As the Senate investigates allegations that elements of the Trump campaign may have been colluding with Russia, an interesting angle has emerged. Fusion GPS is the shadowy research firm that was commissioned by interests aligned with the Democratic party to produce (possibly with the help of the FBI) the famed “dossier” containing some outlandish and disproven allegations on Trump’s Russia connections. Well, Fusion GPS is now accused of simultaneously being hired to work for Putin’s moneyed interests in the West.
Fusion GPS was apparently representing these same Putin-connected interests when they were involved in arranging the controversial meeting Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had with Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Russian intelligence officer and naturalized American citizen, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya last year. Further, the firm also being accused of engaging in unethical and illegal behavior while representing Russian-connected interests.
Bill Browder is a financier with an extensive history of dealings in Russia, and his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday is worth reading in full because the machinations are complicated. But briefly, the story is this after Browder exposed the corrupt financial practices of Putin’s cronies—Browder estimates that Putin has a fortune of at least $200 billion in ill-gotten gains squirrelled away in the West—Putin came after Browder personally, deporting him in 2005, and 18 months later, seizing all the documents related to his investments in the country.
Browder hired a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, to investigate what was going on. Magnitsky reported back that some pretty astonishing news:
Browder, with Magnitsky’s help, filed criminal complaints about the Russian officials stealing from the country’s tax coffers. On November 24, 2008, the very people Magnitsky was accusing of malfeasance arrested him and threw him in jail. After continuous torture, harassment, and beatings he died in jail—but not before Magnitsky was able to smuggle out of jail 400 detailed complaints documenting his abuse.
In 2010, Browder traveled to Washington to petition senators Benjamin Cardin and John McCain, who eventually introduced the the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act. The law denied visas to and froze the assets of corrupt Russian officials involved in human rights abuses, and was passed by huge bipartisan majorities in both the House and Senate. The law continues to make it hard for Putin and Russian kleptocrats to operate in the West. When Putin banned Western adoptions in Russia, it was directly in retaliation to the Magnitsky Act.
The Russian government badly wants the Magnitsky law overturned. The arranged meeting between Don Trump Jr et al. and Akhmetshin and Veselnitskaya and was allegedly part of the government’s lobbying attempt to have the law overturned. This naturally included discussions of how the adoption ban might be overturned.
Not only did Fusion GPS arrange this meeting, Browder alleges that “Veselnitskaya, through Baker Hostetler, hired Glenn Simpson of the firm Fusion GPS to conduct a smear campaign against me and Sergei Magnitsky in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act”—an extension of the original Magnitsky legislation that passed in December. (Fusion GPS apparently insists on being hired through a law firm so that all their dealings are made opaque by attorney-client privilege.) On April 20, President Trump sent a letter to Congress pledging “robust and thorough enforcement” of the Global Magnitsky Act.
In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Browder also alleges that Fusion GPS has been operating on behalf of the Russian government illegally, because “at no time did they indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests, nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.”
If all that weren’t damning enough, Thor Halvorssen, president and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, has also provided eye-opening testimony to the Judiciary Committee alleging that Fusion GPS is also operating in violation of the Foreign Agent Registration Act, owing to its involvement in an oddly similar scheme to prevent scrutiny of Venezuelan kleptocrats that are funneling money out of the oil-rich but unstable socialist country. Halvorssen also provides detailed accusations about how Fusion GPS is intimidating reporters from reporting the truth about the scheme. (Fusion GPS’s principals are mostly former reporters—including former Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, who is married to Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director—and as such, the firm’s cozy ties to major reporters raise some serious ethical questions. See this column by THE WEEKLY STANDARD’s Lee Smith for a detailed and damning dissection of Fusion GPS’s role in “manufactured news for hire.”)
Fusion GPS has previously been in the news for their harassment of Republican campaign donors in the 2012 presidential election, and was also hired to produce a report defending Planned Parenthood after extensive video evidence emerged that the abortion provider was harvesting and selling fetal organs.
Fusion GPS founder and former Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Glenn Simpson initially refused to testify before the Senate, and publicly asserted that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights if subpoenaed. As of yesterday, Simpson has reportedly reached an agreement to speak to the Judiciary Committee in private.
