Leading members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, along with Fusion GPS founders, worked to further propagate the Russia-collusion hoax they were responsible for initiating well after President Donald Trump’s election victory. According to newly declassified congressional testimony from former Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, he attended a meeting on February 10, 2017, with Jake Sullivan, Clinton’s former senior foreign-policy adviser; Daniel Jones, a former aide of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein; and Fusion GPS cofounders Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, because “they were interested in trying to raise money to continue their efforts to investigate the Russian interference in the campaign.” (Remember, established Russian interference in 2016 isn’t the same as Trump colluding with them to do so.)

Fusion GPS was the opposition research firm hired by Clinton that was responsible for funding and propagating ex-British spy Christopher Steele’s infamous and bogus anti-Trump dossier. The FBI used that dossier to secure FISA warrants to spy on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

During his own testimony, Sullivan was asked about this hour-long meeting and if the Steele dossier was discussed. “I mean not specifically about the dossier,” he answered. “lt was sort of about the effort that they had put in to finding out ties between Trump and Russia and what their belief was based on the accumulation on that.”

RealClearInvestigations journalist Paul Sperry reports, “Just 10 days before the February 2017 meeting, Jones had incorporated a nonprofit called The Democracy Integrity Project (known internally as TDIP) after huddling with Simpson. The goal of their ongoing project is to ‘prove’ the allegations in the dossier, while digging up new dirt on Trump and feeding it to media outlets, congressional investigators and the FBI to derail his presidency.”

Sperry further reports, “Mimicking the Clinton campaign, TDIP hired Fusion GPS and Steele to conduct the new opposition research, paying them millions of dollars. Podesta steered his repurposed partners to donors at a time when the Clinton campaign had not yet closed its books; the campaign was still open. In 2017 alone, TDIP raised more than $7 million with his help.”

TDIP then began a concerted effort to further the Russia-collusion hoax by feeding “information to FBI and congressional investigators, and then [telling] reporters that authorities are investigating those leads. The tactic adds credibility to TDIP’s pitches, luring big media outlets to bite on stories. It mirrors the strategy federal authorities themselves deployed to secure FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign: citing published news reports of investigative details their informants had leaked to the media to bolster their wiretap requests.” In other words, TDIP was a propaganda outfit disseminating disinformation in an attempt to establish the false narrative that Trump was beholden to the Kremlin.

As Sperry concludes, “The Clinton team and other Democrats never stopped campaigning against Trump. Hillary Clinton didn’t just pay for the Russian-sourced opposition research on candidate Trump before the election; her top aides helped bankroll continuing efforts to cast the now sitting president as a Russian agent.” And that effort was built on lies.