After party-first-country-whenever obstructionist Rethuglicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to release the transcript of the testimony of opposition research firm Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson from August, 2017, the Committee's Democrats released the transcript (embedded at the link) so that the public could get a complete picture of Russia's interference in the 2016 elections. Judiciary Committee Chairman, the odious hayseed Sen. Charles Grassley (Rethug-Ethanol) and his cohorts on the Committee are trying to discredit Fusion's investigator, former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, and the FBI, in order to divert attention from the serious charges being leveled in the Russiagate scandal. Withholding the transcript gave the Trumpist Rethugs cover to go after the whistleblower rather than the perpetrators, while denying the public it's right to the truth.
The key revelation in the transcript is that the Fusion / Steele "dossier" was not the impetus for the FBI's opening of the Russiagate probe, as the Rethugs and White (Supremacist) House have alleged in order to discredit the FBI's investigation, which is the Trumpists' main goal next to discrediting Robert Mueller and his team of prosecutors. In a January 2 op-ed in the New York Times, Simpson and Fusion GPS co-founder Peter Fritsch stated that the impetus for the FBI investigation was from other sources both inside and outside of the Trump campaign (it was separately disclosed that Trump foreign affairs "advisor" George Papadopoulos had drunkenly tipped off Australia's ambassador to the UK about Moscow's election interference in the spring of 2016, which led to the FBI investigation).
Good for the Senate Dems responsible for getting this transcript out in public, if only to expose the Rethuglicans' unpatriotic attempts to undermine the FBI's investigation of Moscow's partnership with the Trump campaign during 2016.
UPDATE: Apparently publicly unknown until now, the FBI had a source inside the Rump campaign --
The feedback from Steele, as filtered through Simpson, is that the FBI had an asset inside the Trump campaign by September 2016—months before the arrest and recruitment of Papadopoulos—and that this resource made the FBI more receptive to the information that Steele was giving them. Including, possibly, the personal information that Russia might use to blackmail Trump.So, Steele's trying to give a heads- up to an ally that Rump is being/ might be blackmailed by the Russians. And rancid corncob Grassley and his fellow traitors want to go after... Steele.
Also good to know the consequences of f*ckwads Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers of the New York Effing Times who, on October 31, credulously passed along their spoon- fed scoop that the FBI had found no evidence of Rump connections with Russia, which caused the Fusion GPS folks to stop dealing with the FBI, fearing (rightly) that there were Stormtrumpers in the FBI's New York office manipulating information to suit Rump's campaign:
Following on Comey re-opening the case into Clinton’s emails, the New York Times’ “nothing to see here” story was so counter to everything that Steele had passed along to the FBI that he severed his relationship out of concern that Trump or the Russians had actually flipped the FBI. That story—one of the two most important and influential stories of the campaign season—remains completely unsourced and unexplained.Journamalism!
