U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., is suing the company that commissioned the “dossier” of unverified claims against President Trump, its founder and others, alleging they interfered with his official work in Washington.
The Washington Examiner reports the allegations against Fusion GPS and founder Glenn Simpson include “racketeering” and interfering with Nunes’ probe of the Obama administration’s investigation of alleged Trump-Russia collusion.
Nunes, who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee until the 2018 election, states Simpson, Fusion GPS and the watchdog Campaign for Accountability “illegally conspired to ‘harass’ him in an attempt to ‘hinder, delay, prevent, or dissuade’ him from looking into issues surrounding the federal investigation in the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”
The Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee contracted with Fusion GPS during the 2016 election to produce the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.
Obama’s FBI and State Department submitted the document to a top-secret court to obtain warrants to spy on the Trump administration. However, the special counsel investigation of Robert Mueller debunked the major claims of the dossier and found no evidence for any of them.
The complaint in U.S. District Court in Virginia alleges the watchdog group and the company colluded to obstruct his efforts in Congress to uncover the facts of the Obama administration’s investigation of the Trump campaign.
The case cites three ethics complaints filed by the Campaign for Accountability “in concert with” Fusion GPS’ attempts to “chill reporting of Fusion GPS and Simpson’s wrongdoing.”
A spokesman for the Campaign for Accountability claimed the charges are “obviously frivolous.”
The Examiner noted the contents of the dossier were shared with the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration.
“Marc Elias, a Perkins Coie lawyer and the Clinton campaign’s general counsel, provided briefings to the Clinton campaign related to what Fusion GPS and Steele had uncovered. The DOJ and FBI also made extensive use of Steele’s information to target Trump campaign associate Carter Page with surveillance through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Nellie Ohr, the wife of high-ranking DOJ official Bruce Ohr, was also a contractor for Fusion GPS in 2015 and 2016, and her Trump-Russia research was passed along by her husband to the FBI.
Some of these revelations — including the payment scheme between the Clinton campaign and Fusion GPS — were revealed in connection to efforts by Nunes in 2017 and 2018, the Examiner explained.
Special counsel Robert Mueller investigated the allegations triggered in part by the dossier for two years and concluded there was no evidence them.
Nunes charged that Fusion, Simpson and the Clinton campaign had the “common goal” of “using the false and defamatory statements in the Steele dossier to poison the minds of voters.”
They decided to attack him, Nunes alleged, because of his efforts to expose their “nefarious activities.”
“Corrupt acts of racketeering are part of [the] regular way of doing business” for Fusion, he said.
Nunes told Fox News on Wednesday, “We know that we spent $40 million roughly investigating the Trump campaign but at the end of the day, we don’t have anything to show for it.”
Nunes cited Mueller’s remark in a congressional hearing that he wasn’t familiar with Fusion GPS.
“We don’t know many of the players involved in Russian investigation and to not know who Fusion GPS is – you know – give me a break. This is why the courts are going to have to come in and clean this up and this is why people like me who have the ability to do this have to take these cases to court so that we can pull out more information,” he said.
