On Tuesday’s broadcast of “CNN Tonight,” former Clinton Press Secretary Brian Fallon reacted to the report that the Clinton campaign funded research that resulted in the Steele Dossier by stating that it would have been “malpractice” for the Clinton campaign to not try to learn whatever it could about Trump.
Fallon said, “[C]ampaigns engage in opposition research all the time. And my understanding of what took place is that in the spring of 2016, in April of 2016, the firm, Fusion GPS, having been under contract with a Republican-aligned client during the GOP primary, made an overture to Perkins Coie, the law firm that was connected to the campaign — or our campaign, and said, ‘Hey look, we’re knee deep in a lot of this very interesting research related to connections between Trump’s businesses and Russia, and our existing client has dropped us because the Republican primary’s over, Trump is emerging as the Republican nominee. But now going into the general, you might find this interesting.’ It would have been malpractice, in my view, for the campaign to not to want turn over every rock and learn everything it could about Donald Trump. So, while I didn’t know that it — that that meeting took place at the time, I’m glad that Marc Elias and whoever else was aware of it at the time authorized it and went forward with it.”
He further stated that it is “fair” to question why the campaign wasn’t more forthcoming about its role in funding the dossier. He added, “I think that probably, to the extent that people think that there’s some gotcha here it’s because so long has gone by without the campaign acknowledging this. I think it’s probably the result two of things: Number one, how few of the people on the campaign knew about it, because it was pretty well sequestered to the law firm, which in turn was contracting with an outside firm, which in turn was contracting with a subcontractor. I suspect most of the people learned about it.”
Fallon also said that he didn’t know when Clinton herself learned about the dossier arrangement and that he had only learned about it a few days ago.
He concluded by stating that the dossier’s accuracy is what really matters, not who funded it.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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