A conservative US website has admitted that it initially hired the political research firm behind the controversial dossier on Donald Trump that outlined the president’s alleged ties to Russia. During the 2016 election race, the Washington Free Beacon, a rightwing site funded by a prominent Republican donor, hired a firm called Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on several GOP presidential candidates, including Trump, the site said on Friday. But Matthew Continetti, editor in chief, said the Free Beacon had “no knowledge of or connection to” the dossier or Christopher Steele, the former British spy behind the document. The revelation came days after reports that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) helped fund the Fusion GPS opposition research that led to the high-profile Trump-Russia dossier. “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,” he wrote in a post on the site published Friday night.

Source: The Guardian October 28, 2017 00:33 UTC