AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): Brand new transcripts just released revealing bombshell testimony from the firm behind that anti-Trump dossier, the dirty dossier. One of the claims is that information in the dossier came from a Trump campaign insider.
BRIAN KILMEADE (CO-HOST): And that is one claim. “Somebody's already been killed as a result of the publication of the dossier,” thought to be a Russian, “and no harm should come to anybody related to honest work.”
EARHARDT: The Hill's John Solomon has been breaking details on this story from the very beginning and he joins us now with the very latest. John, we wanted to talk to you, because when this was released, [Sen.] Dianne Feinstein [(D-CA)] released this 312 page transcript, when they interviewed Glenn Simpson, who started Fusion GPS. You read this last night, what is the most shocking thing or what surprised you?
JOHN SOLOMON (THE HILL EXECUTIVE VP): I think there's a couple of things. One is that Glenn spends a lot of time trying to say that this document wasn't a partisan document, that he's all about research, yet we now know that his clients were clearly partisan, the DNC, and the Clinton Foundation -- or excuse me, the Clinton campaign. And so those are two things that when you see him trying to do that -- and he was interviewed before we knew that the DNC and Clinton did a sort of a tap dance, that caught my attention. I think the revelation that somebody was killed over the release of the dossier was really the most shocking thing. And we don't know a lot. I've been digging on this. I can't find a whole lot other than a suggestion that it might have been one of Christopher Steele's sources in Russia who might have been killed after this came out. But we don't know more and I think people are going to have to dig on that a lot.
KILMEADE: Right, so John, you do this for a living, but as the editorial came out last week when they tried to exonerate themselves, they said, “We got this information, but Steele got this information, he went to the FBI and they corroborated it.” There's a little problem with that editorial as opposed to the reality. They have walked back -- there was no corroboration with the FBI so to speak, right?
SOLOMON: Yeah, if you take [former FBI Director] James Comey at his word, he called it an “unverified document.” That was in May, eight and 10 months after they had begun working on it. The sources I talked to in the law enforcement community say “Hey, there’s a couple things that have been corroborated, but a lot of things are unverified, and some things, like the president's lawyer taking a trip that didn't happen, have been outright dismissed.” And I think over the next few weeks you're going to see reporters compare Glenn Simpson's testimony, the dossier, and what we now know in the public and try to make a little bit more sense of what’s right and wrong about the story.
