“We’re speaking with Theresa May today and, as soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be.” Trump, Tillerson, Theresa May, Justin Trudeau and Angela Merkel would all have access to the same intelligence reports, which must show that Russia is behind the attack, and all but Trump came to the same conclusion.Īfter everyone else had concluded the Russians were behind the attack, Trump was still talking as if it might be someone else. It seemed clear that Trump would have to echo Tillerson’s comments or be radically out of step with the western consensus on standing up to Russian aggression that NATO members have shared since the beginning of the Cold War. Tillerson, himself a recipient of the Russia’s Order of Friendship from Putin, was fired the day after he denounced Russia for the attempted assassination of a former double agent in Britain with nerve gas, promised solidarity with Britain and vowed there would be consequences. We can’t know whether Putin has, as reported in the Steele dossier, disgusting kompromat that could bring Trump low, or whether Trump has compelling business or political reasons to make him dance to the tune played by the vicious assassin in charge of Russia, but if there was any real doubt about the relationship, Tillerson’s firing removes it. The letter was first reported by the Washington Examiner.Donald Trump’s sudden Twitter firing of Rex Tillerson on Tuesday is the moment that it became impossible to maintain the fiction that Trump is not in some way in league with Vladimir Putin. Graham Wilson, the lawyer representing the campaign and the DNC, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Trump, who has railed against the dossier for years, released a statement celebrating the agreement and once again denouncing the dossier as “a Hoax funded by the DNC and the Clinton Campaign”. A special counsel assigned to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation charged one of Steele’s sources with lying to the FBI and charged a cybersecurity lawyer who worked for Clinton’s campaign with lying to the FBI during a 2016 meeting in which he relayed concerns about the Russia-based Alfa Bank. The Steele dossier was a report compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele and financed by Democrats that included salacious allegations about Trump’s conduct in Russia and allegations about ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.ĭocuments have shown the FBI invested significant resources attempting to corroborate the dossier and relied substantially on it to obtain surveillance warrants targeting the former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.īut since its publication, core aspects of the dossier have been exposed as unsupported and unproven rumors. The documents have not yet been made public and an FEC spokeswoman, Judith Ingram, said the FEC had 30 days after parties are notified about enforcement matters to release them. The Clinton campaign agreed to a civil penalty of $8,000 and the DNC $105,000, according to a pair of conciliatory agreements that were attached to the letter sent to the Coolidge Reagan Foundation. The Clinton campaign and DNC had argued that the payments had been described accurately, but agreed, according to the documents, to settle without conceding to avoid further legal costs. “By intentionally obscuring their payments through Perkins Coie and failing to publicly disclose the true purpose of those payments” the campaign and DNC “were able to avoid publicly reporting on their statutorily required FEC disclosure forms the fact that they were paying Fusion GPS to perform opposition research on Trump with the intent of influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential election,” the initial complaint had read. But on FEC forms, the Clinton campaign classified the spending as legal services. The Clinton campaign hired Perkins Coie, which then hired Fusion GPS, a research and intelligence firm, to conduct opposition research on Republican candidate Donald Trump’s ties to Russia.
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