Majorityrights News > Category: British Politics

Our Russia dossier wasn’t dodgy. Donald Trump is compromised. Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. Photo by STEPHEN VOSS

Fusion GPS Founders On Russian Efforts To Sow Discord: ‘They Have Succeeded’

NPR, Fresh Air 26 Nov 2019:

During the ‘16 campaign, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch hired former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele to investigate Trump’s involvement with Russia. Their new book is Crime in Progress.

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I’m Terry Gross. After Donald Trump was elected but before he was inaugurated, BuzzFeed published a leaked document that became known as the Steele dossier - a series of memos written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele suggesting Russia had been cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump and that, according to several sources, Russia had compromising information that could be used to blackmail Trump.

This dossier had been commissioned by Fusion GPS, a private research company providing research for law firms and corporations as well as opposition research for political candidates. Fusion was first hired to investigate Trump during the primary by the Republican news site The Washington Free Beacon. After Trump won the primary, the law firm representing Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee started funding Fusion’s research into Trump.

My guests are the founders of Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch. They’re former Wall Street Journal reporters. Some of the Russians who surfaced in the Trump investigation were people Simpson and Fritsch had reported on at The Wall Street Journal while investigating Russian corruption and organized crime. Simpson and Fritsch have written a new book called “Crime In Progress” about their investigation into Trump, its impact and Republican attempts to discredit Fusion GPS and the Steele dossier.

Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch, welcome to FRESH AIR. What were some of the findings in your report and in the Steele dossier that you consider to be the most important early warnings of Donald Trump’s ties to Russia?

PETER FRITSCH: The truth is Chris Steele came into this project about nine months in. We started looking at Donald Trump and his relationship to Russia as part of a much broader project, which was looking at Donald Trump’s business career. As has been reported, we first started working for Republicans. About nine months in, we started working with Chris Steele. Now, we saw a lot in the early going that caused us to have concerns about Donald Trump’s relationship with Russia.

First, we saw his relationship with Felix Sater. Felix Sater is a Russian emigre to the U.S. who was working with Donald Trump and, importantly, worked with him in the FL-Group, which developed, among other properties, the Trump Soho. You know, this is an individual who was - went to prison for slicing someone’s face open with a margarita glass, who then was convicted of stock fraud - this is all in the ‘90s. So that caught our attention, to see him with a business card - occupying an office in Trump Tower and carrying a business card with Donald Trump’s company name on it.

Then, we found a number of properties inside Trump Tower itself that were occupied by convicted and alleged organized crime figures from Russia. You know, we also just saw a pattern of investments coming into Donald Trump’s properties, and to Donald Trump personally. The other sort of interesting data point in the early going was the transaction in Palm Beach involving a Russian oligarch by the name of Dmitry Rybolovlev - pardon my pronunciation. He is a potash magnate - it’s a fertilizer - sort of king of Russia. He bought Donald Trump’s mansion in the mid-2000s for about $95 million when it was on the market for $45 million. That was a really suspicious transaction to us. So anyway, the sum of that and just the sum of our research regarding his business led us to want to know more about Russia, which is how we started working with Christopher Steele.

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Sacha Baron Cohen Calls Out Social Media as ‘the Greatest Propaganda Machine in History’

In a recent Anti-Defamation League keynote, Cohen outlines how internet companies have fueled bigotry and hate speech. But he has a solution.

IndieWire, 21 Nov 2019:

Sacha Baron Cohen has courted controversy his entire career, portraying characters, from Ali G and Borat to Bruno, that have pissed off all groups from left to right.

He’s an equal-opportunity offender, but his alter-egos have long served to expose the hypocrisies of society by mocking humanity’s worst tendencies. His 2018 Showtime series “Who Is America?” tackles humankind’s dark side head-on by bait-and-switching real-life figures to catch them in their blind spots. In the show, he got Dick Cheney to sign a waterboarding kit, former chief justice Roy Moore to take a pedophile lie-detector test, and “The Bachelor” star Corinne Olympios to endorse the training of child soldiers on camera.

But at the Anti-Defamation League’s Never Is Now Summit on Anti-Semitism and Hate, Baron Cohen took off his comedy hat when honored with the ADL’s International Leadership Award. He used the platform to deliver a keynote outlining how social media and the information it disseminates have fueled the bigotry dominating the current political moment in the U.S. (Watch full video of the speech below.)

“Yes, some of my comedy, OK probably half my comedy, has been absolutely juvenile and the other half completely puerile,” he said. “I’m just a comedian and an actor, not a scholar. But one thing is pretty clear to me. All this hate and violence is being facilitated by a handful of internet companies that amount to the greatest propaganda machine in history.

“Think about it. Facebook, YouTube, and Google, Twitter and others — they reach billions of people. The algorithms these platforms depend on deliberately amplify the type of content that keeps users engaged — stories that appeal to our baser instincts and that trigger outrage and fear,” Baron Cohen said, adding that “it’s time for a fundamental rethink of social media and how it spreads hate, conspiracies and lies.”

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Well done, Andy. A bit hyperbolic to express relief over his not having been sentenced to jail, when fines, restitution, hundreds of hours of imposed community service and sex offender registration is hyperbolic enough. That quibble aside, to articulate this sort of feminist insane injustice is a needed social service. Thanks.

I recall myself, in my teens and twenties, ‘peon’ guilty-of-everything White man that I was, being overwrought with complexty and yes, ambivalence at having to approach the all too precious and valuable princess…

..already conditioned for the mine field of sudden, shrill, egregiuos interpretations of my motives that could be detonated with any awkward misstep.

...conditioned by the pervasive hostility of my mother and general social atmosphere of feminist insanity, but most accutely, by the sudden, shrill, humiliating reactions from my feminist older sister if, for example, I expressed preference for a beautiful woman, or perhaps noticed a nice female ass; I was overwhelmed by a horrible intentional oscillation regarding women.

Now, you must understand that I was getting something like thousands of volts of electricity sent through my forebrain by the manly incitements of my father and brothers as well…

...good and scrambled, I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating in this context…

...that I was able to locate and orient my ownmost innocence by asserting the truth that I was willing to take my equal in a woman on 1 -10 scales of physicality, emotion and intellect. That is, I knew for myself that I was fair.

However, this does not necessarily make up for missing confirmation… puerile females can be absurdly punishing of any sort of timidity, while overvaluing sheer confidence at horrific cost to intellectual and social capital.