Although his questioners at the time didn’t know what he was talking about, Fusion GPS chief Glenn Simpson raised eyebrows on Aug. 22, 2017, when he told Senate Judiciary Committee investigators that the FBI had a “human source” inside the Trump campaign.
It’s still not clear what Simpson meant. Was he referring to Stefan Halper, now recognized as an FBI informant who tried to insinuate himself into the campaign? Or was it someone else? Congressional investigators still don’t know. But in light of the attention paid to Halper, it’s still worth going over precisely what Simpson said last year.
Simpson was talking to investigators about Christopher Steele, the former British spy Simpson retained to produce what became known as the Trump dossier. Steele had contacts within the FBI from previous work, and Simpson told interviewers that at the height of the campaign Steele met with FBI officials in Rome.
“At some point I learned that [Steele] was meeting with the lead FBI guy from Rome,” Simpson said. “I don’t remember when he told me that.”
“And did you have a name associated with who that was?” investigators asked.
“Not at that time.” [It was later reported that Steele actually met with four FBI officials, some of whom had come from the U.S. to talk to Steele.]
“You said that [Steele] told you of the meeting with the FBI in Rome in mid or late September, that he ‘gave them a full briefing’?” the questioner asked. {Note: While Steele met with the FBI officials in Rome in September, he also met with an FBI agent in London in early July 2016.]
“A debrief, I think, is what he probably said, they debriefed him,” Simpson answered. “I don’t remember him articulating the specifics of that. You know, my understanding was that they would have gotten into who [Steele’s] sources were, how he knew certain things, and, you know, other details based on their own intelligence.”
Then Simpson said the FBI officials had something else by which to evaluate Steele’s material: intelligence the bureau had gotten from a source inside the Trump campaign.
“Essentially what [Steele] told me was they had other intelligence about this matter from an internal Trump campaign source and that — that they — my understanding was that they believed Chris at this point — that they believed Chris’s information might be credible because they had other intelligence that indicated the same thing and one of those pieces of intelligence was a human source from inside the Trump organization.”
The next question was obvious: “And did you have any understanding then or now as to who that human intelligence source from inside the Trump campaign might have been?”
At that point, Simpson’s lawyer, Joshua Levy, stepped in. “He’s going to decline to answer that question,” Levy said.
“On what basis?”
Simpson spoke up. “Security,” he said.
“Security,” repeated Levy.
“We had been really careful — I was really careful throughout this process not to ask a lot of specific sourcing questions,” Simpson explained. “There are some things I know that I just don’t feel comfortable sharing because obviously it’s been in the news a lot lately that people who get in the way of the Russians tend to get hurt.”
Levy also claimed that the information might be privileged. The questioner moved on. “Was this individual also a person who had been a source for Mr. Steele, without identifying who that was?”
“No,” said Simpson.
“So this was someone independent of Mr. Steele’s sources who potentially had information also on the same topics?”
“Yes,” said Simpson. “I mean, I don’t think this implicates any of the issues to say I think it was a voluntary source, someone who was concerned about the same concerns we had.”
The investigator said he was having a hard time hearing Simpson’s answers.
“It was someone like us who decided to pick up the phone and report something,” Simpson said.
How did Simpson know that? The investigator wanted to know. “And your understanding of this, does that come from Mr. Steele or from a different source?”
“That comes from Chris, yes,” Simpson said.
“And when did he share that information with you?”
“I don’t remember exactly.”
“Do you think it was around the same time that he met with the FBI, so mid to late September of 2016?”
“I think more likely early October.”
And that was it. The questioning moved on to other topics and did not return to the unnamed source inside the Trump campaign. But there were a few things to glean from Simpson’s description.
First, Simpson said the FBI informant volunteered for the job — a person who decided to pick up the phone and join the investigation. Second, Simpson did not say whether he knew who the FBI informant was. Simpson said the FBI told Steele that such an informant existed, and also suggested that he, Simpson, at some point learned the identity — “There are some things I know that I just don’t feel comfortable sharing.” But Simpson did not say definitively, and Senate questioners did not press. Finally, Simpson claimed that the informant supplied information that corroborated the Steele dossier, although several months later then-FBI director James Comey called the dossier “unverified.”
In retrospect, it was a telling moment in the Hill’s investigation of the FBI’s conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation. But Simpson’s description of the informant left a lot of questions. To this day, House investigators are trying, so far without great success, to find the answers.
