Dragonlady
Designing Woman
Boy are you going to hate this answer. The Democrats purchased their opposition research through an "arm's length transaction", which is the legal and accepted way of obtaining unbiased oppo research.
The Democrats didn't "hide it from the FEC buy laundering it through a law firm". The Democrats used the standard procedure for obtaining "Opposition research" by making an anonymous request through their law firm. An "arm's length transaction" is where neither the buyer, nor the seller knows who is at the other end of the deal.
The Democrats have NEVER made any attempt to hide the fact that their law firm hired Fusion GPS to do their oppo research. Nor did they try to "hide it from the SEC". Some accounting drone at the DNC entered the payment to the law firm as "legal fees", instead of "oppo research", which is easily done since the cheque would have gone to the law firm, "in trust", to pay for it all, including their fees for dealing with Fusion GPS.
It's disingenuous to make the claim that Dems tried to hide or "cover up" this purchase from the FEC, when the matter was being openly discussed in every newspaper, magazine and media outlet in the world. You'd have to be willfully uninformed not to have known that the Dems paid for the Steele Dossier in 2016, making any claims of an attempted "coverup" ridiculous in the extreme.
Obama didn't use the Steele Dossier to open an FBI Investigation of the Trump Campaign. The Steele Dossier didn't exist when the FBI began it's investigation of Russian influence on the Trump Campaign. That started when George Poppadopolis got drunk in bar in London, England and told people from the Australian Embassy that the Russian government had Hillary Clinton's emails and were going to release them before the election.
The guys from the Australian Embassy notified the American Embassy, and they notified the FBI. The investigation got serious when everyone involved in the Trump Campaign started lying about contact with Russian officials. Paul Manafort was "volunteering" to be Trump's Campaign manager, while being deeply in debt to Russian oligarchs, one of whom was a known Russian spy.
General Flynn was paid large sums of money by the Russian Government and was acting as an agent of the Turkish government AFTER being appointed as Trump's NSA.
The FBI would have been derelict in their duty if they HADN'T opened an investigation of the Trump Campaign. And given all of the charges, convictions, guilty pleas that came out of the Mueller Investigation, as well as the Mueller Report, and the Senate Report on Russian Election Interference, proved that such investigations were both fact based and warranted.
