It was Fusion GPS in Washington DC who gave Orbis the contract to find dirt between the Trump campaign and Russia!
- [Highlights and links added to article are mine – Oui]
UK was given details of alleged contacts between Trump campaign and Moscow | The Guardian |
The UK government was given details last December of allegedly extensive contacts between the Trump campaign and Moscow, according to court papers.
It was not previously known that the UK intelligence services had also received the dossier but Steele confirmed in a court filing earlier this month that he handed a memorandum compiled in December to a “senior UK government national security official acting in his official capacity, on a confidential basis in hard copy form”.
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Since the memo became public in January, Steele had not spoken about his role in compiling it but he and his company, Orbis Business Intelligence Limited, have filed a defence in the high court of justice in London, in a defamation case brought by Aleksej Gubarev, a Russian venture capitalist and owner of a global computer technology company, XBT, and a Dallas-based subsidiary Webzilla.Gubarev, who was named along with his company in the December memo as being involved in hacking operation, has denied any such involvement and is also suing Buzzfeed in the US courts for publishing the December memo alongside Steele’s earlier reports on election hacking.
A statement by Steele’s defence lawyers, endorsed by the former MI6 agent, said Orbis was hired between June and November last year by Fusion GPS, a Washington-based research consultancy to look into Trump’s links with Russia.
In that period, Steele produced 16 memoranda citing mostly Russian sources as describing a web of alleged contacts and collusion between Trump aides and Russian intelligence or other Kremlin representatives.
The document said that he passed the memos to Fusion on the understanding that Fusion would not disclose the material to any third parties without the approval of Steele and Orbis. They did agree to Fusion providing a copy to Senator John McCain after the veteran Republican had been told about the existence of Steele’s research by Sir Andrew Wood, a former UK ambassador to Moscow and an Orbis associate, at a conference in Canada on 8 November.
Senator McCain handed a copy of the Steele memos to James Comey, the FBI director, on 9 December.
After delivering these reports, the court papers say Steele and Orbis continued to receive “unsolicited intelligence” on Trump-Russia links, and Steele decided that to draw up another memo with this new information which was dated 13 December.
He handed one copy over to the senior British national security official and sent an encrypted version to Fusion with instructions to deliver a hard copy to Senator McCain.
The defence argues that Steele and Orbis were under a duty to pass on the information “so that it was known to the United Kingdom and United States governments at a high level by persons with responsibility for national security”.
Steele and Orbis say they never gave any copies to news organisations although Steele said he gave off-the-record briefings about the dossier to a small number of journalists in late summer and early autumn 2016. The defence brief argues that neither Steele nor Orbis is liable for Buzzfeed’s decision to print the document.
Lawsuit against BuzzFeed over publishing ex-spy’s dossier moves to federal court | McClatchy |
A defamation suit [pdf] brought against online news site BuzzFeed for its publishing of an intelligence dossier that alleges Kremlin ties to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has been transferred to federal court.
The suit, brought by Cyprus-based tech mogul Aleksej Gubarev, was transferred at BuzzFeed’s request from a local Florida court to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami.
Gubarev’s defamation suit against BuzzFeed demanded a response by Feb. 28, which has been extended. Since the lawsuit was filed, BuzzFeed has redacted Gubarev’s name from the document and apologized.
In a statement to McClatchy, BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenthal said, “We have redacted
Mr. Gubarev’s name from the published dossier, and apologize for including it.”
In 2011, Glenn Simpson, along with two other former Journal reporters, launched Fusion GPS, in Washington, D.C. The firm’s activities, according to the terse, purposefully oblique statement on its Web site, centered on “premium research, strategic intelligence, and due diligence.”
In September 2015, as the Republican primary campaign was heating up, he was hired to compile an opposition-research dossier on Donald Trump. Who wrote the check? Simpson, always secretive, won’t reveal his client’s identity. However, according to a friend who had spoken with Simpson at the time, the funding came from a “Never Trump” Republican and not directly from the campaign war chests of any of Trump’s primary opponents.
But by mid-June 2016, despite all the revelations Simpson was digging up about the billionaire’s roller-coaster career, two previously unimaginable events suddenly affected both the urgency and the focus of his research. First, Trump had apparently locked up the nomination, and his client, more pragmatic than combative, was done throwing good money after bad. And second, there was a new cycle of disturbing news stories wafting around Trump as the wordy headline splashed across the front page of The Washington Post on June 17 heralded, Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin.
Simpson, as fellow journalists remembered, smelled fresh red meat. And anyway, after all he had discovered, he’d grown deeply concerned by the prospect of a Trump presidency. So he found Democratic donors whose checks would keep his oppo research going strong. And he made a call to London, to a partner at Orbis he had worked with in the past, an ex-spy who knew where all the bodies were buried in Russia, and who, as the wags liked to joke, had even buried some of them.
