Originally Posted by Precious_b
Are you stating that the Steele Dossier was NOT started by conservatives? Because it was. Liberals were not the people who initiated the dossier. That is a fact. Can't twist is around any other way with logic. But if you can supply a source that I am wrong, I will apologize.
I only use mention of the report to raise the dander of certain posters here. Now if you want to call that twisted, so be it.
it wasn't.
the only thing true about your statement is that a conservative group did start opposition research into Trump and others. the rest is wrong.
feel free to apologize to HF at your earliest convenience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier#Research_funded _by_conservative_website
Research funded by conservative website
In October 2015, before the official start of the 2016 Republican primary campaign, the founders of Fusion GPS were seeking political work and wrote an email to "a big conservative donor they knew who disliked Trump, [and] they were hired". He arranged for them to use The Washington Free Beacon, an American conservative political journalism website, for their general opposition research on several Republican presidential candidates, including Trump.[48][49] It is primarily funded by Republican donor Paul Singer.[49] The Free Beacon and Singer were "part of the conservative never-Trump movement".[50] Although Singer was a big supporter of Marco Rubio, Rubio denied any involvement in Fusion GPS's initial research and hiring.[51]
Early in their investigation, they received help from investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, who gave them his files on Trump. They contained findings about "Trump's past dealings, including tax and bankruptcy problems, potential ties to organized crime, and numerous legal entanglements. They also revealed that Trump had an unusually high number of connections to Russians with questionable backgrounds."[48]
For months, Fusion GPS gathered information about Trump, focusing on his business and entertainment activities. When Trump became the presumptive nominee on May 3, 2016,[52] the conservative donor stopped funding the research on him.[13][53]
In October 2017, the Free Beacon issued a statement:
"All of the work that Fusion GPS provided to the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product that the Free Beacon received appears in the Steele dossier. The Free Beacon had no knowledge of or connection to the Steele dossier, did not pay for the dossier, and never had contact with, knowledge of, or provided payment for any work performed by Christopher Steele. Nor did we have any knowledge of the relationship between Fusion GPS and the Democratic National Committee, Perkins Coie, and the Clinton campaign."[51]Although the source of the Steele dossier's funding had already been reported correctly over a year before,[13][53][54] and the Free Beacon had issued a statement to this effect in October 2017,[51] a February 2, 2018, story by the Associated Press (AP) contributed to confusion about its funding by stating that the dossier "was initially funded" by the Washington Free Beacon, so the AP posted a correction the next day: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until after Democratic groups had begun funding it."[55]
By the spring of 2016, researchers at Fusion GPS had become so alarmed by what they had already learned about Trump that they felt the need "to do what they could to keep Trump out of the White House".[56]
