No longer is it a question of if one presidential campaign or the other sought kompromat on its political opponent. The questions now, if they can even be enumerated, are many: Can we properly judge and corroborate a claim’s veracity, when it was obtained under clandestine circumstances? And, on that point, how is one to assess the legitimacy of the claimant, or of the claim’s acquisition? And finally, if the claim is indeed veracious and not simply salacious, to what end does it serve us?
These are but a few questions that continue to haunt Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and the dossier still breathing between them. To recount, the titillating tale began in January when BuzzFeed released what notoriously became known as the Trump-Russia dossier. From the start, its contents were subjected to suspicion and scrutiny, and justifiably so. The thirty-five-page document contained licentious and louche accounts about Mr. Trump’s relationship with Russia through the years. Those more credulously inclined (specifically, those commenting from the Left’s furthest reaches) were too eager to accept the dossier’s damning details; they thought it infallibly true. Many Democrats received it as though it were the divinely inspired answer to their incipient impeachment prayers.
But, as the scientific philosopher Karl Popper teaches us, a claim is only strong insofar as it is falsifiable. So far as the dossier was concerned, fumes from the outset smelled of untruth or outright falsity. At worst—based on this necessary standard of scrutiny—some of the document’s details were disproved outright, and at best, others appeared quite weak. For this reason, many on the Right denounced wholesale the dossier as being fully unfounded and apocryphal. They thought it a calumnious contrivance conjured up by the anti-Trumpers from the Left.
The freshet of recent evidence has made the situation somewhat clearer, but no less complex. It continues to be a sinuous web whose complexity deepens as each strand slowly unweaves. It appears that both political parties, Republican and Democratic, attempted to acquire compromising material—the phrase from which Russia’s neologism, “kompromat” derives—against their preferred candidate. The interesting thing to note here, however, is that in both cases and on both sides, the subject of the kompromat was the same. The subject, of course, was Donald Trump.
It’s completely clear now that the Democrats had an interest in digging up dirt on then candidate Trump (and were willing to pay handsomely for the excavation), but the Russian dossier was by no means an ex parte effort. In a vertiginous turn of events, we’ve come to know that it wasn’t the Democrats, but rather the Republicans who first financed Fusion GPS’s investigation into Donald Trump.
Fusion GPS is an eminently well-connected private investigation firm located in Washington D.C. The company’s founders and chief operators, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch—both former investigative reporters for the Wall Street Journal, transferred their journalistic skills from the public to the private domain. The two share an apolitical approach to poaching secrets for their clientele. Together, they’re one disinterested stick of dynamite seeking to collect rather than destroy a story’s many pieces. They’re mercenaries for hire, tasked with mining political or personal penetralia.
This is precisely what they did, when in 2015, a conservative think tank and website called The Washington Free Beacon hired the pair to look into a man who then appeared to be the Republican Party’s usurper. This man, of course, was Donald J. Trump. At the time, the groundswell of support for Trump was growing but uncertain. Some thought his political success unsustainable, and others, who remained more sanguine about ultimately having a traditional Republican standard-bearer face Hillary Clinton in the general election, continued to believe another primary candidate would emerge.
Paul Singer, a ruthlessly successful Republican hedge fund manager and activist investor from New York, aligned himself with the latter. Singer heads the Elliot Management Corporation, his remarkably durable Wall Street hedge fund known for targeting the financial woes of various foreign nations. His fund has found especial profitability in purchasing distressed sovereign bonds and forcing their eventual payment—with accrued interest—in full. His is an especially predacious approach even by Wall Street’s normal Darwinian tendency.
Aside from his acumen regarding international financial affairs, Singer is politically astute and a major contributor to the Republican Party at home. Hoping to see his preferred candidate Marco Rubio secure the party’s nomination, he set forth to gather potentially compromising information about Mr. Trump—then Rubio’s greatest adversary (although some will say Rubio’s greatest adversary was himself).
At Singer’s behest, Fusion began its work so that Trump might be felled from within and not from without the GOP. This is a striking revelation in the storyline. It was Singer, and not the Democrats who first hired Fusion GPS to achieve that task. It’s unclear, however, how far Simpson and Fritsch got under Singer’s aegis; his investment was ultimately short-lived. Trump’s appeal flourished, Rubio’s rapidly diminished, and it became certain beyond all doubt that the real-estate mogul would become the party’s candidate.
Not wanting Simpson and Fritsch’s good work to go to waste, the Democrats jumped at the opportunity to fill Singer’s place. They needed to finance Fusion’s efforts, for the pair are political sell-swords as I said before. It was at this point that Marc Elias, a Perkins Coie attorney and general counsel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, funneled presumably thousands of dollars (or more—a private investigator can fetch a pretty penny for a particular set of skills very much in-demand) to the two for the continuance of their research.
It is at this point a red flag springs forth onto the scene. Political campaigns must disclose and explain investments above two hundred dollars. This is a demand made specifically of campaigns, but not of private individuals such as Paul Singer. If a campaign fails to disclose where its funding is invested, said campaign has violated FEC law. One can only assume Elias’ investment in Fusion far exceeded the two-hundred-dollar amount, for which there was no explanation. The investment was either deliberately obfuscated or accidentally omitted, but it couldn’t have been both. To note, this “either-or” scenario has become all too recurrent between both the Republican and Democratic parties.
Adequately endowed, Simpson and Fritsch continued their investigation into Trump’s speckled past. They discovered among other notabilia lawsuits stemming from Iceland, the Cayman Islands, and Ukraine. But above all, and most persistently, they found links between Mr. Trump and the Russian state. This appeared to the pair both disconcerting and beyond their collective investigative scope. Without further ado, it is at this point they welcomed Christopher Steele onto the set. It is he who formulated and lent his name to what became the Steele-dossier, otherwise known as the Trump-Russia dossier.
Simpson and Fritsch recognized the increasing depth within which many of Trump’s details were rooted in Russian affairs. They therefore called upon Steele, who also works in the private investigation sphere. After graduating Cambridge, Steele spent his early twenties working as an undercover agent in Moscow. He was a member of Britain’s MI6, the country’s near-equivalent to America’s CIA. There, in Russia’s capital, he was actively deployed during the days of the USSR’s tumultuous perestroika. While the Soviet Union’s reformation eventuated in the cautious infusion of liberal ideals, Steele operated as a covert agent. It’s not difficult to imagine the kinds of connections he made whilst serving there, unsavory or otherwise, but connections all the same.
Upon leaving the MI6 and returning to civilian life, he—like Simpson and Fritsch—began his own private investigation firm called Orbis Business Intelligence. Working with Orbis, Steele operates on an international scale, as all entrepreneurs of espionage must do, but his particular selling point is his unique knowledge of Russian affairs. For Fusion GPS, this was the missing piece. Steele’s expertise would prove indispensable for the American company, whose resources and connections were drying up the further east they went. A decorated past as a Russian denizen made Steele just the man for the job.
Steele pursued his sources, all of whom held ascendant positions in the Kremlin’s hierarchy. Among these sources, as cited in the in dossier, were a “Senior Russian Foreign Ministry Figure”, a “Former Top-Level Russian Intelligence Officer”, and—a less formally denoted figure—an “Ethnic Russian Close Associate of Trump’s”. Combined with his own unique discoveries, the three provided Steele with enough raw intel to fill thirty-five pages. His intel was admittedly raw—a fact from he never shied away—and as such, was in need of further verification. The difficulty laid with the verification, however, and the next investigatory stage would supposedly confirm or refute the dossier’s claims.
This proved to be a challenge. Some claims were verifiable, such as Russia’s responsibility for the DNC e-mail leak, while others were less so. The latter, perhaps apocryphal category houses the “golden showers” story, which, ludicrous and lecherous though it may be, was corroborated by a few Russians in the know. But, lest we not forget, Moscow is famously unforthcoming, if not deliberately deceptive, when it comes to telling the truth. This fact makes corroborating evidence all the more important.
Steele found the information sufficiently disquieting that he decided to turn it over to the British intelligence service (to which he no longer paid professional allegiance) and the FBI. He thought his action was most prudent in light of what he had learned. In an anonymous interview with Mother Jones, he said his acquired information was “something of huge significance, way above party politics”. He also confided to the left-leaning publication that the Kremlin had been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for some time, and had enough kompromat on him to “be able to blackmail him” in the future. Steele considered this a potential risk to America’s national security.
Special Counselor Robert Mueller agreed. For no other reason would Mueller call upon Steele and entertain his audience. His investigators have met with and interviewed the former MI6 officer, and so too have multiple congressional committees. If Steele’s dossier contains little more than scurrilous claims or spurious lies, why then is he receiving such sober attention? Yet another question, of the many that persist. What’s known is this: as this cause célèbre commences its conclusion, more and more answers will finally appear.
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