A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.” 
 
 Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry. 
 
 In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers. 
 
 We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have. 
 
 Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place. ||||| A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.” 
 
 Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry. 
 
 In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers. 
 
 We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have. 
 
 Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.
– The political research firm behind an infamous dossier on then-candidate Donald Trump defends its work in a New York Times op-ed and accuses the president and his allies of trying to downplay explosive allegations about Russian collusion. Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, founders of Fusion GPS, lay out how they enlisted former British spy Christopher Steele to look into Trump's Russian contacts after being separately hired by the conservative paper the Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign. "What came back shocked us," they write. "Mr. Steele's sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive—and now confirmed—effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the FBI." The pair write that they helped Steele get the report to the FBI via Sen. John McCain. They have provided 21 hours of testimony to congressional committees and called for their testimony to be made public because they say it debunks conspiracy theories on the far right. "We don't believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the FBI's investigation into Russian meddling," they write, naming one of those theories. "As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp." They accuse Republicans of "chasing rabbits" by going after them instead of looking more seriously into the allegations against the president. Click for the full op-ed.