An attorney representing Fusion GPS said in a closed Senate hearing last year that “somebody’s already been killed” as a result of the so-called Trump dossier.
“He wants to be very careful to protect his sources,” Josh Levy, an attorney for Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson said in the closed 10-hour hearing at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Aug. 22, 2017. “Somebody's already been killed as a result of the publication of this dossier, and no harm should come to anybody related to this honest work.”
Neither Levy nor Simpson elaborated on who was killed. However, it has been reported that Oleg Erovinkin, a former general in the KGB and its successor FSB, helped Steele compile the dossier. He was found dead in his car in Moscow in December 2016, and no cause of death has yet been confirmed.
Erovinkin was an aide to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who was repeatedly named in the dossier. In the dossier, Steele said he has a source close to Sechin.
Though Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, had objected to calls from Simpson and Democrats to release the testimony publicly, ranking member Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., unilaterally did so Tuesday afternoon.
Fusion GPS helped fund the compilation of the dossier, a handful of memos put together by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The dossier contained salacious, mostly unverified allegations about President Trump’s ties to Russia.
