A new report ties Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee to the same firm that funded the research for the infamous dossier that alleged a connection between the Kremlin and President Donald Trump.
According to reporting by the Washington Post, a lawyer who represented both the Clinton campaign and the DNC retained a Washington firm called Fusion GPS to conduct research.
ABC News can confirm that this firm had already been investigating Trump since early 2016 — but at the request of an unnamed Republican client looking for opposition research on Trump.
Later on, when Marc E. Elias and his law firm, Perkins Coie, who represented Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee, took over the funding of the Fusion GPS research, Fusion GPS hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy and Moscow station chief with ties to the FBI and U.S. intelligence community.
A source familiar with the situation confirmed to ABC News that Elias and his firm paid Fusion GPS for services.
“To aid in its representation of the Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie retained Fusion GPS, entering into an engagement for research services that began in April 2016 and concluded before the election in early November,” the source said.
Between June 2015 to December 2016, the Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees, according to campaign finance records examined by the Washington Post. And since since November 2015, the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million in “legal and compliance consulting’’.
It is not possible to know how much of those funds were passed on to Fusion GPS.
In August, ABC News reported that the same private research firm, Fusion GPS, was paid during the heated Republican primaries by wealthy Republicans and then later worked for Democrats, all of whom wanted to dig up dirt on Trump and plant negative news stories, according to political operatives.
But the biggest revelation from the Washington Post report is the direct link between the Clinton campaign and the lawyer who retained Fusion GPS, which later funded the dossier.
The dossier, compiled by Steele, outlines raw intelligence, much of it unverified, that alleges collusion between Russian agents and the Trump campaign and claims the Kremlin had blackmail on Trump.
The DNC denies any part in gathering or funding the research the led to the dossier, emphasizing that DNC Chairman Tom Perez who was not actually chair during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization. But let’s be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened,” said DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa.
It is not against the law for campaigns to fund opposition research, nor is it against the law for a campaign to hire a foreign contractor for campaign services, legal experts tell ABC News.
Beyond that, Washington Post reporter Adam Entous clarified that there isn’t any evidence so far that the actual dossier– or any reports authored by Steele– were shared with the Clinton campaign. “Those themselves were given to the lawyer,” he said on CNN Tuesday night.
There is a strategy to who sees opposition research, Entous said.
“It doesn’t appear they were given to the campaign railroad the DNC. That’s the way these arrangements are structured in order to protect the campaign, to protect the candidate in case something like this in the future comes out, so they’re not directly involved in the research firm that’s doing some of this work,” he said. Another point of key significance in the Washington Post report is its timing.
Republican House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes appeared to be trying to identify the clients who funded the dossier.
Putting pressure on the search, Nunes quietly approved a subpoena earlier this month that would make public the identity of the initial donor. Specifically, the subpoena requests the bank handling finances for Fusion GPS to open up its books, thus forcing it to identify the person who first financed the infamous dossier.
House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday told Reuters in an interview that the Department of Justice needs to turn over documents related to the dossier.
“We’ve had these document requests with the administration, with the FBI in particular, for a long time and they’ve been stonewalling,” Ryan said.
