In July, when news broke that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met last year with a Russian lawyer and a former Russian intelligence officer who promised dirt on the Hillary Clinton campaign, there was a media feeding frenzy. After months of speculation about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, this meeting was something concrete.
However, there was one detail about the meeting that the media and Democrats in Congress have decidedly not been in a frenzy to feed on. The Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was also collaborating with Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm that has mainly done work for interests aligned with the Democratic party. Fusion GPS has denied any role in setting up the Trump Jr. meeting. However, the firm has worked with Veselnitskaya in her lobbying to lift U.S. sanctions aimed at Putin and fellow Russian kleptocrats who are squirreling away billions in Western financial institutions. Aspects of this issue—Moscow’s 2012 ban on American adoptions of Russian children, in retaliation for the sanctions—were reportedly discussed during her meeting with the Trump campaign.
Here’s where it gets weird: Fusion GPS is the same firm that was hired to put together the infamous “dossier” on Trump’s alleged ties to Russia. The dossier is said to have been commissioned by the campaign of a Republican primary opponent before the project was taken over and funded by some unidentified Democratic client after Trump won the GOP nomination. It contained a wild mix of allegations, some salacious, some provably false, many of them hard or impossible to corroborate. Despite questions about the document’s reliability, the FBI relied on it in part to procure a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a former national security adviser to the Trump campaign.
In short, it appears Fusion GPS was simultaneously on the payroll of Democratic interests seeking to discredit Trump on the basis of his ties to the Russian government even as it was working on a lobbying effort whose beneficiaries would be Vladimir Putin and his billionaire cronies.
All this was sordid-looking enough for the Senate Judiciary Committee, which was investigating the Trump meeting, to seek testimony from Fusion GPS founder and former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson. He balked, and negotiations reportedly foundered on his unwillingness to reveal the client who had been paying for the Trump-Russia dossier. After the threat of a subpoena, Simpson eventually agreed to speak to the committee privately.
That Fusion GPS no doubt has things to hide doesn’t necessarily mean it is part of some grand Russian conspiracy. There are sharks lurking in the murkier waters of the fabled Washington swamp: very profitable and mercenary firms that specialize in the dark arts of opposition research and media manipulation. They tend not to be picky about clients and grow less picky as the clients grow more lucrative. That could conceivably explain Fusion GPS’s role in all this.
Fusion GPS has been in the news two notable times in the last five years. In 2012, Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel reported that the firm was behind a smear campaign targeting conservative donors to Mitt Romney. The outfit had even dug up divorce records of one Idaho Republican who had donated $1 million to a pro-Romney super-PAC. Simpson didn’t deny his firm was behind the effort and told Strassel the donor was a “legitimate” target.
In 2015, after Planned Parenthood was embarrassed by videos in which its officials discussed the sale of fetal body parts, Fusion GPS was hired to produce a report exonerating the abortion provider. The report was covered extensively by the media. The headline in the New York Times was “Planned Parenthood Videos Were Altered, Analysis Finds,” and Fusion GPS was antiseptically described as a “Washington-based research and corporate intelligence company.” (Despite the way in which it was used by the New York Times and other media outlets friendly to Planned Parenthood, the report conceded that there was no “widespread evidence of substantive video manipulation.” That line didn’t make it into the Times’s article.)
Of course, it’s the firm’s foreign clients that are the source of the most controversy. The Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony on July 27 from Bill Browder, a former investor in Russian markets. In 2005, Browder was deported from Russia for exposing financial corruption by Russian officials with ties to Putin, and 18 months later all of the documents relating to his investments in the country were seized. Browder hired a Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, to look into what was going on. Magnitsky reported back that legal documents from the companies Browder owned in Russia were being used to misappropriate $230 million in taxes the company had paid the Russian government.
Shortly after this discovery, Magnitsky was imprisoned. He would die in prison under suspicious circumstances—but not before he had smuggled out over 400 complaints via his lawyers of torture and beatings. In 2010, Browder used Magnitsky’s story to appeal to senators John McCain and Ben Cardin to pass legislation denying visas to and freezing the assets of Russian officials tied to human rights abuses. The Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 eventually passed Congress with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. The law infuriated Putin, and the Duma responded by voting for the adoption ban. Veselnitskaya has long been advocating for the repeal of the Magnitsky Act.
Browder’s Senate testimony made two explosive accusations. The first is that Fusion GPS has failed to “indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests, nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act” (FARA). However, it’s not clear that the two Russians in the meeting with the Trump team in June 2016, Veselnitskaya and former Russian intelligence officer and naturalized American citizen Rinat Akhmetshin, were acting on behalf of the Russian government.
For her part, Veselnitskaya denies doing so, though she did represent the son of a senior Russian government official who ran afoul of the Magnitsky sanctions in an attempt to purchase some Manhattan real estate and has also represented state-owned enterprises. Adding to the mystery is that Fusion GPS was hired by Veselnitskaya through the law firm Baker Hostetler. Using a law firm as an intermediary means that all business between Veselnitskaya and Fusion GPS is covered by attorney-client privilege, and therefore totally opaque.
The second accusation from Browder is that Fusion GPS was hired for the explicit purpose of “conduct[ing] 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 2016.
Browder’s story about Fusion GPS was reinforced by some shockingly similar testimony provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Thor Halvorssen, president and CEO of the Human Rights Foundation, also accused Fusion GPS of violating FARA, owing to its work representing Derwick Associates, a Barbados-based company whose principals are Venezuelan.
The Venezuelan government awarded a dozen power plant contracts to Derwick in exchange for millions of dollars in kickbacks to Venezuelan government officials, Halvorssen alleged in his testimony. Halvorssen also provided detailed allegations that Peter Fritsch, another former Wall Street Journal reporter and partner at Fusion GPS, was instrumental in killing a WSJ investigative report on Derwick’s corruption in 2014, as well as stories on the matter in other publications such as Bloomberg and the Economist. Halvorssen further claimed that Fusion GPS’s efforts to spike stories on Derwick’s corruption included running smear campaigns on various whistleblowers and investigative journalists looking into the matter.
Fusion GPS for its part responded to the Senate testimony with a statement: “It is a matter of public record that Fusion GPS worked for and under the supervision of an American law firm to provide support for civil litigation in New York. It was not required to register under FARA, and it did not spread false information about William Browder or Sergei Magnitsky.”
What do clients get by hiring a firm like Fusion GPS? Among other things, a firm with former top reporters would certainly know how to push the buttons of top news editors. Aside from Simpson and Fritsch, Fusion GPS’s principals include other notable former reporters from the Wall Street Journal, all with storied investigative careers and extensive contacts.* If any firm in Washington has the institutional expertise on how to both feed the media manufactured news and scare editors into deep-sixing potentially damaging stories, it’s Fusion GPS.
Reporters have always been somewhat dependent on dubious leaks from lawyers and prosecutors and lawmakers, all of whom have genuine investigative powers—subpoenas, search warrants, and the like—that reporters don’t enjoy, no matter how much they flatter themselves by calling their work “investigative journalism.” In financially strapped modern newsrooms, dependence on the use of such sources has probably only grown. The temptation for reporters needing their next big scoop is to turn to firms like Fusion GPS for one-stop information shopping. An unfortunate side-effect is the disinclination of many major publications to scrutinize and report the role of firms like Fusion GPS in shaping major stories. There’s a strong likelihood they would be implicating their own reporters, not to mention biting one of the hands that feed them.
The Trump-Russia scandal may not be going away anytime soon, but the more we learn about the role of Fusion GPS and how they operate, the more it suggests there may be a related media scandal just waiting to break open.
Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
*Correction: This article reported incorrectly that Fusion GPS principals included former Washington Post reporters.
