Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., denied Thursday his presidential campaign was the unidentified GOP client that hired Fusion GPS, an opposition research firm, to conduct research into Donald Trump during the Republican primaries.
“As far as whether it was my campaign, it wasn’t and I’ll tell you why,” Rubio told CNN. “I was running for president. I was trying to win. If I had anything against Donald Trump that was relevant and credible and politically damaging, I would’ve used it. I didn’t have it.”
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee partly funded the research that led to the controversial “Trump dossier.” The initial report about Fusion said the research started at the request of an anonymous Republican, but no one has been able to identify who that was.
Later, Marc Elias, a lawyer for the Clinton campaign and the DNC, hired Fusion GPS on behalf of the two entities. Fusion GPS then hired Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer, who authored the dossier.
Many of the claims in the document haven’t been substantiated.
Rubio, who ran for president last year and faced off against Trump in the Republican primaries, denied his campaign was the anonymous client and said it’s “abundantly clear” from press reports that Steele’s involvement in the dossier didn’t begin until the Republican primaries ended.
“I don’t know who it was,” Rubio said. “The one thing we do know, this thing about the dossier you’re discussing, all those press accounts, and I’m just going off press accounts, they all make it abundantly clear that the work that Mr. Steele did on that dossier didn’t even start until April or May or June, after the Republican primary was over. So that was the DNC, and that was the Clinton campaign.”
