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Trump-Russia 2.0: Dossier-Tied Firm Pitching Journalists Daily on Collusion realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/…
Key Democratic operatives and private investigators who tried to derail Donald Trump’s campaign have rebooted their operation since his election with a multimillion-dollar stealth campaign to persuade major media outlets and lawmakers that the president should be impeached.
The operation’s nerve center is a Wash DC nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project or TDIP. Among other activities, it pumps out daily “research” briefings to prominent Washington journalists as well as congressional staffers to keep the Russia “collusion” narrative alive
TDIP is led by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI investigator, Clinton administration volunteer and top staffer to California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
It employs key opposition-research figures behind the salacious and unverified dossier: Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and ex-British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. Its financial backers include the actor/director Rob Reiner and billionaire activist George Soros.
The project’s work has been largely shrouded in mystery. But a months-long examination by RealClearInvestigations, drawn from documents and more than a dozen interviews, found that the organization is running an elaborate media-influence operation....
....that includes driving and shaping daily coverage of the Russia collusion theory, as well as pushing stories about Trump in the national media that attempt to tie the president or his associates to the Kremlin.
The group also feeds information to FBI and congressional investigators, and then tells reporters that authorities are investigating those leads. The tactic adds credibility to TDIP’s pitches, luring big media outlets to bite on stories.
It mirrors the strategy federal authorities themselves deployed to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign: citing published news reports of investigative details their informants had leaked to the media to bolster their wiretap requests.
5 days a week, TDIP emails a newsletter to Democrats and prominent Beltway journalists under the heading “TDIP Research” – which summarizes the latest “collusion” news, and offers “points of interest” to inspire fresh stories regarding President Trump’s alleged ties to Moscow.
Recipients of the TDIP reports include staffers at the New York Times and Washington Post and investigative reporters at BuzzFeed, ProPublica and McClatchy, as well as news producers at CNN and MSNBC
According to a source familiar with the project's email distribution list. Democratic aides on Capitol Hill also subscribe to the newsletter.
The briefings typically run several pages and include an “Executive Summary” and links to court documents and congressional testimony, letters and memos, as well as new articles and videos.
A March 13 TDIP bulletin, for instance, highlighted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s sentencing without informing readers that Robert Mueller closed the case without any collusion accusation against Manafort, who was punished for personal financial crimes.
A Feb. 12 briefing led with an NBC News exclusive report on the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s two-year Russia probe. But it misstated what the news was....
....that both Democrats and Republicans agreed with the conclusion that there was "no factual evidence of collusion" between the Trump campaign and Russia – claiming instead that Democrats “rejected” the conclusion.
“What’s significant about them is they're totally one-sided,” said a veteran reporter with a major newspaper who is plugged into the national security beat in DC insisting on anonymity. “It’s really just another way of adding fuel to the fire of the whole Russia collusion thing."
Jones' project doesn’t just spin news. Its more ambitious goal is to make news by essentially continuing the Clinton-funded investigation into alleged Trump/Russia ties that began in 2016, and then sharing findings with news outlets, congressional investigators and federal agents
Jones has hired Fusion GPS, the same Washington firm co-founded by former journalist-turned-opposition-researcher Simpson that was paid more than $1 million by lawyers for the Hillary Clinton campaign to collect information damaging to Trump during the 2016 election.
Jones is also paying Steele. Fusion GPS paid the former British intelligence officer $168,000 to produce a series of anonymously sourced memos for Clinton accusing the Trump campaign of an espionage plot with the Kremlin to hack Clinton campaign emails and steal the election.
Memos also claimed the Kremlin held compromising material on Trump, including video of him with prostitutes in Moscow. Three years of multiple federal investigations failed to verify the accusations. But they were still used by the FBI to obtain a FISA-wiretap on Carter Page.
In a letter last year, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, then chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that the anti-Trump trio was responsible for spreading “inaccurate” information about the Russia investigation and the Trump campaign....
“Mr. Jones stated he planned to push the information he obtained from Fusion and Steele to policymakers on Capitol Hill, the press and the FBI,” Grassley wrote Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, referring to an FBI interview with Jones.
Simpson and Steele have a history of feeding the FBI and Congress unsubstantiated allegations and rumors, sending investigators down rabbit holes. They have also planted several anti-Trump stories in the media that have proved unverifiable, unfounded, or just plain false.
Jones has a long history himself of promoting conspiracy theories. He has personally placed anti-Trump news stories with media outlets after feeding related tips to the FBI.
Jones has also communicated with investigators for Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, hoping to spread more Trump-Russia conspiracy theories.
Even as it pushes the collusion theories, TDIP partnered with a cybersecurity firm, New Knowledge, funded by Reid Hoffman, which used social media strategies employed by Russians to influence the 2016 campaign to defeat GOP candidates for Congress during last year’s midterms
New Knowledge publicly stated it was tracking Russian social-media disinformation networks during the 2018 campaign. In fact, it was secretly involved in its own disinformation campaign to influence the outcome of the 2017 Alabama Senate special election.
New Knowledge operatives created thousands of fake Russian Twitter accounts programmed to follow GOP candidate Roy Moore to make it appear he was backed by Moscow.
The scheme worked: a number of media stories reported Moore was being supported by Russians. Only, it was a high-tech frame-up.
Hoffman maintains he didn’t know what his money was being used for. In 2016, the Silicon Valley billionaire gave the Hillary Victory Fund more than $500,000, FEC records show.
After media reports exposed the false-flag operation several weeks later, a website set up by TDIP and New Knowledge during the 2018 campaign was taken down. Screenshots of the site – Disinfo2018.com – clearly show their relationship, however.
Around the same time, a TDIP daily e-bulletin sang the praises of its partner New Knowledge, noting it had prior experience studying Russian influence operations and linking to a flattering piece about one of its founders.
DiResta and New Knowledge also collaborated with Jones on a report on Russian disinformation that was released by the committee in December. The report claimed that a Russian social-media plot allegedly to help elect Trump in 2016 was worse than thought,
The report even posited that “Russian influence networks” conspired with “domestic right-wing disinformation networks,” allegedly including Fox News, Breitbart News, The Hill and the Daily Caller, to suppress Democrat voter turnout to help Trump and the GOP candidates he endorses
Upon its release, Warner billed the report as a “bombshell.” It was widely covered by CNN and other major media. A former colleague of Simpson’s said that Jones “brokered the New Knowledge work" with the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Dan Jones does more than just send out these briefs,” said the well-placed source. “He’s working with the FBI and [the] Senate Intelligence [Committee]."
The Democracy Integrity Project can be traced back at least to Dec 2016, when Simpson and Jones made trips to California to raise money for their joint anti-Trump project. “They started soliciting donors and assembling their team for a post-election operation in December 2016,”
Jones incorporated TDIP just 11 days after Trump took office in January 2017, and registered it as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit several months later. It enjoys that tax-exempt status because the group claimed in its mission statement to the IRS to be “non-partisan”
By filing under that tax-exempt status, the organization does not have to publicly disclose its donors. Its latest IRS filing shows reported income of more than $9 million and assets of more than $1.6 million.
In addition to Soros, who has donated at least $1 million, liberal Hollywood activist Reiner also backs the project, according to the former Simpson colleague with direct knowledge of discussions with Reiner.
In 2017, Reiner started the Committee to Investigate Russia with James Clapper and several other former Obama officials. Reiner has called for Trump’s impeachment, arguing repeatedly that the president has committed “treason against the United States.”
A New York-based nonprofit linked to the family of billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer has donated $2.1 million to TDIP, according to the Daily Caller. Steyer, who has hired Fusion GPS to conduct investigations in the past, has also demanded Trump’s ouster over Russia.
And social media titans including the founders of Facebook, Twitter and Google are indirectly funding the project through donations funneled through a Silicon Valley foundation, the Daily Caller also reported.
Advance Democracy Inc., a sister organization founded by Jones sharing the same Northern Virginia address as TDIP, received at least $500,000 from the foundation last year.
Longtime observers of the Washington political scene are curious how Jones has for years been able to escape serious scrutiny while running a political influence operation that works closely with national media, federal law enforcement and congressional investigators.
With access to a multimillion-dollar war chest, they say he could continue to push the anti-Trump Russia collusion narrative long past the Mueller report or even the 2020 presidential election.
Caputo, a former Trump aide, wants an investigation of Jones: “I want to know who Dan Jones is talking to across the investigations – from the FBI to the Southern District of New York to the [Special Counsel’s Office] to the Department of Justice, to Congress.”
Ex-Trump campaign official Michael Caputo, left, blames Jones' "smear campaign" for $125,000 in legal bills. At right, his attorney Dennis C. Vacco. 
