Feinstein posts testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder

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Feinstein posts testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder

Postby sunglasses » Tue Jan 09, 2018 8:16 pm

This just dropped. I have not delved into it yet.

But here it is for those who want to read it.

I'll update with pertinent excerpts as I'm able to do so, feel free to add quotes if you get to it before me.

Feinstein said she did this per Fusion GPS' request.

Edit: My apologies to everyone, somehow I originally posted this in Until Someone Loses an Eye.
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Re: President Trump makes himself an even BIGGER asshole

Postby Cobra-D » Tue Jan 09, 2018 8:26 pm

I didn't know where to post this cause this is about trump being an asshole but it's also has to do with the ongoing russia investigation, but I I'll post it here cause I'm not sure which of the countless Russian threads to post in.

So while all ya'll was debating Oprah running for president sen. Diane Feinstein released the fusion GPS interview transcript regarding the investigation.

For those wondering Fusion GPS is the group that was paid by people in the republican establishment and then later by Hilary to look into Trump during the primaries and are the ones who finance the Steel dossier(AKA the things that says there's a tape involving trump, hookers and pee pee) which the investigation is base on.
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Re: Feinstein posts testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder

Postby sunglasses » Tue Jan 09, 2018 9:46 pm

Damning info on Bill Browder, who lately has been touted as Putin's loudest critic.

Spoiler: show
And, you know, around the -- similarly, there was a deposition of a customs agent by one of the lawyers who -- you know, in this initial effort to trace the origin of these allegations, where they came from, how they could have ended up with the Justice Department, the first thing we did was interview the client, got their story, and interviewed the agent who worked on the case for the DOJ and that agent said he got all his information from William Browder.

So at that point I was asked to help see if we could get an interview with William Browder. They wrote a letter to Browder and asked him to answer questions and he refused. Then the lawyers wanted to know, you know, whether he could be subpoenaed.

So a lot of what I did in 2014 was help them figure out whether he could be subpoenaed in the United States to give a deposition, and the first thing that we did was we researched the ownership and registration of his hedge fund, which was registered in Delaware and filed documents with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So we subpoenaed his hedge fund. A lot of the early work I did was just documenting that his hedge fund had presence in the United States. So we subpoenaed his hedge fund. He then changed the hedge fund registration, took his name off, said it was on there by accident, it was a mistake, and said that he had no presence in the United States and that, you know -- as you may know, he surrendered his citizenship in 1998 and moved outside the United States. That was around the time he started making all the money in Russia. So he's never had to pay U.S. taxes on his profits from his time in Russia, which became important in the case later.

In any case, he said he never came to the United States, didn't own any property here, didn't do any business here, and therefore he was not required to participate in the U.S. court system even though he admitted that he brought the case to the U.S. Justice Department. So we found this to be a frustrating and somewhat curious situation.

He was willing to, you know, hand stuff off to the DOJ anonymously in the beginning and cause them to launch a court case against somebody, but he wasn't interesting in speaking under oath about, you know, why he did that, his own activities in Russia.

So looking at the public record we determined that he did come to the United States frequently, and I discovered through public records that he seemed to own a house in Aspen, Colorado, a very expensive mansion, over $10 million, which he had registered in the name of a shell company in a 1clear attempt to disguise the ownership of the property.

We were able to ascertain that he does use that property because he registered cars to that property with the Colorado DMV in the name of William Browder. So we began looking for public information about when he might be in Aspen, Colorado, and I found a listing on the Aspen Institute Website about an appearance he was going to make there in the summer of 2014.

So we -- I served him a 2subpoena in the parking lot of the Aspen Institute in the summer of 2014 using two people -- two subcontractors. Actually, those other subcontractors were -- their names escape me, but I forgot about those. We can get you that. This is all in the Pacer court record, the public court record.

In any event, we served him the subpoena and he ran away. He dropped it on the ground and he ran away. He jumped in his car and went back to his mansion. At that point he tried to suppress -- tried to quash the subpoena on the grounds it hadn't been properly served. We didn't get a video, but there 1are sworn affidavits from my servers in the court record about the service. But he objected to it on a number of grounds. A, he continued to insist he had nothing to do with the United States and didn't come here very often even, though we caught him 20 here, clearly has cars in Colorado. He also said that you can't serve a subpoena for a case in New York in the state of Colorado, it's outside the primary jurisdiction. He also began to raise 24 questions about whether Baker Hostetler had a conflict of interest because of some previous work he did with one of the Baker lawyers. This led to a long, drawn-out discovery battle that I was in the center of because I served the subpoenas and I helped find the information for 5 the first set of subpoenas that lasted, you know, 6 through 2014. This was, you know, a lot of what I did. This was -- the main focus was on trying to get William Browder to testify under oath about his role in this case and his activities in Russia.

All of this -- his determined effort to avoid testifying under oath, including running away from subpoenas and changing -- frequently changing lawyers and making lurid allegations against us, including that, you know, he thought we were KGB assassins in the parking lot of Aspen, Colorado when we served the subpoena, all raised questions in my mind about why he was so determined to not have to answer questions under oath about things 19 that happened in Russia.

I'll add that, you know, I've done a lot of Russia reporting over the years. I originally met William Browder back when I was a journalist at the Wall Street Journal when I was doing stories about corruption in Russia.

I think the first time I met him he lectured me about -- I was working on a story about Vladimir Putin corruption and he lectured me about how have Vladimir Putin was not corrupt and how he was the best thing that ever happened to Russia. There are numerous documents that he published himself, interviews he gave singing the praises of Vladimir Putin. At that time I was already investigating corruption in Putin's Russia. So this made me more curious about the history of his activities in Russia and what that might tell me about corruption in Russia, and as part of the case we became curious about whether there was something that he was hiding about his activities in Russia. So through this period while we were attempting to get him under oath we were also investigating his business practices in Russia and that research -- and I should add when I say "we," I mean the lawyers were doing a lot of this work and it wasn't -- I can't take responsibility or pride of place on having done all this work. We were doing it all together.

It was a -- you know,there were a number of lawyers involved, other people. In the course of doing this research into what he might not want to be asked about from his history in Russia we began to learn about the history of his tax avoidance in Russia and we began to deconstruct the way that his hedge fund structured its investments in Russia and, you know, we gradually accumulated through public records, not all from Russia, that he set up dozens of shell companies in Cyprus and other tax havens around the world to funnel money into Russia and to hold Russian securities. He also set up shell companies inside of Russia in order to avoid paying taxes in Russia and he set up shell companies in a remote republic called Kalmykia, K-A-L-M-Y-K-I-A, which is next to Mongolia. It's the only Buddhist republic in Russia and there's nothing much there, but if you put your companies there you can lower your taxes.

They were putting their companies in Kalmykia that were holding investments from western investors and they were staffing these companies -- they were using Afghan war veterans because there's a tax preference for Afghan war veterans, and what we learned is that they got in trouble for this eventually because one of Putin's primary rules for business was you can do a lot of things, but you've got to pay your taxes.

In fact, William Browder famously said in 2005 at Davos everybody knows under Putin you have to pay your taxes, which is ironic because at the time he was being investigated for not paying taxes. Ultimately they were caught, some of these companies were prosecuted, and he was forced to make an enormous tax payment to the government of Russia in 2006. I will add that Sergei Magnitsky was working for him at this time and all of this happened prior to the events that you are interested in involving the Russian treasury fraud and his jailing. This precedes all that.

But returning to the detailed discussion of my work, we investigated William Browder's business practices in Russia, we began to understand maybe what it was he didn't want to talk about, and as we looked at that we then began to look at his decision to surrender his American citizenship in 1998. At that point somewhere in there the Panama papers came out and we discovered that he had incorporated shell companies offshore in the mid 1990s, in 1995 I believe it was in the British Virgin Islands, and that at some point his hedge fund's shares had been transferred to this offshore company.

This offshore company was managed -- several of his offshore companies were managed by the 4 Panamanian law firm called Mossack Fonseca, Fonseca,which is known now for setting up offshore companies for drug kingpins, narcos, kleptos, you name it. They were servicing every bad guy around. And I'm familiar with them from other money laundering and corruption and tax evasion investigations that I've done. I'll note parenthetically that William Browder talks a lot about the Panama papers and the Russians who are in the Panama papers without ever mentioning that he's in the Panama papers. This is, again, a public fact that you can check on-line.

So that's an overview of the sort of work I was doing on this case. In the course of that I also began reaching back, I read his book Red Notice to understand his story and the story of his activities in Russia. I'll add also that I was extremely sympathetic for what happened to Sergei Magnitsky and I told him that myself and I tried to help him. It was only later from this other case that I began to be curious and skeptical about William Browder's activities and history in Russia.


My apologies for the random numbers. They were page margins, and I started to go in and take them out but got interrupted.

Edit: Holy shit this long. If I was to just quote interesting bits I'm going to wind up with a post as long as a meter stick. So, I will spoiler the quotes. I must double post just to keep the wall of text seperate.

If you don't feel like wading thru all this, politico has some of the quotes.

Edit again: Oh lord, I can't get thru this right now. It's just sooooo long.
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Re: Feinstein posts testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder

Postby sunglasses » Tue Jan 09, 2018 10:32 pm

Double post so this can be broken down timely and so I don't have to wade through giant walls of text to post quotes.

On why they started to look at Russia

Spoiler: show
Q. So you had mentioned a few minutes ago that you had done some political or campaign research in the course of the 2016 presidential election and you clarified that that was work related to then Candidate and now President Trump. What can you tell us about that work? Can you just describe it first generally and then I'll ask you some follow-up.
A. It was, broadly speaking, a kind of 7holistic examination of Donald Trump's business 8 record and his associations, his bankruptcies, his suppliers, you know, offshore or third-world suppliers of products that he was selling. You know, it evolved somewhat quickly into issues of his relationships to organized crime figures but, you know, really the gamut of Donald Trump.

So anyway, we read everything we could read about Donald Trump. Those books cover his divorces, his casinos, his early years dealings with labor unions and mafia figures. I'm trying to think what else. His taxes certainly have always been a big issue. Again, it was sort of an unlimited look at his -- you know, his business and finances and that sort of thing.


Q. Okay. So with regard to that initial engagement because you had talked a bit about some of the research you had done -- I think you said it was holistic, financials, potential ties to organized crime. With regard to this initial engagement that started in October, September, can you just explain for us what your findings were.

A. I guess I'll just give you the caveat that, you know, it's a group effort. So I can tell you, you know, as the person that was, you know, running the project, you know, I had my fingers in various things, but there were also the things that I was directly focused on. In the early -- the very first weekend that I started boning up on Donald Trump, you know, I found various references to him having connections 20 to Italian organized crime and later to a Russian organized crime figure named Felix Sater, 22 S-A-T-E-R. It wasn't hard to find, it wasn't any great achievement, it was in the New York Times, but as someone who has done a lot of Russian organized crime investigations as a journalist originally that caught my attention and became something that, you know, I focused on while other people looked at other things

Q. And what, if anything, did you conclude about the connection between and in the business 2 dealings that then Candidate Trump had had with Mr. Sater?

A. Well, somewhat analogous to the Browder situation I found it notable this was something he didn't want to talk about and testified under oath he wouldn't know Felix if he ran into him in the street. That was not true. He knew him well and, in fact, continued to associate with him long after he learned of Felix's organized crime ties.

We saw indications that some of the money came from Kazakhstan, among other places, and that some of it you just couldn't account for.


On golf courses and taxes

Spoiler: show
We spent a lot of time trying to figure out whether he's really as rich as he says he is because that was the subject of a libel case that he filed against a journalist 5 named Tim O'Brien for which there was quite a lot of discovery and litigation filings detailing O'Brien's allegation that he was worth, you know, maybe a fifth to a third of what he claims and Trump's angry retort that he was worth far more than that. So we did things like we looked at the golf courses and whether they actually ever made any money and how much debt they had. We looked at the bankruptcies, how could somebody go through so many bankruptcies, you know, and still have a billion dollars in personal assets. So those are the kinds of things. We looked at a lot of things like his tax bills. Tax bills are useful because you can figure out how much money someone is making or how much they're worth or how much their properties are worth based on how much they have to pay in taxes. One of the things we found out was that, you know, when it comes to paying taxes, Donald Trump claims to not have much stuff. At least the Trump organization.


Initial ease of information and the hiring of Steele

Spoiler: show
Q. And specific to the engagement with regard to the research on Candidate Trump, why did you specifically ask Mr. Steele to do that work?
A. The way our firm runs we pursue things, you know, somewhat out of curiosity. So we didn't know -- it was opaque what Donald Trump had been doing on these business trips to Russia. We didn't know what he was doing there. So I gave Chris we gave Chris a sort of assignment that would be typical for us which was pretty open ended. We said see if you can find out what Donald Trump's been doing on these trips to Russia. Since Chris and I worked together over the years there's a lot that didn't need to be said. That would include who is he doing business with, which hotels does he like to stay at, you know, did anyone ever offer him anything, you know, the standard sort of things you would look at. I don't think I gave him any specific instructions beyond the general find out what he was up to.

The thing that people forget about what was going on in June of 2016 was that no one was really focused on sort of this question of whether Donald Trump had a relationship with the Kremlin. So, you know, when Chris started asking around in Moscow about this the information was sitting there. It wasn't a giant secret. People were talking about it freely. It was only, you know, later that it became a subject of great controversy and people clammed up, and at that time the whole issue of the hacking was also, you know, not really focused on Russia. So these things eventually converged into, you know, a major issue, but at the time it wasn't one.


They keep asking stuff about the Prevezon case for aaaageeesss

GASP!

The dossier isn't even really a dossier

Spoiler: show
A. Correct. To be totally clear, you know,
what people call the dossier is not really a
dossier. It's a collection of field memoranda, of
field interviews, a collection that accumulates
over a period of months. You know, they came in
intermittently, there was no schedule. You know,
he'd reach a point in the reporting where he had
enough to send a new memo; so he'd send one. So
you won't find any real rhythm or chronological
sort of system to the way they came in.


On Steele's reputation and how the confirmed 'sensitive information they obtained'

Spoiler: show
Q. You had indicated that when you received
it you found it unusual, it was sensitive
information. Did you take steps to verify any of
the information?

A. We assessed it for credibility, whether it
was credible. The question of the credibility of
the information is obviously a big question here,
can this be believed. There's other secondary
questions that would follow on from that, can it
somehow be used, does it have any use and that sort
of thing, but the threshold question is is it
credible information.
You know, there were two background factors
to that. One was who is it coming from. It's
coming from Chris Steele who's a guy that I've
worked with for, you know, about eight or nine
years and Chris, as I say, has a Sterling
reputation as a person who doesn't exaggerate,
doesn't make things up, doesn't sell baloney. In
my business, I mean, there are a lot of people who
make stuff up and sell baloney. So the one thing
that you get good at if you do this for a while is
finding reliable sources, finding reliable people
who have a record of giving it to you straight and
not making stuff up and not making mistakes. So
from that perspective, you know, this was alarming
because Chris is a credible person, he's well
respected in his field, and, as I say, everyone I
know who's ever dealt with him thinks he's quite
good. That would include people from the U.S.
government.


I'm just going to sum up things because holy hell there's a lot of back and forth.

Summation of pages around the 160 mark: The DNC hack happened and Steele found something that he felt the FBI needed to know about. Fusion GPS initially dragged their heels, but Steele said he knew someone to talk to. Steele's concern was whether or not there was political blackmail afoot and/or if someone had been compromised. Steele attempted to contact them in June or July, however, Fusion GPS dude Simpson was never involved in these talks.

Simpson does state in the 170s that it appeared obvious espionage had occurred.

Steele reported to Simpson he had a meeting with the FBI in September of 16, that they told Steele they believed his information to be credible as they had discovered similar reports. FBI had told Steele they had inside Trump campaign information as well.

Late 170s: Comey's reopening of Clinton's emails concerns Fusion GPS and Steele about their bipartianship and started to concern them about what was going on at the FBI. Because of this concern, Steele stopped talking to the FBI.

More questions about dinners and the prior case.

There is a LOT of back and forth about did anyone violate a business contract by going to the media, did Steele say whether or not the FBI said to talk to the media, did you guys talk about going to the media.

Levy, Simpsons attorney, stresses to the questioners that they've already told them that neither Simpson nor Steele gave the data to Buzzfeed.

Then they ask if Simpson thought that the confidentiality agreement meant they weren't supposed to talk to law enforcement. He replies that if there is a terroristic crime or mafia operation then they should report it and that it wouldn't be bound by a confidentiality agreement.

Ah the nitty gritty FINALLY. Simpson is asked if the amount of compensation to Fusion or Orbis was based on the FBI opening an investigation into Trump. He indicated no.

Talked about how they looked into Carter Page before looking into any conspiracy. Simpson said Carter Page was the typical person that Russians would try to co-opt, compromise, or manipulate.

Simpson later repeats that Huckabee Sander's insistence that Fusion GPS took money from the Russian government is very, very false. He also clarifies that they are non-partisan and not an extension of the democratic party.

Simpson states he does not feel Steele was influenced by anyone.

They ask a LOT if Simpson knows Steele's sources. He does not.

It's mentioned that after the election Fusion noted that someone had attempted to hack them.

They want to know if Fusion paid journalists? They did not.

There is so much back and forth even the court reporter interrupts with a succinct, "Guys."

Bunch of talk about a bunch of Russian dudes who were involved in Trump's Soho project.

They keep trying to push for client names and source names t/o the interview. It's painful.
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Re: Feinstein posts testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder

Postby sunglasses » Thu Jan 11, 2018 3:28 pm

Tweets this morning (and yesterday)!

"Disproven and paid for by Democrats 'Dossier used to spy on Trump Campaign. Did FBI use Intel tool to influence the Election?' @foxandfriends Did Dems or Clinton also pay Russians? Where are hidden and smashed DNC servers? Where are Crooked Hillary Emails?" the president tweeted.

"What a mess!"


This tweet is rather contradictory to the testimony that was released. Of which he said this:

The fact that Sneaky Dianne Feinstein, who has on numerous occasions stated that collusion between Trump/Russia has not been found, would release testimony in such an underhanded and possibly illegal way, totally without authorization, is a disgrace. Must have tough Primary!


It wasn't a classified document and releasing it wasn't illegal.
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Re: Feinstein posts testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder

Postby Cobra-D » Thu Jan 11, 2018 8:04 pm

Is...he asking fox to explain this to him?
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Re: Feinstein posts testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder

Postby sunglasses » Thu Jan 11, 2018 9:52 pm

That wouldn't be the strangest thing.

And yes, he live tweets them every morning almost.
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Re: Feinstein posts testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder

Postby mancityfooty » Mon Jan 15, 2018 1:15 am

https://wonkette.com/
this is a left wing commie site I post on occasionally, I think it would fit in well with some people here.
the coverage of the testiomony of the fusion gps can be found here:
like https://wonkette.com/628122/its-real-fuckin-obvious-why-gop-didnt-want-us-to-read-the-fusion-gps-transcript
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