The Theranos Scandal Helps Illustrate How Private Spies Like Fusion GPS Operate

They always hide who is paying them as they sell fake narratives

In his new book “Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube And The Rise of Private Spies”, investigative journalist Barry Meier pulls back the curtain and exposes the secret relationships between private intelligence firms like Fusion GPS, the mainstream news media, political campaigns and shady corporations. 

The Theranos case is a perfect example of how these private intelligence firms stay in the shadows while pushing – and in some cases, selling – fake “news stories” to media outlets on behalf of their well-heeled clients. 

Brief History of the Theranos Scandal

Theranos was one of the biggest scams ever perpetrated. It was a juggernaut of a company built around new medical technology about which extravagant claims were made – and supposedly – verified. 

Only as it turned out, the blood-testing machines Theranos was selling couldn’t do what was claimed – not even close. Theranos’ founder Elizabeth Holmes had built the blood testing company into a nine-billion-dollar enterprise by the time the truth emerged, and the fraud was exposed.

Attempting to hide what they had done, Holmes and the company’s former Chief Operating Officer, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, destroyed a database that proved that Therano’s blood testing was a fraud.  

Elisabeth Holmes and Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani

The Daily Mail reported back on January 12:

Theranos, the blood-testing start-up that promised to revolutionize health care only to collapse after its hyped product turned out to be a dud, destroyed incriminating evidence proving that it engaged in fraud, prosecutors allege.

Federal authorities also allege the company’s star CEO Elizabeth Holmes, 36, and her former lover and COO, Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, 56, used funds from investors to subsidize an extravagant lifestyle while peddling a fraudulent product.

Prosecutors submitted a filing to federal court in San Francisco on Monday alleging that Theranos executives destroyed data that proved their blood-testing product was inaccurate.

Knowingly misleading investors by providing false data is a federal crime.

Holmes’ trial is just now getting underway and Balwani’s is scheduled for later this year.

Fusion GPS Attempts to Contain the Fraud

In “Spooked”, Meier devotes most of the fifth chapter to relating how Fusion GPS moved to help Holmes and Balwani try to keep a lid on the emerging scandal.

Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson, co-founders of the private operative firm Fusion GPS

When a Wall Street Journal reporter named John Carreryrou began uncovering the lie that Theranos was based on, the company hired Fusion GPS and pointed private spy Peter Fritsch at both Carreyrou several of the key whistleblowers exposing the fraud, including a man named Chris Riedel.

Former Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou

After stating early in the chapter that “hired operatives have a long history of trying to intimidate journalists or ruin them”, Meier goes into detail about how Fusion went about trying to do exactly that to Carreyrou.

As I discussed in a previous column at The Epoch Times, both Glenn Simpson and Fritsch, the co-founders of Fusion GPS, are former Wall Street Journal reporters themselves. 

Carreyrou was a former colleague of Fritsch’s and Simpson, which is why when Fritsch initially contacted Carreyrou to congratulate him for winning his second Pulitzer Prize, Carreyrou’s guard was down. 

When Fritsch asked if Carreyrou could help him with a project, the WSJ reporter showed friendly interest. 

Here’s how Meier relates what happened next:

Fritsch explained that Fusion GPS was working on a project related to the medical laboratory testing industry. He said in a note that he just had spoken with an industry whistleblower who had been involved in lawsuits that charged the testing industry’s two corporate giants, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, with overbilling public agencies hundreds of millions of dollars for blood tests and other diagnostic work.

Fritsch said that Carreyrou’s name had come up during his chat with the whistleblower, whose name was Chris Riedel.

“I reached out to him and identified myself as a researcher and former WSJ reporter,” Fritsch wrote. “To which he says, ‘Oh, so do you know Carreyrou?’ Sure, says I.”

Fritsch then switched gears. “I caught him lying to me about something and just wanted to reach out and get your read of this dude,” he added. “Hope you are well and after the bad guys.”

Note what happened there: Fritsch was trying to impugn a key whistleblower while hiding from Carreyrou that he had been hired by Theranos to discredit Riedel and any other whistleblowers who were talking to him. Fritsch was trying to see if he could get the WSJ reporter to drop one of his main sources, maybe even drop the Theranos story altogether.

Fritsch waited five days to contact Carreyrou again and confess that he had reached out to him as a paid operative for Theranos. Then Fritsch went right back to trying to cajole Carreyrou into dropping his Theranos investigation. 

When that failed, Fritsch turned nasty, and browbeat Carreyrou in series of emails before turning to tracking the reporter’s activities by using Freedom of Information Act Requests [FOIA]. That allowed Fritsch to see where Carreyrou was investigating and who he was talking to, so Fritsch could report that back to Theranos.

Carreyrou revealed these interactions with Fritsch in several interviews he gave while promoting the book he wrote about his investigative reporting on Theranos, “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup”. He thought about detailing Fritsch’s activities in the book, how Theranos had hired a private operative to stalk him and try to discourage him, but in the end decided the book was too far along in the publication process to add a section about Fritsch and Fusion.

Private Spies Hide Who Is Paying Them

What Fritsch attempted to do for his clients is the kind of slimy and unethical behavior that is rife in SpyGate.  Christopher Steele and Glenn Simpson never came out and volunteered to the numerous reporters and government officials that they shopped the dossier to that they were private intelligence operatives being paid for this work by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Reporters would have instantly been faced with the stark realization that one of the campaigns involved in the 2016 Presidential election was sending well-paid private intelligence operatives to them seeking their help in launching a scandal targeting the other campaign in the race.

We now know, thanks to former CIA Director John Brennan’s declassified briefing notes that former President Barack Obama, Brennan, James Comey and Peter Strzok all knew back in July of 2016 that a fake scandal targeting Trump and his campaign was being launched by Clinton’s campaign. This was reiterated again by the CIA when they sent an investigative referral to both Comey and Strzok dated September 7, 2016. 

So, Comey and Strzok knew even before the Carter Page warrant was applied for at the FISA Court in late October that this was all highly likely a dirty tricks operation launched by Hillary Clinton.

And even so, Comey and many others decided to play along with the hoax and pretend they didn’t know who these private spies were working for. 

They All Knew It Was a Clinton Hoax and They Played Along

That is the big news no one is talking about.  They can’t talk about it because it destroys too many fake narratives that too many people involved in launching and then promoting the RussiaGate hoax are too heavily invested in.

They can’t backtrack at this point without creating legal liabilities for themselves. They are on the record too many times to change their stories at this late date. 

Last October, when he was braced with the implications of his own presidential briefing notes, Brennan snidely said Clinton was merely attempting to ‘highlight’ what the Russians were supposedly doing on Trump’s behalf to help him win the election, and there was nothing illegal about it.

What if it turns out Clinton was paying private spies to create a fake Trump/Russia collusion scandal based on fraudulent evidence that these spies then shopped to the FBI?  And this fake evidence ended up being used in at least one federal surveillance warrant? Would John Brennan consider that to be any kind of illegal activity?

I’ll end by pointing out that what John Brennan thinks about this isn’t nearly as important as what another John thinks about it at this point – John Durham.

Durham’s Special Counsel’s Office continues to investigate exactly how that train wreck of a fake Russia scandal got started and what, if any, criminal charges to bring because of it.

And you can bet private spies Glenn Simpson, Peter Fritsch and Christopher Steele are prime targets of Durham’s investigation. 

If these private spies can no longer operate in the shadows, what good are they?