Last week leaders of the Senate intelligence committee, senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner, gave a press conference in which they announced they are eager to speak with Christopher Steele, the former British MI6 officer believed to have compiled the controversial dossier of allegations about President Trump’s connections to Russia. Steele reportedly spoke with special counselor Robert Mueller about the dossier, but the committee has yet to hear from the man who laid the foundations for the theory that Trump or his campaign team colluded with Russian officials to fix the 2016 presidential election for him.
One reporter, however, claims that the Senate intelligence committee has verified “some of the Steele dossier.” Ken Dilanian of NBC News told MSNBC Thursday morning that “Burr said they had been able to corroborate some aspects of it.”
But in the 40-minute-long press conference, neither Burr nor Warner suggested anything of the sort. Rather, Burr said “the committee cannot really decide the credibility of the dossier without understanding things like who paid for it, who are your sources and subsources?” Dilanian explained that “two sources told NBC News the committee has corroborated parts of the dossier.”
Dilanian did not explain to viewers what Burr was clearly hinting at—namely, that the Steele dossier is the paid product of a private information company called Fusion GPS, which has become notorious for inventing sleazy and often fact-free attacks on democratic whistleblowers and political figures and feeding them to journalists. Dilanian himself is no stranger to Fusion GPS.
Who Is Fusion GPS?
In summer 2016, Fusion GPS distributed the dossier under Steele’s name to a number of major news organizations. All refrained from publishing a document they couldn’t verify. It was finally published by BuzzFeed in January after CNN reported U.S. intelligence agencies had briefed outgoing president Barack Obama and his incoming successor Donald Trump on the existence of the dossier.
It was Fusion GPS that also spearheaded a campaign to dismantle the Magnitsky Act, the 2012 legislation that imposes sanctions on Russian officials and figures associated with the regime of Vladimir Putin who are known to have played a role in the 2009 death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky. Fusion GPS’ effort, according to William Browder, the driving force behind the Magnitsky Act and head of the Magnitsky Global Justice Campaign, included a smear campaign against him and his late friend and lawyer.
In his explosive July 27 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Browder, the 53-year-old CEO and founder of Hermitage Capital Management, alleged Fusion GPS may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by spreading Russian state propaganda. Washington DC journalists, Browder added, were in on the game—getting stories from the company that first tried to torque American law to benefit Putin and his cronies then spread the salacious Steele dossier.
“I suspect that a number of journalists,” Browder testified, “and one in particular here in Washington was operating so far outside the bounds of normal journalistic integrity that there must have been some incentive for them to be doing it coming from Fusion GPS.”
The journalist Browder alluded to is NBC News’ intelligence and national security reporter: Ken Dilanian. In extensive interviews, Browder alleged to me that a number of journalists, including Dilanian, were beholden to Fusion GPS and its principals, including former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson, for supplying them with stories in the past. Reporters, Browder argued, were therefore reluctant to look too deeply into Fusion GPS’s smear campaign against him and Magnitsky. Multiple attempts to reach Dilanian for comment went unanswered.
To back up his assertion about NBC and Dilanian, Browder showed me documents that chronicled Dilanian’s reporting on the Magnitsky Act—reporting that Browder believes moved in tandem with Fusion GPS’s campaign to discredit both himself and Magnitsky in the hope of repealing the law and lifting sanctions against Russia.
Russia’s Target: Corrupting the American Press
What these records and other accompanying documents also suggest is that Russia’s attempt to “hack” the 2016 election was hardly just about the election, and that a main target and beneficiary of that effort—which is ongoing—is the American press.
In an email hacked from the account of a U.S. foreign service officer, Dilanian asked Sen. Ben Cardin’s office if the senior Democratic member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee wanted to comment on the story about Magnitsky that he was reporting. “There is no evidence he was beaten in prison, as Browder has alleged,” Dilanian declares:
and it’s clear from police and court records that he wasn’t detained because he blew the whistle on an alleged fraud scheme. He was detained over tax evasion by Browder’s companies. In fact, there are credible allegations in court documents that Browder and his associates are suspects in the fraud—and that Browder concocted the whistleblower story to cover that up.
We plan to publish something about this next week, and I wanted to give Sen. Cardin a chance to comment on it. He is not a large part of the story, and if these allegations are true, he is one of many smart and influential people who were misled, obviously.
Another email, hacked from the same cache, written by a Democratic staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, dismisses Dilanian’s thesis: “There is overwhelming evidence that Sergei Magnitsky was beaten in prison”—after which the staffer makes his case clearly:
Photographs of his beaten body were available to us, which show physical evidence of him having been beaten. … We reviewed the detention center protocol, which reports that Magnitsky was beaten with rubber batons by guards on the evening of November 16, 2009—the night he died. … Magnitsky’s Death Certificate refers to a cerebral cranial injury. … The forensic postmortem conducted by Russian state experts refers to injuries on Magnitsky’s body consistent with the use of rubber batons.