Fusion GPS House testimony

[MelissaB]

Fusion GPS testimony in front of House Intel, y'all! Click here, and dive in! Remember, it's just one man's testimony. Much more to come.
http://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00/20180118/106796/HMTG-115-IG00-Transcript-20180118.pdf

Link to tweet

Say what you will about Mr. Simpson, he knew Manafort was almost certainly a foreign agent a decade before the election. So, um, MSM. Yeah. Just throwin' that out there. It was in the WSJ in *2007.*

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Shorter Simpson: Any journalist with WiFi who could produce fog on a mirror should have been able to confirm Trump-Russia ties.

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SIMPSON: "YOU CAN DEFINITELY FIND RUSSIAN MAFIA GUYS WHO ARE BIG SHAREHOLDERS IN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA." 🔥🔥🔥

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"Condos, EB-5 visas, Trump, Kushner, money laundering...BINGO!!!"

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OOOOOHHH: Trump had Russian gangsters living at Trump Tower who rigged one of the skating competitions at the Olympics Mitt Romney ran. 🔥🔥🔥

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Simpson: Well, Trump was basically a huge mobbed-up criminal from 2005 onward, especially with Russian deals.

Hey, that's exactly when Jeff Zucker gave him his own show on NBC!

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SCHIFF: So, did dirty Russian money go into his golf courses? SIMPSON: Dude. His kid bragged about it. And, yeah, there are big balance sheet holes that make no sense.

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EG Note: I have no idea about the Browder/Prevezon stuff. Withhold judgment. But Simpson strikes me as an exemplary competitive intel analyst. Rigor, technique, and analysis seems best-in-class.

SCHIFF: So, all this Russian money, would The Kremlin basically have a lever over THE CURRENT PRESIDENT? SIMPSON: Yup.

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SIMPSON: The Agaralovs started "operating" in the US in the 1990s and were tied to the Semion Mogilevich/Bank of NY scandal 🔥🔥🔥

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I'll continue thread in first reply.

[MelissaB]

1. Cont'd

Yup - this is how you run a HUMINT network without biasing it. You let your subcontractor do their work, and you accept it without backwashing your own analysis, biasing it.

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🔥🔥🔥 Why was the raw HUMINT from Christopher Steele left unfinished, unverified? Because it was so disturbing. ‼️

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Important: Simpson realized that this was NOT normal business intel or oppo research. It was WAY into counterintelligence land.

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Simpson, looking at a Kushner project, realized that the EB-5 VISA scam could be a way for foreign intel services to GET SPIES INTO AMERICA DISCREETLY.

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ROONEY: So Mr. Simpson, did you conclude that these were crimes. SIMPSON: um ok we dont really do that concluding there are crimes we um no

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ROONEY: Maybe if we knew this in 2016, Trump might not be POTUS.

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Simpson claims not to have known who @Billbrowder was in 2013. But he's a major expert on Russian mafia and foreign influence.

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J-ASS UPDATE: Simpson claims he heard but did not confirm that Nigel Farage delivered data to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy *via thumb drive.*

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LEVY: Why did you instruct Chris Steele to talk to the media. SIMPSON: Because dude, this was a complete mess.

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And by the end of the campaign, why was Glenn Simpson so disturbed? Because it wasn't just Russians messing with the election. It was Russians AND Americans.

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The events of October showed Simpson just how ugly the Russian intervention was about to become:

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SIMPSON: Chris Steele was especially concerned because something really bad was going on at the FBI for this level of weirdness to occur near an election day.

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SCHIFF: Anything else we could look at to make this any goddamn weirder?

SIMPSON: HENRY KISSINGER'S THING. MOSCOW AF

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SIMPSON: Also, did you know that Manafort is the protégé of the Nixon guy who ran campaigns like Russian dictators?

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Simpson connects all the dots: Stone, Flynn, Turkey, Russia, Brexit...

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jesus just drop the indictments. i'm bored. 🤣

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[BigmanPigman]

2. HOLY SHIT! Why did Nunes and the GOP

House Intel Comm vote to release this?! This is so complex. Mueller had better hire more people since he is gonna need a bigger boat.

[triron]

4. Maye they didn't. I thought Rachel said last night

most on the committee are dems.

[BigmanPigman]

6. I saw her last night too

and have a pink post it with a note to look for the vote today but I thought the majority were GOP. I looked at the members' pictures on the TV so maybe I am wrong.

On edit: There are 13 GOP and 9 Dems on the comm.

[triron]

13. Guess I misheard.

[BigmanPigman]

14. The link to the testimony was just shut down!

[mr_lebowski]

7. So they can point to the parts where Simpson DIDN'T say 'There were Crimes' or ...

'There is proof of collusion' and have their toadies parade around those excerpts to the media, knowing that only liberal nerds like us are going to pore over the testimony ... the mainstream media themselves (apart from libtards like Rachel and Joy ) won't bother pointing out the TONS of other 'bad shit' that Simpson testified to ... hell we already saw what happened when DiFi released the Senate version ... nothing happened to their Dear Trumpty over that testimony coming out, no reason to think it'll be 'different this time'.

There's no 'smoking gun' for the media to freak out about, but there is a bunch of spots where Simpson declines to accuse TrumpCo of actual crimes or collusion, so that's all the media is going to cover because GOP Toadies will be out there pimping that news, and no prominent Dem voices are going to go out and trumpet the (potential) bad shit, so ... not 'much to lose' for Trump vis-a-vis this release.

[BigmanPigman]

11. Maybe they will use distractions as well

since they are pros at it by now. The govt shutdown, his foul mouth, DACA, fued with Kelly, etc will be the news and this won't make it to the front page as usual.

[kentuck]

8. I was wondering the same thing??

It must have had something to do with the trip that Rosenstein and Wray made over to Paul Ryan's office a couple of weeks ago? They stopped to talk to Nunes also.

[shraby]

12. How come when I click the links at the top it takes me to "page not found"

Is the whole transcript available anyplace yet?

[OnDoutside]

30. Here's one about Michael Cohen and Kushner !

MR. SWALWELL: Thank yoLJ, Mr. Simpson.

And earlier you stated that you didn't think Jared Kushner was relevant
because of his age, and I had interrupted. I said, I take offense to that.
But just on Michael Cohen, and I'll turn it back over to our staff. Did you
ever research whether Michael Cohen had any aliases or other names that he
used? Did you ever find anything out about that?

MR. SIMPSON: A little bit. The possibility that he had two passports or
used a different fom1ulation of his name was something -- I can't remember - we
asked around about or thought about trying to get information on, but ultimately did
not.

MR. SWALWELL: Did you ever come across the name Michael Cohn,
C-o-h-n, with links, common addresses but different social security numbers?
MR. SIMPSON: I think my staff probably did come across stuff like that,
but we didn't make much of it. It looked like a typo.

MR. SWALWELL: When it came to Donald Trump Jr., did you have similar concerns, as you've mentioned with Mr. Cohen and Mr. Kushner, as to his contacts with Russians as it related to money or investments for the Trump
businesses?

84
MR. SIMPSON: Yes. · rm trying to remember. In general, we knew from
the open source work that we had done that Donald Trump Jr. was - had done a
lot of travel to Russia and was involved in a lot of these discussions, that he'd
done -- he'd gone to Kazakhstan for reasons that we didn't - we weren't sure of,
he'd gone to Latvia, and he'd been to Russia. And we eventually formed the view
that the Russians were very interested in him or that he'd had a lot of deals with
them. I don't remember a lot of specifics beyond that.

MR. SWALWELL: What is your knowledge of Donald Trump, Donald J.
Trump, the father's travel to Russia? Can you tell us how many times you believe
he has traveled to Russia, in your research?

MR. SIMPSON: I believe that he's been to Russia a minimum of four or
.five times, and that he's been going to Russia since the late Soviet years.
And we -- we did spend a lot of time digging into the origins of his interest in
Russia and his fascination with Russia and it's an interesting tale. I mean,
it's -he -one of the few people who Donald Trump calls like a good friend is a
guy named Howard Lorber, who is a real estate investor.
And Lorber was one of the --one of the early -there was sort of a
swashbuckling crowd of American investors who moved into Russia in those early
years when it was really wild. And Lorber --l'm trying to remember the
names of the other ones, but there was a small group of people and Donald was
pretty tight with them.

And, again, that was one of the reasons the whole thing struck me as
mysterious, because it seemed like he had been there, you know, numerous times
and never come back with a deal. And, you know, there could be an innocent
explanation for that, which is that he could never find somebody that - you know,
an honest partner. In any event, I wanted to try to figure that out.

MR. SWALWELL: Does the name Bennett LeBow sound familiar to
you?
MR. SIMPSON: LeBow is an associate of Lorber's, and Liggett-Ducat was
his company. And they are the ones who, it appears, introduced Donald
Trump to Russia, from what we can tell.
MR. SWALWELL: To your knowledge, prior to the 2013 trip for Miss
Universe, when had he last gone to Russia?
MR. SIMPSON: There's reporting In the Steele memos about another trip
prior to that to St. Petersburg.
MR. SWALWELL: When do you believe that trip took place?
MR. SIMPSON: I would be guessing.
MR. SWALWELL: I'm going to yield back to the ranking member. And
Mr. Castro might have some questions.
MR. CASTRO: In all of your research and your review of Trump assets,
did you come across any reason to believe that any Kushner assets had been
used to pay off Trump debts or there was any mixing of the businesses by the two
families and companies?

MR. SIMPSON: Well, the Jersey City project was - I remember there was
some Trump involvement in the Jersey City project, which was kind of a Kushner
branded project. So there clearly was things that they were doing together.
What we heard from people familiar with the story was that the Kushner
family and their connections were a big attraction for Trump before the marriage
and that, you know -- I mean, I don't want to -- I'm trying to be polite about it, but, I
mean, there was a business element to the whole, you know, connection. And I
will hasten to add that I was not able --
: One minute.

MR. SIMPSON: -- to confirm any of this, and I didn't share this widely,
certainly not in any kind of formal way with anyone.
You know, the Kushners are ethnic Russian and they, we were told, had
relationships of their own with Russian capital. And, you know, the exact story I
think was that their relationships were with the Russian diaspora in the New York
area.

So more broadly speaking, during the ?Os, in the Refusenik era, there was
a lot of Russian Jewish immigration to the New York area. And a lot of those
people had -- well, I'll just say there was a lot of immigration, and that community
is very large, and a Jot of people became very successful and wealthy. And, as I
understand it, those are the connections that the Kushners have to outside capital.

MR. CASTRO: Thank you.
BY
Q Mr. Simpson, good afternoon. Thank you for being here. I'm -
- · a member of the majority staff.

Switching gears, could you please briefly describe for us Fusion's
engagement with the Baker Hostetler law firm In connection with the Prevezon
litigation in the Southern District of New York?

A Sure. Baker Hostetler is a big Midwestern Republican-oriented law
firm that is one of my oldest clients. And I began working for Baker, I believe, in
2009 or 10, and I've done a number of cases with them. And I generally provide
litigation support, which Is research, gathering documents, figuring out who to
subpoena, and sometimes dealing with witnesses and media and other things.
I think the Prevezon matter was probably the fourth or fifth matter I've done
with them. They're very serious., sober, reputable attorneys, and I like working
with them.

And so they approached me originally in late 2013 with this matter. I didn't
know anything about Prevezon, didn't know anything. about most of this stuff.
Didn't know who Browder was, William Browder was.
But, in any event, the original issue that was presented to me was not really
a Russia issue, it was a money - it was like a technical question about money
laundering, which was whether the government could possibly prove that money
from some specific fraud in Russia went into these projects in New York, these
real estate projects.

And John Moscow, one of the partners there, who's an old contact of mine
from when he was a money laundering prosecutor and I was a money laundering
reporter, walked me through the technical aspects of the financial transactions.
And to my - I was skeptical, but he persuaded me that there were some
assumptions and leaps in logic that were made about the chain of entities and
banks that raised questions about whether they could really prove that this money
from over here went to this property over there.

So I was -- so that was - originally we were retained to help with the technical
aspects·of it. And I think more broadly as it, you know, became -1
guess - well, sorry.

So I didn't agree to work on it at that time. I believe we discussed it. They
went away. Then they came back a few months later, which would have been
early 2014, when it had become more apparent to them that this was going to be a
significant piece of litigation, and said: We want to brng you on for litigation
support.

And, again, litigation support, I had done it for them before. Basically, you
know, use your journalistic skills to help us gather information, who to subpoena,
read documents, write analyses of evidence, all of that. And then, as you get into
the sort of more public phase of a court dispute, help them manage all the public
aspects as well.

So while I don't, you know, I don't run a PR firm, part of that is, you know,
the media aspects of litigation support. So I think - I think the original
engagement covered all of those things.

So in the early phase of this, the very first thing that we - I remember
having to do was help investigate the client.

So I didn't - we didn't know much about the client. Obviously, the lawyers
have responsibility to evaluate whether the client is engaged in anything improper,
and they certainly have to determine the sources of their funds.
And they represented to me that this was a minor player in Russia, and to
the -- I couldn't find much on them myself. There was -- you know, it's just a fairly
obscure real estate company.
[5:29 p.m.]

MR. SIMPSON: You know, I don't know the entire landscape of oligarchs
in Russia, but these guys are obviously not significant oligarchs in Russia. That's
what we could tell.

In any event, the first thing that a lawyer wants to know at !he beginning of
a case like this, and most cases, is whether their client's story is true. So that was
the first thing that we did was we interviewed the client. They interviewed the
client and got the client's story.

And the client's story was that these allegations that were in this Justice
Department forfeiture complaint originated with an organized crime figure in
Moscow, who had been blackmailing them and had been prosecuted, arrested and
prosecuted for blackmailing them.

So we had to investigate whether that story was true. So we, you know,
spent a long time looking at this guy. His name is Dimitry Barenovsky (ph). And
the story that Natalia Veselnitskaya provided to us was that he was a captain in the
Solntsevo brotherhood, which is the dominant mafia family in Moscow and known -
you know, it surfaces in parts of the Trump story, bizarrely, and was run by a guy
named Semien Mogilevich
.
So Natalia is the one telling us the this story because she is the lawyer for
Prevezon and had apparently been involved in this extortion matter, and so she's
got all the information from the courts about this alleged shakedown. And she
was introducing me as some kind of former government lawyer who's the one who
hired Baker.

S o I worked for B a ke r, a nd s he's th e o ne who hire d B ake r. I didn't get to
introduced to her originally. This was information she provided to Baker that they
then provided to me.

In any event, we eventually were able to confirm that the story was basically
true, that this guy was a gangster, he was known to western law enforcement as a
gangster, and he, in fact, had been prosecuted and thrown in jail for this extortion
racket.

So then the question was, well, how did this story get from a convicted
gangster in Moscow into a Justice Department forfeiture complaint? And so the
lawyers, the Baker lawyers deposed a government agent, an ICE agent who did
the work, did the investigation, and he said he got it from this businessman named
William Browder.

And so then the question became, well, where did Browder get it from?
Did he get it from the gangster, or was it, you know, from some other source? So
we began to try to do various types of discovery to figure all that.out. So I may
have -- I don't know if I'm giving you too much here, but this is basically the origin
of this case.

So over the course of 2014, most of what I did was looking at this Russian
organized crime figure, looking at, you know, all the events around the extortion
case in Russia, and had to try to help them to figure out how all this information
somehow made its way into a Justice Department civil forfeiture complaint.
And eventually, that led us to Mr. Browder, who is a former American
citizen, who gave up his citizenship and moved - when he started making a lot of
money in Russia. and was living in the UK. And he didn't want to explain any of
this to us.

We originally wrote him a letter. The lawyers wrote him a letter saying, can
you tell us what's going on here, and he declined. And so then the lawyers asked
me to figure out how we could subpoena him. So I found that his hedge fund was
registered in Delaware and therefore had corporate presence in·the United States,
which meant that, theoretically, at least, he can be subpoenaed through his hedge
fund because he was listed as an officer in the records.

So we subpoenaed the hedge fund. We then retroactively filed new
documentation with the SEC, taking his name off the record, said it was all a
mistake. And he said you can't subpoena me. I'm not really an officer of that
hedge fund.

So we were, you know -- that was litigated for a while. And meanwhile, the
lawyers said, see if you can figure out another way to subpoena this guy. And his
position was that, you know, he was -- you kflOW, he had brought this case to the
Justice Department but he didn't want to be questioned about bringing this case to
the Justice Department, and that he was immune from being questioned about it
other than through the Hague process because he's a foreign citizen.
So, you know, we knew he was appearing in the media a lot, and then he
probably came to the U.S. to do media appearances and other events. And so
we began to look at that, and I just began doing what l would normally do, which is
to look at other things about this witness, what else do we need to know about this
witness, especially because they don't want to be open with us.
So eventually l discovered that he owned a mansion in Aspen, Colorado, or
at least he ·seemed to. He was connected to it by real estate records and OMV
records, but it was held through some shell companies.
Anyway, we were looking at that, and l don't remember the exact sequence
of events , but som eone. I think the lawyers or maybe me and my staff, discovered
that he w~s going to be in Aspen for an event. So we organized a service, a
subpoena service, which I supervised.

And we had a private investigator, a lawyer, and another, I think, Pl and,
you know, we organized to confront him in the parking lot of the Aspen Institute
and serve him a subpoena. And when we did that, he ran away, so jumped in his
limo and -- or his SUV and went back to his mansion. So dropped the subpoena
on the ground.

So that commenced a lot more litigation over whether we had adequately
served him a subpof::na, whether a subpoena in Colorado is valid for an action in
New York. And, you know, I was -- that was a lot of what l did.
His resistance to cooperating with the civil process, of course, made us
more curious about why he was, you know, determined to not cooperate with the
civil process, and to the point of changing lawyers, hiring ever-more expensive law
firms, and spending what must have been large sums ·Of money to not cooperate
with a civil subpoena. And so that made me curious about why he didn't want to
cooperate.

And I'll add parenthetically that when I was working as a reporter and living
in Brussels and investigating Russian corruption and organized crime, I had met
Mr. Browder and asked him for help investigating Vladimir Putin, and he had
lectured me on Putin not being corrupt and being a bit - someone who's very
helpful to -- the best thing that· had happened to Russia in a long time.
And at that time, Browder was making a lot of money in Russia. So
anyway, so in light of all of that, I became curious and it was part of my job to
investigate the activities of Mr. Browder in Russia and his hedge fund in Russia.
And so, you know, in 2014 and I think 2015, we spent a lot of time looking
into his hedge fund in Russia and how they made their money, who their clients
were, in addition to, you know, litigating all these other issues about whether we
had served him adequately.
We discovered, you know, many things about his activities iri Russia and
his general finances, his pattern of avoiding taxation, his use of offshore shell
companies and tax haven jurisdictions, particularly in Cypress and the BVI.
We identified a number of his clients. And, you know, we kept trying to
subpoena him. Eventually -- again, he kept saying I have no connection to the
U.S., I never go there, we kept finding more houses. We found a house in New
Jersey. All of this is in the court record, and it's all public information.

93
Ultimately, we found him in New York City, outside of The Daily Show, and
served him a third time. And this time we taped the whole thing, and he did the
same thing. He jumped out of the limo and he dropped the subpoena and he ran
away, so - but this time it was all on tape and we had already litigated all this.
And the judge was very familiar with this scenario.

And, you know, as all the other discovery was taking place, it became more
and more apparent that, you know, Bill Browder had taken this information and
given it to the government and that, you know, he was the source of these
allegations. And so it became more and more important to understand why he
was making these allegations and, you know, whether he had any basis to do so.

[triron]

32. Interesting points about FBI and Comey.

[triron]

3. This testimony is an eye opener to say the least.

[herding cats]

5. Marking to read later.

Thanks for the post!

[kentuck]

9. This may be more interesting than the interview that Feinstein released the other day?

There is much more detail.

<snip>

[kentuck]

10. Someone has closed down the link ????

Doesn't want it to be read?

Or does someone else have it saved and could share it on DU??

[MelissaB]

15. It's not available on any of the links I had retweeted to find later.

WTF happened?

[HappyBeing]

16. This link works for me

http://docs.house.gov/Committee/Calendar/ByEvent.aspx?EventID=106796

[MelissaB]

21. Thank you!

[kentuck]

17. And this I found interesting...

[kentuck]

20. And this:

[Bernardo de La Paz]

36. His "golf courses are sinks, they don't make money". Just like his casinos lost money in casino boom

[hedda_foil]

39. It's starting to smell like his chief business is money laundering, not real estate.

[MelissaB]

22. Oh yeah!

[Buns_of_Fire]

18. So Rump is in debt to Russia up to his hairy eyeballs.

No wonder he doesn't want anyone nosing around his tax returns.

Big mouth Eric better watch his back from now on. Especially around daddy dearest and junior.

[NoveltySocks]

19. Here's a Link to a backup

here

[MelissaB]

23. Thank you!

[kentuck]

25. Thanks!

[MelissaB]

24. I finished updating the thread in post 1.

Whew! This was a long one.

[oasis]

26. Whoa Nellie!

As the dearly departed sportscaster, Keith Jackson, would say.

[kentuck]

27. KicK !!

A must read. earth-shaking!

[MontanaMama]

28. This testimony is even better than

the Senate version. Once of the reasons is Adam Schiff's questioning. Clearly he is engaged and on a mission. IMO, this is a major distinction between the two interviews...Rep Schiff cared enough to show up. The Senate interview was done by staffers and it showed.

[kentuck]

33. Also, I thought the Senate version was mostly an attempt to discredit Simpson and the "dossier".

They asked very few questions, if any, about Trumps business associates in Russia and other places. This report is much more detailed and much more important, in my opinion.

[MontanaMama]

34. Absolutely kentuck.

I'm still combing through it but it is fascinating!!! Makes me wonder why the committee voted to release it. I also wonder how the vote went down? Glenn Simpson seems like a good person who found himself in a freaking cesspool and tried to do the right thing. Steele's worry about our FBI is going to be important.

[Roland99]

29. Dear. Gawd.

[longship]

31. Holy moley!

A hearty DURec. Get thee to the top of the greatest page.

I am utterly gobsmacked!

[Leghorn21]

35. Chuh-fuckin CHING, MelissaB - many thanks for your massive amount of work on this!!! nt

[Bernardo de La Paz]

37. +1. . . . . nt

[MelissaB]

38. Thanks!

I'm good at copy & paste, but Eric Garland did the real work. I just thought it was important enough to see.

[wishstar]

40. Thanks Adam Schiff, who will be in charge of investigation when Dems win back the House

In the meantime, he is doing a great job despite Nunes, Gowdy etc. who want to shut Mueller's investigation down.

[triron]

41. kick for visibility