[3] In February 2012, the magazine Mother Jones published an article on Frank VanderSloot and his company Melaleuca, who combined had given $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mitt Romney.

[10] After a grand jury declined to indict Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing, on March 28, 2017, Daleiden and Merritt were charged with 15 felonies in the State of California: one for each of the people whom they had filmed without consent, and one for criminal conspiracy to invade privacy.

[15][18] Browder lodged a complaint with the U.S. Justice Department in December 2016 that Fusion GPS may have lobbied "for Russian interests in a campaign to oppose the pending Global Magnitsky Act [and] failed to register under [U.S.

[21] It is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer and auditor working for Browder who died in a Russian prison after uncovering a corruption scheme that he was then charged with having helped concoct.

[19][20] Shortly after the settlement of the Prevezon lawsuit in July 2017, Fusion GPS accused the White House of trying to "smear" it for investigating President Trump's alleged ties to Russia.

[24] White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that ongoing investigations into potential ties between Trump's 2016 election campaign and Moscow were political ploys to undermine his presidency.

"[25] In September 2015, Fusion GPS was hired by The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative political website, to do opposition research on Trump and other Republican presidential candidates.

[26] From April 2016 through October 2016, the law firm Perkins Coie, on behalf of the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, retained Fusion GPS to continue opposition research on Trump.

[27][28] In June 2016, Fusion GPS retained Christopher Steele, a private British corporate intelligence investigator and former MI-6 agent, to research any Russian connections to Trump.

"[32] On October 23, 2017, Fusion GPS filed for a court injunction against Nunes' subpoena seeking the firm's bank records for a period of more than two years, arguing it would damage and possibly destroy the business as well as violate their First Amendment rights.

[34] On October 28, 2017, The Washington Free Beacon told the House Intelligence Committee that it had retained Fusion GPS's services from 2015 to May 2016, to research Donald Trump and other Republican presidential candidates.

A previous witness, Bill Browder, had accused Simpson and Fusion GPS of evading registration as foreign agents for campaigning to influence and overturn the Magnitsky Act.

[24] Senators were expected to also use the hearing "to press Justice Department officials on what they know about Veselnitskaya, Prevezon, Fusion GPS and their connections to both the Trump campaign or the Russian government.

[46] German Khan, one of the litigants and one of Russia's wealthiest citizens, is the father-in-law of Dutch attorney Alex van der Zwaan, who was charged in the Mueller probe for making false statements to the FBI.

[48] On April 19, 2018, ten days after his home, office, and hotel room were raided by the FBI as part of a criminal investigation, Cohen filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss the suit.