Hillary Clinton says she knew nothing of the dossier on then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump before it was published on BuzzFeed, even though her campaign partially funded it, according to a report in The New York Times.
Clinton, who lost her White House bid to Trump in November, was disappointed the information on purported connections between Russia and Trump's campaign had not been made public before the election, according to two of her associates who talked to the Times.
Similarly, officials past and present of the Democratic National Committee said they had no idea their Washington law firm, Perkins Coie, was bankrolling the investigation by Fusion GPS, which subcontracted former British spy Christopher Steele to do the work.
The Clinton campaign and the DNC picked up payments for the work done by Steele after an unknown Republican donor stopped funding it.
But then-DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz had no knowledge of Steele's investigation, her spokesman David Damron told The Hill on Wednesday. And DNC officials said the party had little time to deal with such information anyway since it was embroiled in its own leaked email scandal at the time.
Similarly, DNC communications director Xochitl Hinojosa said Tom Perez, the DNC's current chairman, had nothing to do with the deal.
"Tom Perez and the new leadership of the DNC were not involved in any decision-making regarding Fusion GPS, nor were they aware that Perkins Coie was working with the organization," Hinojosa told The Hill. "But let's be clear, there is a serious federal investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia, and the American public deserves to know what happened."
Trump has long called the dossier, which includes unsubstantiated salacious claims about him, "fake." He reiterated that Wednesday to reporters outside the White House, citing the current reporting.