By Mark Hosenball
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A federal judge has given an unnamed bank more time to respond to a congressional subpoena for financial records of the Washington research firm that hired a former British spy to compile a dossier on presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Trump and other Republicans have alleged that Russians paid Fusion GPS, a Washington firm, for research on their own dealings with Trump and his campaign. The Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee has sought Fusion’s bank records in an effort to pursue those allegations.
In a closed-door hearing with Senate Judiciary Committee investigators, Fusion GPS founder Glenn Simpson said there was no connection between the firm’s work on the dossier and its legal research on a lawsuit involving Russians who attended a June 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law and close aide, Jared Kusher, and former campaign chief Paul Manafort, sources familiar with the hearing said.
It has been widely reported that supporters of Republican Jeb Bush, a primary opponent of Trump, initially paid for the firm’s research, and the law firm Perkins Coie, which represented Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, confirmed on Tuesday that it hired Fusion GPS in April 2016.
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan had set a Thursday evening deadline for the unnamed bank to give the committee its last two years of records on Fusion GPS. But in an order posted on the court docket late on Thursday, she extended the deadline until Monday morning.
The decision indicates that lawyers for Fusion and the House committee are negotiating in an effort to settle their dispute out of court, sources familiar with the matter said.
Joshua Levy, a lawyer for Fusion, declined to comment, and the House of Representatives lawyer on the case did not respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting By Mark Hosenball; Editing by John Walcott and Tom Brown)
