PRESS RELEASE
Senator Grassley To Hold Hearings on Steele Dossier
July 20, 2017 (EIRNS)—Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley will hold an open hearing on July 26 on the Steele dossier, among other things. He had originally planned a hearing for yesterday, but it was postponed after Fusion GPS founder Glen Simpson refused to attend. Now Grassley says he’s prepared to subpoena him.
The hearings, held under the rubric of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, are designed to get more of the story behind the Steele dossier out into the open. Grassley has said that he wants to explore Fusion GPS’s connection to the FBI, specifically former FBI Director Comey, and how the dossier was leaked around to the press. Now Grassley has rescheduled the hearing, calling Glen Simpson, Paul Manfort, Donald Trump, Jr., and William Browder to testify. Browder, the son of Earl Browder, the former head of the Communist Party of the U.S.A., is a London-based hedge-fund manager who is a vehement opponent of Putin’s Russia, and the main force behind the anti-Russia Magnitsky Act, which was the subject of the set-up meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, that is now the subject of Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation. At the time of the meeting, Veselnitskaya was working with Fusion GPS against Browder in a case that the Justice Department brought against her client. Browder has been a vocal critic of Fusion GPS’s credibility. In January he attacked the veracity of the Fusion GPS dossier on Trump.
Grassley has been focused on the role of British intelligence and the FBI in setting up President Trump. He holds his cards close to his chest, and the prospect of this hearing has drawn much speculation as to what he’s up to.
