patrick.net

This is a defamation case brought by three international businessmen who
were defamed in widely disseminated political opposition research reports commissioned
by political opponents of candidate Donald Trump. The reports (which came to be
known as the “Trump Dossier” and the “Dossier”) were published in advance of the 2016
presidential election by the Defendants: the Washington, D.C. based firm Fusion GPS
(“Fusion”) and its principal Glenn Simpson, a former journalist specializing in political
opposition research. In that role, the Defendants traffic in procuring damaging
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information about political candidates. The reports are gravely damaging in that they
falsely accuse the Plaintiffs—and Alfa (“Alfa”), a consortium in which the Plaintiffs are
investors—of criminal conduct and alleged cooperation with the “Kremlin” to influence
the 2016 presidential election. But neither the Plaintiffs nor Alfa committed any of the
acts irresponsibly attributed to them by the Defendants. To the contrary, the Plaintiffs
and Alfa are collateral damage in a U.S. political operation—conducted by the
Defendants—that has nothing to do with the Plaintiffs.
2. The specific “report” that includes defamatory statements about the
Plaintiffs is one of seventeen written Company Intelligence Reports 2016 (“CIRs”) that
comprise the Trump Dossier. The Defendants included Company Intelligence Report
112 (the “Report” or “CIR 112”) in the Trump Dossier, even though the Trump Dossier’s
themes have nothing to do with the Plaintiffs. Broadly, those reports purport to describe
details of an alleged scheme between the Russian government and the Trump presidential
campaign to unlawfully manipulate the result of the presidential election in favor of
candidate Trump. The Defendants gathered these reports in the process of conducting
“opposition research” (known as “oppo research” by its practitioners and the media)
against Trump. Opposition research, in essence, is the gathering of information for the
purpose of eventually discrediting or otherwise harming a candidate for a public office.
Opposition research is neither objective nor neutral. Instead, it is skewed from the outset
in favor of appearing to find negative information about individuals—the essence of the
product that political opposition research practitioners are hired to produce.