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| -Lurid Crime Tales- |
| Steele Dossier's ‘Coincidences' Keep Piling Up |
| 2018-02-10 |
| [Daily Caller] At least four separate coincidences have emerged as the public learns more information about the unverified Steele dossier and how it was crafted. The origin story of the 35-page document was pretty simple at the outset. Fusion GPS, which was investigating then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, hired former British spy Christopher Steele to write the dossier. But as more details about the dossier trickle out into the public forum, connections have surfaced that raise questions about how information made its way into the salacious document. Here are the four most significant "coincidences." Trump Tower The first coincidence to emerge from the dossier involved the June 9, 2016, meeting held at Trump Tower between Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and a group of Russians. Two of the Russians in the meeting ‐ Natalia Veselnitskaya and Rinat Akhmetshin ‐ happened to be working at the time of that meeting with Glenn Simpson, the founder of the opposition research firm that commissioned the dossier. (RELATED: Revelations From Glenn Simpson’s House Intelligence Committee Interview) Simpson, Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin were working on behalf of a Russian businessman on a lobbying campaign to undermine a U.S. sanctions law called the Magnitsky Act. Simpson met before and after the meeting with Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin but says he was not aware of the Trump Tower meeting until it was reported in July. He has also denied telling the two Russian operatives about his work on the Steele dossier. Trump Jr. accepted the meeting after an acquaintance offered to provide him with dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. A Russian government attorney at the behest of Russia’s prosecutor general would provide the information, according to the acquaintance. The offer matches up loosely with some of the allegations in the dossier, including that the Kremlin provided dirt on Trump’s political opponents. Trump Jr. and others in the meeting say that it went nowhere and no meaningful information was exchanged. They also say that there was no follow up to the meeting, which lasted around 20 minutes. Simpson himself appeared to acknowledge the odd overlap between his work on the two Russia-related projects ‐ the dossier and the work with Veselnitskaya and Akhmetshin. "I mean, thank God I didn’t know anything about the Trump Tower meeting, or I would really have some explaining to do," he told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence during a closed-door interview in November. Three more 'Coincidences' follow: |
| Posted by:Besoeker |