Mary Jacoby, wife of FusionGPS founder, Glenn Simpson, posted items on Facebook (now removed) bragging that her husband’s work really launched the federal investigation. It was already know that Simpson and FusionGPS were central players. What’s new is an investigative report that says Simpson’s involvement goes back several years.

A detailed article by Lee Smith in The Tablet, reports

In a Facebook post from June 24, 2017, that Tablet has seen in screenshots, Jacoby claimed that her husband deserves the lion’s share of credit for Russiagate. (She has not replied to repeated requests for comment.) “It’s come to my attention that some people still don’t realize what Glenn’s role was in exposing Putin’s control of Donald Trump,” Jacoby wrote. “Let’s be clear. Glenn conducted the investigation. Glenn hired Chris Steele. Chris Steele worked for Glenn.” This assertion is hardly a simple assertion of family pride; it goes directly to the nature of what became known as the “Steele dossier,” on which the Russiagate narrative is founded. The fact that Jacoby is a reporter who often shared bylines with her husband at The Wall Street Journal is another reason to take her Facebook post seriously.

Last week’s revelation that Simpson hired Nellie Ohr, the wife of ranking Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, to work on the dossier certainly supports Jacoby’s implicit contention that Steele’s role in compiling the dossier has been exaggerated. –Lee Smith, in The Tablet

Smith’s most striking point is not that Simpson played a key role–that was already know–but that he generated the material earlier and did not rely on Russian sources. (I have no idea if that claim is accurate, but it is surely worth consideration in the Congressional investigations.) To quote Smith:

A Tablet investigation using public sources to trace the evolution of the now-famous dossier suggests that central elements of the Russiagate scandal emerged not from the British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s top-secret “sources” in the Russian government—which are unlikely to exist separate from Russian government control—but from a series of stories that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and his wife Mary Jacoby co-wrote for The Wall Street Journal well before Fusion GPS existed. –Smith, in The Tablet

Separately, another aspect of the dossier is being exposed. Writing in The Daily Caller, Chuck Ross reports on the London trial where a Russian tech businessman, Aleksej Gubarev, alleges he was defamed in the dossier, which says that he and his tech companies hacked the Democratic National Committee servers. (The DNC has refused to allow the FBI or independent investigators to access their server to find out.) Gubarev is suing the US website, BuzzFeed, for publishing the document and thus publicizing the allegation.

A key question is “who leaked the dossier to BuzzFeed?” The website won’t say, claiming journalistic privilege, and a US judge recently agreed.

But now Gubarev’s lawyer says they have discovered the answer independently and are close to revealing it.

The article implies it is a former senior aide to Sen. John McCain. The Senator was given the dossier, turned it over to the FBI, and has stated he did not leak it. FusionGPS has said, in court documents, that it did not leak it. But McCain’s aide, David Kramer, a former State Department official, has refused to make such a public declaration and spent months dodging a subpoena. He was finally served and deposed, as well as interviewed by the House Intel Committee.