Some of the allegations appear to have been debunked, like a claim that Trump lawyer Michael Cohen travelled to Prague during the election to meet with a Russian official. Comey described the memo as “salacious and unverified” in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. Trump has called the memo “fake” and disputes all of the allegations. Steele also alleges that Trump has deep financial ties to key Russian figures that the Kremlin could use to blackmail him, and it contains a series of lewd allegations about the president. Shortly after that, BuzzFeed published it online.Ĭiting senior Russian government officials and intelligence officers, the dossier claims that Russia has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years.” Steele writes that Trump and his inner circle “accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” on Hillary Clinton. The document was passed around in Washington during the 2016 election, but was not widely known about until CNN reported that former FBI director James Comey had briefed President Trump and former President Obama on its existence. presidential election: Republican candidate Donald Trump’s activities in Russia and compromising relationship with the Kremlin.” The 35-page opposition research document compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele has the look of an official government intelligence report. Here is a look at what we know about the controversial document at the center of the Russia investigation after the latest turn of events. The saga took another bizarre twist on Friday when the conservative news outlet Washington Free Beacon said it paid the same opposition research firm used by the Democrats for dirt on Trump and other GOP candidates about six months earlier. Democrats are trying to keep the focus on the contents of the memo and say it doesn’t matter who paid for it. Republicans are on the offensive, claiming the new funding revelations as evidence the investigations into whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia were fixed against them from the start. “That’s something that may have influenced some people.The revelation that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) helped fund an explosive dossier about President Trump has roiled the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. “Voters should have had that information,” she said. “From my perspective, it didn’t come out before the election … and the American people didn’t even know the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign for connections with Russia starting in 2016,” Clinton said. Read: Hillary Clinton: Women Who Support Trump Are ‘Publicly Disrespecting Themselves’ At the same time, she expressed frustration about the nondisclosure of other information about Trump: that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign’s connections with Russia. While Clinton defended Elias’ decision to support the research, she pointed out that her campaign chose not to publicize it before the election. (The Beacon maintains that none of the work it funded ended up in the dossier.) Clinton explained to Noah that it was at that point that her campaign became involved, after Fusion GPS approached her campaign lawyer, Marc Elias, about the effort. When Trump received the Republican Party’s nomination, however, it ceased funding the research. Indeed, The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet funded in part by GOP donor Paul Singer, disclosed late last week that during the 2016 presidential primary it retained research firm Fusion GPS-which would later produce the dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele-to dig up information about then-candidate Trump. Read: Billionaire Tom Steyer’s Petition to Impeach Trump Has Collected Over 1 Million Signatures She explained that while her campaign ultimately funded some of the research, it was initially backed by a Republican donor during the Republican primary. In her conversation with Noah, Clinton defended her involement, making a point to distinguish between her campaign’s funding of the research and the alleged efforts of the Trump campaign “to influence the election” with the help of the Russians. The former presidential candidate spoke to Trevor Noah on The Daily Show on Wednesday, days after news emerged that her campaign and the Democratic National Committee had helped pay for the dossier, a document that describes salacious ties between the Trump camp and the Russian government.
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