George Soros has indirectly funded the opposition research firm behind the infamous Steele dossier at the center of the Trump-Russia collusion investigation, according to a spokesman for the left-wing billionaire activist.
The funding of Fusion GPS for the Russia project was provided through a grant by Soros to the nonprofit Democracy Integrity Project, Soros aide Michael Vachon told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
The nonprofit organization paid Fusion GPS as a contractor to continue a probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, through their law firm, also funded the dossier.
The Democracy Integrity Project was formed in 2017 by Daniel Jones, a former Senate Intelligence Committee staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
The Daily Caller reported a Washington, D.C., lawyer named Adam Waldman met in March 2017 with Jones, who told him he was working with the author of the dossier, former British spy Christopher Steele, and Fusion GPS. Jones said the project was being funded by Soros and a group of Silicon Valley billionaires.
Jones told the FBI in interviews in March 2017 his organization was paid about $50 million to conduct the investigation.
The Daily Caller said Jones sent Waldman a link to a McClatchy article reporting federal investigators were investigating whether right-wing news sites such as Breitbart and Infowars had a role in Russia’s election-oriented cyber operations.
Dossier at the center
The anti-Trump dossier of unverified claims, based largely on unnamed Russian sources, became a major pretext for launching the special counsel investigation. It was the primary evidence submitted to a top-secret court to spy on a Trump campaign aide.
WND recently reported Republican Congress members who questioned top Justice Department official Bruce Ohr behind closed doors learned he had regular contact regarding the dossier in 2016 with Andrew Weissmann, who is now special counsel Robert Mueller’s top deputy,
Ohr previously testified that the FBI was aware when it submitted the dossier as evidence to obtain a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign that Steele was biased against Trump and that Ohr’s wife, Nellie, worked for the company that produced it.
WND reported in August that newly obtained emails, texts and handwritten notes of Ohr confirmed the connection to Steele, who told Ohr of his fear that they would be “exposed” because of the firing of FBI Director James Comey.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, summed up Ohr’s testimony, calling it “the biggest abuse of power” he had ever seen.
“Go back to the fundamentals. Bruce Ohr, a top Justice Department official, his wife worked for the firm hired by the Clintons to produce the dossier. The dossier that we all know is the foundation of this whole thing which was disproven, salacious, unverified, not credible. That dossier Fusion is giving to Nellie Ohr, to Bruce Ohr who is giving it to the FBI. We know all that, and the FBI took it to the court. Didn’t tell the court who paid for it. Didn’t tell the court the guy who wrote it, Christopher Steele had been terminated,” Jordan said.
The congressman said it “now it appears [the FBI] knew about Bruce Ohr, Nellie Ohr’s involvement and didn’t tell the court that either.”
“They did all of that for what purpose? To spy on the other party’s campaign,” Jordan said.
“That is never supposed to happen in the United States of America and yet it did. This is the biggest abuse of power I have ever seen. And I am going to keep digging at it and so are my colleagues until we get answers for the American people.”
WND also reported Republican congressmen who questioned Ohr found his testimony conflicted with the declarations of other key figures, former FBI lawyer Lisa Page and Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson.
Comey described claims in the dossier as “unverified and salacious.” And longtime Clinton lawyer Lanny Davis rebutted a key claim in the dossier, contending his new client, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, was never in Prague. The dossier makes Cohen and his Prague visit central to its contention that there was “clandestine” conspiracy of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.