The following article by the Politico staff was posted on their website January 3, 2018:
The founders of Fusion GPS took to the pages of The New York Times to push back against Republicans who have attacked the firm over a dossier related to the Trump Russia investigation — and to urge that their testimony be released.
“We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have,” wrote Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Fritsch in an op-ed published Tuesday under the headline “The Republicans’ Fake Investigations.”
During the 2016 campaign, Fusion GPS, a research firm, compiled what came to be known as the Steele dossier, a collection of intelligence reports on Donald Trump’s alleged connections to Russia.
The report was written by a former British intelligence officer named Christopher Steele. It has come under fire from some Trump backers, not only because of the inclusion of some as-yet-unproven salacious material but also because they see it a dubious trigger to the Trump-Russia investigation.
In their op-ed, Simpson and Fritsch urged Congress to release their testimony: “Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.”
As far as it being the origin of the Russia probe, Simpson and Fritsch wrote that the dossier’s importance has been overstated.
“We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the FBI’s investigation into Russian meddling,” wrote Simpson and Fritsch. “As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.”
The duo wrote that their testimony gave Congress all the ammo it needed to debunk conspiracy theories.
“Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place,” they wrote.
The op-ed also detailed the origins of the Steele dossier, a report that Simpson and Fritsch said they stand behind.
“We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties,” they wrote. “To have done so is our right under the First Amendment.”
View the post here.