discredit and destroy Donald Trump.
We know that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC secretly funneled $1,024,408 to Fusion GPS through the Perkins Cole law firm to pay for dirt on Donald Trump.
And we know that $168,500 of that money was then paid by Fusion to British ex-spook Christopher Steele to create his highly discredited and unverifiable dossier about Donald Trump’s alleged activities in Russia.
What we don’t know is what Fusion GPS did with the remaining $855,908.
That’s a lot of money.
And how it was spent is still a big secret, even though it was money from a federal campaign.
It’s time for all of that to come out.
A key part of the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms required campaigns to divulge precisely how they spend their money. Even as the new laws ended the days of suitcases of cash turned over in secret, they forced a transparency that makes corrupt payments, impermissible payments, or even embarrassing payments easier to expose and stop.
Except when you cleverly use a conduit for spending money on things you want to keep secret and don’t want to disclose.
That’s exactly what the Clinton campaign did. No one was supposed to know about their involvement in the dirty tricks. The campaign lawyer actually lied to the press about the campaign’s involvement. And, using the cutout of a law firm, Fusion has concealed where the money the Clinton campaign gave it went and what it paid for.
We have no idea who was paid from that the balance — $855,908.
But we do know that some of it went to make nine payments to at least three unnamed journalists. What exactly were they paid for?
Fusion refuses to say who they were and even which organs they worked for. It claims that the reporters were only hired by them to conduct “research.”
Is that credible?
Maybe they were paid to spot typos, too.
Who were they?
And beyond those three journalists, who else did Fusion GPS pay? And what did any other payees do for the money?
Did Fusion hire additional “opposition researchers”? More ex-spooks? Did the money find its way to other foreigners to quietly pass along more unverified, un-investigated gossip about Trump to the media?
Did it pay sources for the often false “intelligence,” as was the custom of Christopher Steele?
How much of the money did Fusion keep for itself?
The compilation of a dossier that Steele has admitted was based, in many parts, on “unsolicited sources” — and the hawking of that admittedly uninvestigated information to the press in order to influence the election was no less of an intrusion on our electoral process than the alleged Russian hacking.
We need to know who was behind this.
It’s time for complete transparency.
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