OBAMA HIRED HUGE NUMBERS OF CHARACTER ASSASSINATION SERVICES TO RUN HIT
JOBS ON AMERICANS
Since
April of 2016, Obama's campaign organization has paid nearly a million
dollars to the law firm that funneled money to Fusion GPS to compile a
dossier of unverified allegations against Donald Trump.
Former
president Barack Obama’s official campaign organization has directed
nearly a million dollars to the same law firm that funneled money to
Fusion GPS, the firm behind the infamous Steele dossier. Since April of
2016,
Obama
For America (OFA) has paid over $972,000 to
Perkins Coie, records filed with the Federal Election Commission (FEC)
show.
The
Washington
Post reported last week that Perkins Coie, an
international law firm, was directed by both the Democratic National
Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign to retain Fusion GPS in
April of 2016 to dig up dirt on then-candidate Donald Trump. Fusion GPS
then hired Christopher Steele, a former British spy, to compile a
dossier of allegations that Trump and his campaign actively colluded
with the Russian government during the 2016 election. Though many of the
claims in the dossier have been directly
refuted,
none of the dossier’s allegations of collusion have been
independently
verified. Lawyers for Steele
admitted
in court filings last April that his work was
not verified and was never meant to be made public.
OFA,
Obama’s official campaign arm in 2016, paid nearly $800,000 to Perkins
Coie in 2016 alone, according to FEC records. The first 2016 payments to
Perkins Coie, classified only as “Legal Services,” were made April
25-26, 2016, and totaled $98,047. A second batch of payments, also
classified as “Legal Services,” were disbursed to the law firm on
September 29, 2016, and totaled exactly $700,000. Payments from OFA to
Perkins Coie in 2017 totaled $174,725 through August 22, 2017.
FEC
records as
well as
federal
court records show that Marc Elias, the Perkins
Coie lawyer whom the Washington Post reported was responsible for the
payments to Fusion GPS on behalf of Clinton’s campaign and the DNC, also
previously served as a counsel for OFA. In
Shamblin
v. Obama for America, a 2013 case in federal court in Florida,
federal court records list Elias as simultaneously serving as lead
attorney for both OFA and the DNC.
Federal
records show that Hillary Clinton’s official campaign organization,
Hillary
For America, paid just under $5.1 million to Perkins Coie in 2016.
The
DNC paid
nearly $5.4 million to the law firm in 2016.
The
timing and nature of the payments to Perkins Coie by Obama’s official
campaign arm raise significant questions about whether OFA was funding
Fusion GPS, how much Obama and his team knew about the contents and
provenance of the dossier long before its contents were made public, and
whether the president or his government lieutenants knowingly used a
partisan political document to justify official government actions
targeting the president’s political opponents named in the dossier.
According to the
Washington
Post, Fusion GPS was first retained by Perkins Coie on behalf of
the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s
presidential campaign in April of 2016.
At
the same time that Hillary’s campaign, Obama’s campaign organization,
and the DNC were simultaneously paying Perkins Coie, the spouse of one
of Fusion GPS’s key employees was working directly for Obama in the West
Wing. Shailagh Murray, a former Washington Post
reporter-turned-political operative, was serving as a top communications
adviser to Obama while the Obama administration was
reportedly
using information from the dossier to justify secret surveillance of
Trump campaign staff. Murray is
married to
Neil King, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who was
hired
by Fusion GPS in December of 2016. While at the
Wall Street Journal,
King worked
alongside Fusion GPS’s core team, even
sharing
bylines with Glenn Simpson, the Fusion GPS executive who
personally
hired Steele to probe Trump’s alleged Russia
connections.
The
importance of the dossier funded by Democrats, commissioned by Fusion
GPS, and compiled by Steele, is difficult to overstate given that its
contents were
reportedly
briefed to both President Obama and
then-President-Elect Trump. The dossier was eventually published in full
by BuzzFeed on
January
10. On January 6, then-FBI Director James Comey had
briefed
Trump on the allegations in Steele’s dossier.
Steele
admitted
in court filings that he had shopped much of the
information in his dossier to numerous media outlets beginning in
September of 2016.
Following
reports of Perkins Coie’s role in funneling money to Fusion GPS, the
Campaign Legal Center, a non-partisan campaign finance watchdog, filed
a
complaint with the FEC alleging that the secret
funding schemes violated federal campaign disclosure laws.
Fusion
GPS is also facing a separate defamation suit in federal court related
to claims in the dossier. That case, which was brought by three Russian
businessmen who claim to have been libeled in the Steele dossier, was
filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., in early October. Fusion GPS
is yet to respond to those allegations in court.