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Fusion GPS testimony brings alleged dossier source Sergei Millian back into the spotlight

The House Intelligence Committee released the transcript of its interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson on Thursday.

  • The House Intelligence Committee released the transcript of its interview with Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson on Thursday.
  • Simpson spoke at length about Sergei Millian, a Belarus-born businessman who has worked with the Trump Organization and was reportedly a key source in the
  • Millian appears to have begun downplaying his ties to the Trump Organization after Western reporters started digging into Trump's Russia ties in 2016.
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Millian attended several black-tie events at Trump's inauguration. He told the Russian news agency RIA that he had been in touch with the Trump Organization as late as April 2016. He was also photographed at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in June 2016 with the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a longtime business associate of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.

It was around that time that Millian's organization, the Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, waslooking for "delegates"to attend the Russian Oil & Gas Forum in Moscow.

But Millian appears to have begun downplaying his ties to the Trump Organization after reporters began digging into Trump's Russia ties in 2016.

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Contrary to what he told RIA, Millian told Business Insider in an email last year that the last time he worked on a Trump-brand project was "in Florida around 2008." He did not respond to a subsequent request to clarify the discrepancy.

There were also discrepancies in his resume, Simpson said in his testimony.

Simpson, however, suggested that the Millian-Cohen connection ran deeper.

"As further time went on, we found [Millian] was connected to Michael Cohen, the president's lawyer," Simpson told the House committee. "Michael Cohen was very adamant that he didn't actually have a connection to Sergi, even though he was one of only like 100 people who followed Sergi on Twitter. And they — we had Twitter messages back and forth between the two of them just — we just pulled them off of Twitter."

Millian did not return a request for comment. Cohen told Business Insider earlier this month that the last time he spoke to Millian was in November 2016, days before the election, in which they exchanged "4-6 emails." He said he not have access to the emails offhand but offered to share their content later.

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Source E, meanwhile," acknowledged that the Russian regime had been behind the recent leak of embarrassing e-mail messages, emanating from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), to the WikiLeaks platform," according to the dossier.

Source E also claimed that the Trump campaign and Russia had moles in the Democratic Party; that US-based "cyber operators" were coordinating attacks on the DNC and Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta; and that these operators were being paid covertly via Russian "diplomatic staff" in "key" US cities via that Russia's emigre pension system.

The same source is quoted in the dossier as saying the Trump campaign was "relatively relaxed" about the attention on Trump's reported ties to Russia "because it deflected media and the Democrats' attention away from Trump's business dealings in China."

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Millian has worked as the "vice president of the World Chinese Merchants Union Association" since 2015, according to his LinkedIn page. Hewrote last Aprilthat he traveled to Beijing to meet with a Chinese official and the Russian ambassador to the Republic of San Marino.

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