Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser, this week blasted the Senate Intelligence Committee and others for running an investigation partially based on a Democratic-funded smear campaign.
“Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election,” he told the Senate Intelligence Committee during a closed hearing on Tuesday.
“I want to know because God Damn you to Hell,” he said in his testimony, published by the Washington Examiner.
Caputo also blasted a former Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee aide and former FBI official, Daniel Jones, who is being paid $50 million by seven to ten wealthy donors to continue pushing a narrative of Russian collusion.
Jones admitted to the FBI in March 2017 that he hired Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele after the election to continue work on the dossier—a fact revealed last week by the House Intelligence Committee’s final report on their investigation’s findings.
Leaked text messages showed that both Jones and Steele communicated with the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), through, Adam Waldman—a lawyer for Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska and a friend of Warner’s.
Jones was an aide to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who last year inexplicably released the testimony of Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson. She later blamed it on a “bad cold.”
Caputo said:
How many of you know Daniel Jones, former Senate Intelligence staffer for Senator Dianne Feinstein? Great guy, right? Most of you worked with him. One of you probably just talked to him this morning.
Of course, very few of us in flyover country knew Daniel until recently. Now we know that he quit his job with your Senate committee not long ago to raise $50 million from ten rich Democrats to finance more work on the FusionGPS Russian dossier. The one the FBI used to get a FISA warrant and intimidate President Donald Trump, without anyone admitting—until months after it was deployed—that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.
In fact, good old Dan has been raising and spending millions to confirm the unconfirmable – and, of course, to keep all his old intel colleagues up-to-speed on what FusionGPS and British and Russian spies have found. Got to keep that Russia story in the news.
Of course Dan’s in touch with you guys. We know from the news that he’s been briefing Senator Mark Warner, vice chairman of this committee. Which one of you works for Senator Warner? Please give Danny my best.
An aide to Warner denied to CNN that Jones has been in touch with Warner since 2015, but said nothing of the text messages suggesting that Jones used Waldman as his cutout to Warner.
Caputo then alleged that Jones was behind a recent smear job in the media—a thinly-sourced story that said President Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen went to Prague, which would corroborate the dossier.
“I saw some of his handiwork just last month. Remember this lede paragraph, from McClatchy on April 13? ‘The Justice Department special counsel has evidence that Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and confidant, Michael Cohen, secretly made a late-summer trip to Prague during the 2016 presidential campaign, according to two sources familiar with the matter.’
“That’s your pal Dan, isn’t it? He came up with some kind of hollow proof that Michael Cohen was in Prague meeting with Russians when he wasn’t. He tried to sell that to reporters, and they didn’t buy it because it doesn’t check out. So, to get a reporter to write up his line of bull, he gave the documents to the Office of Special Counsel,” he said.
He recalled how Fusion GPS planted a story in Yahoo News with reporter Michael Isikoff.
It’s a clever but effective ruse. That’s a story, just like when reporter Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News wrote this gem on September 16, 2016:
U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate … a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. That meeting, if confirmed, is viewed as especially problematic by U.S. officials.
…
Dozens of stories were written from the Isikoff piece, doing real damage to the Trump campaign. Of course, now we know Isikoff’s reference to “intelligence reports” was just him renaming a dossier funded by Democrats and dug up by his longtime pal Glenn Simpson and some foreign spies. Once Simpson gave his Clinton campaign opposition research to the feds, it was news.
Recently-published memos by former FBI Director James Comey showed that he was aware CNN was looking for a “news hook” to report on the dossier, and his briefing to the president on the dossier then became the news hook CNN was looking for.
Comey also said former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had instructed him to brief the president on the dossier. Clapper also admitted to the House Intelligence Committee during a closed hearing that he spoke with CNN’s Jake Tapper about the time CNN broke a bombshell report that the president had been briefed on the dossier.
Caputo said it is the investigators need to be investigated.
“What America needs is an investigation of the investigators. I want to know who is paying for the spies’ work and coordinating this attack on President Donald Trump? I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI, to the Southern District of New York, to the OSC, to the Department of Justice, to Congress,” he said.
Caputo was initially brought onto the campaign by former Chairman Paul Manafort in April 2016 and resigned in June 2016, after tweeting a negative comment about his colleague Corey Lewandowski being fired.
Despite his short-lived time on the campaign, he said he has had to spend more than $125,000 defending himself from Congressional and federal investigators looking for any collusion by the Trump campaign.
In his testimony, he said in 2009 he and his family moved back to their hometown of East Aurora, New York, to have a family. Although he made less money, he had a better quality of life, he said.
“That is, until the Trump-Russia narrative took off. Today, I can’t possibly pay the attendant legal costs and live near my aging father, raising my kids where I grew up,” he said.
‘Your investigation and others into the allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia are costing my family a great deal of money – more than $125,000 – and making a visceral impact on my children.
“Now I must to move back to Washington, New York City, Miami or elsewhere, just so I can make enough money to pay off these legal bills. And I know I have you to thank for that.”
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