Did the FBI Have A Source In The Trump Campaign?

jonathanturley

8 years ago

The founders of Fusion GPS (which compiled the Trump dossier with money from Hillary Clinton and the DNC) has caused a stir with an op-ed in The New York Times calling for Congress to release transcripts of their testimony last summer. I favor such a release to give greater transparency on the facts underlying the allegations over both the Trump and Clinton campaigns. I have criticized both parties for managing the information and pushing investigations on one side while obstructing investigations on the other side. However, six words in the op-ed raise a far more interesting prospect: they say that there may have been an insider cooperating with the FBI during the campaign. That would be a highly significant development if the source was a true cooperative witness funneling information to the Bureau during the presidential campaign.

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, founders of Fusion GPS, wrote:

We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

It is not clear who this might be or how careful Simpson and Fritsch were in their language. There has been much talk about the report of an inebriated former campaign association, George Papadopoulos, telling an Australian diplomat that Russia had “political dirt” on Hillary Clinton in May 2016. As the New York Times reported, Papadopoulos, then a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign, was drinking at an upscale London bar when he told Australia’s top diplomat in Britain, Alexander Downer, about the Russian dirt.

Of course, the Papadopoulos does not entirely square with the infamous meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016. That meeting with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort and a Russian-American lobbyist named Rinat Akhmetshin (and others) was premised on disclosing dirt on Clinton from the Russian government. The premise of the meeting would suggest that the Trump people did not have the information and the meeting was reportedly a brief one after the Russians wanted to talk primarily about sanctions. The record suggests that Papadopoulos was speaking about Russian dirt in May but, in June, top Trump people were still eager to learn what the dirt might be.

The reference in the op-ed could well be a reference to the fact that the Australians reportedly let U.S. intelligence know about the drunken exchange with Papadopoulos in London. Hopefully, the public will get more details on such allegations in the coming months.

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