In a letter dated January 7, two top Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), have demanded that committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) release to the public the entire testimony of Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson on the now infamous Trump dossier.
According to an article on Monday in the Washington Examiner , the two Democrats claim that committee Republicans have been selectively releasing out of context snippets of the testimony to the press in an effort to discredit the Robert Mueller investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. Blumenthal and Whitehouse say that the public has a right to hear the full testimony and judge for themselves the truthfulness of the dossier and the possible motives of the company who commissioned it.
This new development follows an editorial last week in the New York Times by Fusion GPS founders Simpson and Peter Fritsch calling for the public release of the transcripts. In the editorial, the two men claim that their company and work are being misrepresented by the small pieces of the testimony that have so far been leaked to the press. They also back up the veracity of the claims about Donald Trump in the dossier, calling Trump the “man with the most troubling business past of any United States president.”
The House Intelligence Committee has also interviewed the Fusion GPS founders and have subpoenaed the company’s bank records, making their’s the only bank records that have been subpoenaed to date.
Blumenthal and Whitehouse’s demand also comes on the heels, according to an article Monday in Hill , of Grassley and Sen. Lindsey Graham requesting the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Christopher Steele, the British agent who compiled the dossier for Fusion GPS and first brought it to the attention of the FBI.
It is the contention of Senators Blumenthal and Whitehouse, as well as that of the Fusion GPS founders, that Republicans on both the House and Senate Committees are actively attempting to distract from the Trump-Russia investigation and are more interested in investigating the whistleblowers and intelligence agents who have worked on the case.
“Diverting our focus from Russian interference to Glenn Simpson or Christopher Steele is, in our view, a misallocation of scarce resources. To the extent that you believe continued attention to those individuals is warranted, the American people should be allowed to decide for themselves.”
The letter Sunday from Blumenthal and Whitehouse joins an already existing public outcry for the release of the full Fusion GPS transcripts that followed in the wake of Simpson and Fritsch’s editorial for the New York Times , causing the hashtag #ReleasetheTranscripts to trend on Twitter.
We need to see the Fusion GPS transcripts from their Congressional testimonies. Republicans have no right to hide them from the American public. They can’t say it’s for security purposes because they say it’s all “bogus.” So what’s the harm? Time to #ReleaseTheTranscripts .
— Scott Dworkin (@funder) January 8, 2018
Let’s rattle @ChuckGrassley ‘s cage and let him know we demand he release the Fusion GPS transcripts! The American People deserve to see for themselves! https://t.co/qxN0JEULzD
— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) January 8, 2018
It was also revealed Monday, in an article in Politico , that the founders of Fusion GPS are asking for U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden, who was appointed by President Trump and donated money to his campaign, to recuse himself from a legal case dealing with the publication by Buzzfeed of the dossier early in 2017, citing conflict of interest.
