Why was Clinton campaign using a company with Putin linked clients to do opposition research on Trump?

Marc Thiessen:
The news that the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for research used in the discredited Trump-Russia “dossier” is a bombshell. But even more shocking — and overlooked — is the revelation that the firm the Clinton campaign hired to compile that dossier, Fusion GPS, is the same firm that has been accused in recent congressional testimony of launching a smear campaign in Washington against Sergei Magnitsky, the Russian lawyer who was tortured and killed in a Russian prison in 2009 after uncovering a $230 million tax theft by 23 Kremlin-linked companies and individuals close to President Vladimir Putin.

Which raises the question no one seems to be asking: Why was Hillary Clinton using an opposition research company with Putin-linked clients to dig up dirt on Donald Trump?

The claimed link that was identified in congressional testimony has its roots in the Putin regime’s lobbying for the repeal of the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, which froze assets and banned visas for Russians involved in or benefiting from Magnitsky’s murder, as well as for others involved in torture, extrajudicial killings or abuses against those seeking to promote human rights or expose illegal activity by Russian officials. So far, some 35 Putin cronies have been sanctioned under the act, infuriating the Russian president.

After the act passed, prominent Magnitsky supporters in Russia began to be mysteriously poisoned, thrown off buildings or shot on bridges in front of the Kremlin. At the same time — according to testimony by Magnitsky’s boss, Hermitage Capital Management chief executive William Browder, recently made to the Senate Judiciary Committee — Fusion GPS launched a lobbying campaign in Washington to repeal the Magnitsky Act by charging (a) that Magnitsky was not murdered and (b) that he and Browder were, in fact, the ones responsible for the tax fraud. Of course, Magnitsky was blameless, and Browder’s only crime was that he virtually single-handedly led the charge for passage of the Magnitsky Act — originally opposed by the Obama administration, including Clinton’s State Department.

One of the faces of the campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act was the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya (the same lawyer who famously met with Donald Trump Jr. in 2016). She visited the United States in 2016 ostensibly to lobby on adoption issues (Putin had barred Americans from adopting Russian children in response to the passage of the Magnitsky Act), but her real purpose was to push the repeal of the act and prevent the passage of a global law bearing Magnitsky’s name. Concurrently, Veselnitskaya defended Prevezon, a company sanctioned under the Magnitsky Act for laundering money from the tax fraud Magnitsky uncovered. Prevezon is owned by Denis Katsyv, a Putin-linked oligarch and son of a former Russian government minister.
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Here’s the bottom line: We have congressional testimony, under oath, that Clinton hired the same firm to smear Trump that Putin reportedly used to smear Magnitsky. Moreover, we also know that the Fusion GPS dossier relied on senior Russian government officials for much of the dirt it compiled, including “a senior Russian Foreign Ministry figure” and a “former top level intelligence officer still active in the Kremlin.” Together, those are bombshell revelations.
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It looks like the Democrats and their cohorts in teh mainstream media are engaged in one of the bigger cover-ups in history trying to bury this connection are denigrate those who talk about it.  Were it not for Republicans in Congress this connection might still be unknown.  The special counsel who was hired to find out if there had been Russian collusion during the 2016 election has brought cases against two people for things that had nothing to do with the campaign or Russian collusion while ignoring the real collusion.

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