-By Warner Todd Huston
After over a year of Democrats screaming from the rooftops that they want to get down to the truth about Russia, yesterday Senate Dems used a tricky Senate rule to delay the testimony of a key witness because his testimony would have likely implicated a bunch of Democrat operatives.
It looks like a political hatchet job is their real motive, not any search for the truth.
Breitbart News has the story:
Senate Democrats cut short a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, delaying the widely-anticipated testimony of a witness who would have cast aspersion on the company responsible for creating the Trump dossier.
Using a parliamentary maneuver, Senate Democrats invoked a two-hour limit on the hearing before Bill Browder, CEO and co-founder of Hermitage Capital, could testify on how he was targeted by Fusion GPS and its co-founder Glenn Simpson, on behalf of Russian interests.
So, just what did this Fusion GPS do in this complicated story?
Fusion GPS has come under intense Congressional scrutiny — for its role in targeting Browder and undermining the Magnitsky Act on behalf of Russia, but at the same time creating a salacious and discredited dossier on Trump paid for by his political enemies claiming he colluded with Russia.
You may recall the salacious “dossier” Breitbart was mentioning. It was a fake “report” filled with lies that were sold as Trump opposition research that came to light after Trump was elected to the White House. It had fake stories of hookers, money changing hands, favors, and Trump collusion with Russian operatives. All made up without even a spark of truth.
This “report” had been around for almost a year last November yet every news source on the planet had refused to publish the information in this fake dossier because they all knew it was bogus. That is, until BuzzFeed decided to post it in full knowing full well it was a fiction.
Anyway, that dossier was linked to the Democrat operatives at Fusion GPS and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassely (R, IA) has been working to get Bill Browder in front of him to ask why Fusion never registered as a foreign agent under the Foreign Agent Registration Act like they should have.
“It is vital for the Committee to fully understand Fusion’s failure to register under FARA and its role in the creating and spreading of the dossier,” he said at the opening of the hearing.
Browder’s advance statements show that he was going to testify that they were up to their ears in this business…
Browder … was set to say Fusion GPS ran a smear campaign against [Trump], orchestrated by Natalia Veselnitskaya, the same Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort in June 2016.
Browder’s testimony claims that Veselnitskaya hired Fusion GPS through lobbying firm Baker Hostetler to undermine the Magnitsky Act on behalf of Russian interests, and that the firm helped to organize a Washington D.C.-based premiere of a “fake documentary” about himself as well as his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.
So, in other words, this was all a Democrat dirty trick.
No wonder Senate Democrats were desperate to torpedo Browder’s testimony.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, YoungConservatives.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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