President Trump compared the so-called “Trump dossier,” which contains scandalous and unverified material on Trump’s ties to Russia, to a fictitious “novel.”
“That dossier, which is totally fake and made up, is like a novel,” Trump told Fox News host Laura Ingraham in an interview scheduled to air Thursday night. “It’s a disgrace and should not have been allowed to be used, and then I hear the kind of money they spent.”
Fusion GPS, the Washington opposition research firm, paid former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s company, Orbis Business Intelligence, $168,000 for the work that led to the “Trump dossier.”
“I mean it’s inconceivable, it’s absolutely inconceivable,” Trump told Ingraham. “It’s horrible.”
Trump tweeted last week that the dossier had cost up to $12 million, but didn’t cite any evidence backing up his claim.
Fusion GPS began conducting opposition during the Republican primaries for the conservative Washington Free Beacon, the Washington Examiner reported last week. Over the summer of 2016, the firm was retained by lawyer Mark Elias, who represented the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Democrats, including Clinton officials, deny having any direct connection to the research that amounted to the Trump dossier.
Some aspects of the dossier — like communications between foreign nationals noted in the dossier — have been confirmed by officials; however, the majority of the scandalous allegations included in the document have not been verified.
The dossier came to light publicly after it was published in full by Buzzfeed in January.
