Meet the Russia specialist who worked on 2 of Fusion GPS' most controversial projects

Sen. Dianne Feinstein's unilateral release of the Senate Judiciary Committee's August interview with Fusion GPS cofounder Glenn Simpson was applauded by those who called it a win for transparency — and a nail in the coffin of GOP lawmakers' attempts to distract from the probe into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Others, however, viewed the content of Simpson's testimony as validation of a talking point often repeated by President Donald Trump and his allies in the media and Congress: Fusion GPS was working both for the Russians and against Trump — albeit on separate projects — during the 2016 election.

The accusation lacks the necessary nuance — Fusion was working for an American law firm, Baker Hostetler, that had been hired by a Russian holding company, Prevezon, as part of a money laundering case in New York's Southern District court.

Baker Hostetler hired Fusion to look into the wealthy investor Bill Browder, who had told the Justice Department that Prevezon was implicated in a $230 million tax fraud scheme that was uncovered by Browder's tax attorney, Sergei Magnitsky, in 2008. The research Fusion did on Browder made it back to Baker and, inevitably, to Prevezon's Russian attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya.

In late 2015, Fusion was hired by the Republican megadonor Paul Singer to work on an entirely separate project: opposition research on Trump. That research, according to Simpson's testimony, was done using open-source information and covered a wide range of subjects, including the Trump family's reported use of sweat shops in Asia and South America to produce Trump-branded merchandise.

Christopher Steele, the former British spy who had spent decades on the Moscow desk at the UK's foreign intelligence service MI6, was not the only subcontractor Fusion hired to research Trump, Simpson said. But his research on Trump's Russia ties, conducted between June through December 2016, was arguably the most explosive.

Once the timeline of Fusion's projects had been established, Senate investigators asked Simpson whether any of Fusion's employees or subcontractors worked on both the Prevezon and Steele projects.

Enter: Edward Baumgartner

Simpson told investigators that Edward Baumgartner, who has a degree in Russian language and runs his own consulting firm similar to Fusion (but with a focus on Russia and Ukraine) worked on both projects.

Simpson said he had been impressed by Baumgartner's "knowledge of the region and his general abilities," which, for Fusion and Baker Hostetler, mostly involved discovery — gathering Russian language documents, reading media reports, and interviewing witnesses who speak Russian.

"I don't speak Russian, I've never been to Russia," Simpson said. "So it would be ordinary course of business for me to identify a specialist who could supply me with that kind of specialized expertise."

Baumgartner, who cofounded the agreed with that characterization in an interview on Wednesday.

"Natalia respected Glenn's work, but they rarely spoke to each other," Baumgartner said. "She never went to his office, and even if they did have a conversation, Anatoli would have had to translate it."

Baumgartner was never made aware of the dossier

Baumgartner said that while he stopped dealing with Veselnitskaya in June 2016, his legal involvement with the Prevezon case formally ended in October 2016. By that point, he had been working with Fusion GPS on its election-related opposition research for about three months.

"I was helping them on this other project, which was unrelated, and they mentioned it to me in July 2016," Baumgartner said, referring to the election-related research. "I was never made aware of Chris Steele's work or the dossier, and it was kept that way deliberately. I would have had nothing to add, anyway.

Baumgartner declined to speak in detail about the election-related work he did for Fusion. But he said his responsibilities involved, among other things, writing reports that compiled "everything publicly known" about Trump campaign associates like Carter Page and Manafort.

With regard to what Fusion told journalists about the research it had been doing throughout 2016, Simpson, like Baumgartner, said the firm discussed things with reporters that were already "in the public record." Specifically, he said, that included "open-source public information pointing towards the possibility that the Russians had infiltrated the Trump campaign."

"So we spoke broadly to reporters and encouraged them to look into this," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

They offer people business deals as a way to compromise them

Simpson went on in the testimony to describe in more detail how Fusion went about analyzing the raw intelligence Steele reported back to the firm from his sources in Russia and elsewhere. Page's trip to Moscow in July 2016, for example, was closely scrutinized by the firm following Steele's report that Page had met with Igor Sechin,

"It comports with my knowledge, and Chris's knowledge, of how the Kremlin does this," Simpson told the committee. "Which is they offer people business deals as a way to compromise them."

Steele was wary of being fed disinformation, Simpson told the committee. A central concern among those scrutinizing the overlap between Fusion's work for Prevezon and its Trump-related research was whether the Russians would catch wind of that project and plant disinformation to undermine it.

Simpson said Steele was armed against those kinds of tricks.

"What [Steele] said was: 'Disinformation is an issue in my profession, it is a central concern, and we are trained to spot disinformation," Simpson said. "'And if I believed this was disinformation, or I had concerns about that, I would tell you that. And I'm not telling you that. I'm telling you that I don't believe this is disinformation.'"