Clinton, DNC Hit with FEC Fine for Steele Dossier Lie

By WMAL.com

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has issued fines to both the Clinton 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for failure to disclose the funding for the opposition research that produced the now debunked Steele dossier.

The fine: totaled $8,000 for the Clinton campaign and $105,000 for the DNC. The FEC issued the fine for misreporting the funding that produced the dossier as funding for “legal services” and “legal and compliance consulting” rather than opposition research, according to and FEC letter released on Tuesday.

Setting the stage: The DNC and Clinton campaign reportedly paid more than $1 million to a the law firm Perkins Coie, who then engaged Fusion GPS to generate opposition research to attack her opponent Donald J. Trump. Fusion GPS went on to hire former British spy Christopher Steele, who was the originator of the Steele dossier. The dossier presented unverified claims against Trump including a Russian security services that possessed a tape of Trump in Moscow hotel room with prostitutes who allegedly were peeing on a bed where the Obamas has once stayed.

What Trump said: “Wow! Just out that the 2016 Clinton Campaign and the DNC paid the FEC today for violating the law by failing to disclose that their payments for ‘legal advice and services’ to law firm Perkins Coie was, in fact, a guise to hire numerous companies, all of whom are now named Defendants in my lawsuit, to try and take down and illegally destroy your favorite President, me,” said the former president in a statement released earlier this week.