Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Monday that Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee staff about whether his infamous firm continued to investigate Donald Trump after the 2016 election.
In a letter to Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), Grassley stated that Simpson told committee staff in 2017 that he stopped probing now-President Trump and his associates’ connections to Russian officials after the 2016 presidential election because he “had no client after the election.”
Here’s what committee staff asked Simpson and what the Fusion GPS founder had to say in return last August:
When the Committee staff interviewed Glenn Simpson in August of 2017, Majority staff asked him: ‘So you didn’t do any work on the Trump matter after the election date, that was the end of your work?’ Mr. Simpson answered: ‘I had no client after the election.’ As we now know, that was extremely misleading, if not an outright lie. [emphasis added]
As The Federalist reported back in April, a former staffer for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), Daniel Jones, told the FBI he had retained Fusion GPS’s services to “continue exposing Russian interference” after the election.
Jones, who runs an investigative firm called the Penn Quarter Group (PQG), reportedly told the FBI he “planned to share the information he obtained with policymakers on Capitol Hill and with the press, and also offered to provide PQG’s entire holdings to the FBI.”
The two testimonies from Jones and Simpson conflict with one another. Either Fusion GPS continued to investigate Trump’s Russia ties, or it did not.
Based on a false NPR story, on Monday Blumenthal accused Donald Trump Jr. of lying to congressional investigators about his father’s business dealings in Moscow. The article has since been heavily edited and given a three-paragraph-long editor’s note admitting that the initial version of the story misrepresented Trump Jr.’s testimony.
Nevertheless, Blumenthal sent a letter to Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking him to bring Trump Jr. before the committee to testify again. In response to this request, Grassley cited Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway’s article that pointed out NPR’s flawed article and said the Democratic senator’s allegations against Trump Jr. are, in fact, unsubstantiated.
After dismissing Blumenthal’s allegations, Grassley said the committee does have evidence that an individual mislead committee staff — but that it’s Fusion GPS’s founder who lied, not Trump Jr.
